Bank found liable in New York civil trial; prosecutor says mortgage profit ‘built on fraud

MADRID (AFP) ― Spain inched out of its two-year recession with timid growth in the third quarter, the country’s central bank said on Wednesday, fuelling fragile hopes of a broader eurozone recovery.News that the zone’s fourth-biggest economy may be on the mend followed signs that the bloc was heading out of its five-year crisis, but analysts warned the recovery was still slow and risk-bound.After nine straight quarters of contraction in the second trough of a double-dip recession, the Spanish ec

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the stock market has room to rise from record levels. “In a sense, we are actually at relatively low stock prices,” Greenspan, who guided the central bank for more than 18 years, said in an interview with Sara Eisen on Bloomberg Television Wednesday. “So-called equity premiums are still at a very high level, and that means that the momentum of the market is still ultimately up.” The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index advanced 23.03 percent this year t

The Federal Reserve may not taper its stimulus efforts soon as the U.S. economy has failed to pick up and inflation remains low, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. president Gary D. Cohn said.  “If you look at where we are economically, versus where we were a year ago, we’re virtually in the exact same place,” Cohn, 53, said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview with Stephanie Ruhle. “So if quantitative easing made sense a year ago, it probably still makes sense today.” The Fed decided in Septembe

In the 1970s, Switzerland’s watchmakers were almost put out of business when they underestimated the importance of the quartz watch. Though the industry recovered and is even prospering, today it faces a new technological challenge from “smart watches” such as Samsung Electronics Co.’s $299 Galaxy Gear. As with quartz four decades ago, the devices are being met with a shrug. According to a survey by consultants Deloitte, two-thirds of executives in the Swiss industry say smart watches pose no th

Stocks move higher as hiring slowdown is seen as keeping stimulus going

Apple Inc. is refreshing its iPad lineup and slashing the price of its Mac computers ahead of the holiday shopping season, as it faces an eroding tablet market share and growing competition from rival gadget makers.Apple unveiled a new, thinner, lighter tablet called the “iPad Air” along with a slew of new Macs Tuesday at an event in San Francisco. The iPad Air weighs just 0.45 kilogram, compared with 1.4 pounds (0.64 kilogram) for the previous version. Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller called

Apple Inc. will probably start selling ultra-high definition televisions with 65- and 55-inch screens during the fourth quarter of next year, according to a Tokyo-based analyst at Advanced Research Japan Co. The Cupertino, California-based company is deciding on specifications, and the models likely will have a frameless design, Masahiko Ishino, an analyst at Advanced Research, said in an interview last week. Ishino declined to identify the people who gave him the information. Apple co-founder S

HTC Corp. is developing a smart watch that uses Google Inc.’s Android software and can take pictures, according to a person familiar with the matter.  The watch’s price, full functions and sales strategy still must be decided before it’s released by the second half of 2014, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. The smart watch will join a growing segment of wearable technology that already includes devices from Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Corp. Dwi

Roger W. Ferguson, a former U.S. Federal Reserve vice chairman, said the Fed’s push for transparency amid quantitative easing tripped up the central bank this year. “They got themselves in trouble when they tried to be very transparent, give us our forward guidance, promise things, and then they don’t deliver,” Ferguson, head of insurer TIAA-CREF, said Monday in New York at a conference held by Limra, an industry group. Over the U.S. summer, the Fed created the expectation that it would begin to

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi challenged rules that would bar banks from accessing public aid unless they forced losses on junior bondholders, a central building block of European Union protocols for handling struggling banks. In a letter to EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, Draghi said EU rules need to be clarified so regulators can order technically solvent banks to strengthen their balance sheets without scaring off investors. Draghi said public capital needs to be a