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The researchers analyzed more than 11,000 fisheries over 50 years and found that those being managed using catch shares were about half as likely to collapse as those without catch shares. And when fisheries switched to catch shares, fish populations stopped declining and, according to some analyses, may have reversed course. “I’ll be honest,” Costello says, “I was really surprised” by the size of the effect.

The system of catch shares works somewhat like a stock market: individual fishers can net a designated percentage of the total amount of a species set aside for fishing annually. The cap on each fish type is adjusted yearly by the government according to how the species is faring. If the population increases, the shares increase in value, too. And fishers can buy and sell shares to one another.

Catch shares give fishers a financial motive to treat the ocean with care, because they are literally invested in the future of their quarry.

LyondellBasell’s bonds have been trading at distressed levels in recent months. A $100 million unsecured bond issue trades at about 30 cents on the dollar, a sign that investors are concerned about default. Another $225 million issue trades at around 23 cents, according to the investment banking firm of Robert W. Baird & Co.

Last year’s merger, which closed in December, made LyondellBasell one of the world’s largest chemical companies, but it saddled it with a heavy debt load. Some analysts questioned the deal. “This really isn’t a good time to buy. You should be waiting a couple more years for assets to get cheap,” HSBC analyst Hassan Ahmed said when the deal was announced that July.

The case, which has languished for 15 years in U.S. and Ecuadorean courts, highlights the growing human and environmental toll of the global quest for oil.

In 1993, 76 people who lived near the wells -- including members of the indigenous Cofan and Quichua Indian tribes and people who came to the Amazon from other parts of Ecuador for jobs -- sued White Plains, New York-based Texaco in New York federal court.

Chevron Blames PetroEcuador

They claimed the pollution had ruined their livelihood as farmers and fishermen and made them and their families sick.

Chevron says Texaco had completely cleaned up its mess by 1998. PetroEcuador, which took over Texaco’s operations in 1990 -- and not Texaco -- is to blame for today’s pollution, Chevron says.

Texas banned unlined waste pits that leaked into groundwater as far back as 1969, says Steve Seni, former assistant director of environmental studies at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil industry.

Die Hilfen seien ferner kein Garant dafür, "dass Qimonda weitere operative oder strategische Initiativen erfolgreich umsetzen kann, die geeignet sind, ihre finanzielle Lage zu verbessern."Für den Fall, dass die Tochter mit den Kreditverhandlungen und der Sanierung scheitere, "könnte Qimonda Schwierigkeiten haben, ihren fälligen Verpflichtungen nachzukommen", teilte Infineon mit.

Michael Shillaker, an analyst at Credit Suisse, is slightly less gloomy, forecasting a year-on-year fall in 2009 of 10 per cent, with a pick-up only around the middle of the year.

In 1945, the final year of the second world war, steel output fell 27.3 per cent – the biggest year-on-year fall since the industry started collecting comprehensive data at the start of the 20th century.

I think we now more or less know that the strong increase in gross capital inflows and outflows after 2004 (gross inflows and outflows basically doubled from late 2004 to mid 2007) was tied to the expansion of the shadow banking system.

Money has been taken out of funds following every strategy, even those – such as macro funds – which were showing returns, according to data from fund trackers Hedge Fund Research.
[...]
Conrad Gann, chief operating officer of TrimTabs, said: “We estimate outflows in November were $32bn, and there is an additional pipeline of redemptions that have not been filled, there could be $80bn [of redemptions] in December.

“There are $57bn of redemptions that we know are in, that are not reflected yet,” he said.
[...]
The funds had outflows of $43bn for the 10 months to the end of October, according to HFR. With TrimTabs’ estimate of further significant redemptions for November and December, the funds will show outflows of more than $100bn for the full year. In 1994, the only previous time they had outflows, the figure was $1m.

David Spegel, global head of emerging markets strategy at ING, said: “Refinancing risk is going to be one of the biggest problems for emerging market issuers in 2009.

The public punishment was a clear sign to villagers that the Taliban are now in charge. And the province they took over lies just 30 miles from the Afghan capital of Kabul, right on the main highway.
[...]
In a growing number of regions, insurgents have put in place:

• Militant commanders who serve as self-described governors and police or military chiefs of provinces.

• A 10 percent "tax" — a forced payment at gunpoint, Western officials say — on rich families, or donations by poorer families of food and shelter for fighters.

• A military draft that forces fighting-age males to join the Taliban for months-long rotations.

• A parallel judicial system run by religious scholars who impose such punishments as tarring, public humiliation and the chopping off hands.

• The closing of Afghan schools or the forcing of schools to replace science with more religious study.

• Manned Taliban or militant checkpoints to demand highway taxes and search vehicles for government employees or foreigners.

Macquarie Office shares fell 12 percent to 29 Australian cents at the close of trading today on the Australian stock exchange, extending their loss this year to almost 80 percent, after the company said banks agreed to extend the existing facility to March 1, 2009.

Macquarie Direct Property, which in August was forced to freeze cash redemptions, has put half its A$1 billion assets up for sale to increase cash holdings, the newspaper said, citing the fund's Chief Executive Officer Richard Cutler.

Another Macquarie fund plans to sell its half-stake in the No.1 Martin Place building in Sydney, while Macquarie Office Trust is selling buildings in Adelaide and North Sydney.

Factory output was down 0.9 percent in November from a month earlier, according to the government's seasonally adjusted data.

Production in the automotive sector slid 24.4 percent from November 2007 and 23.1 percent from October, as carmakers reacted swiftly to a sharp drop in demand in both the local market and the country's main export market, Brazil.

Steel and aluminum production fell 11.1 percent year-on-year in November and 13.8 percent from October. Oil refining dropped 12.4 percent from November 2007 and 12.9 percent from October.

About 33,000 units of new homes have been sold during the second half, a decline of 25 percent from 44,000 units in the first six months, E-House said.

This mall has seven zones modeled on international cities, nations and regions, including Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California.

Although the mall opened in 2005, it suffers from a lack of retailers. Much of the retail space remains empty, with 99.2 percent of the stores vacant. Many analysts say that the main reason the mall is so far largely unoccupied is that it is located in the suburbs of Dongguan, which means that it is only practical to travel there using a car. The mall was scheduled to close in July 2008.

About 500 new malls have been built in China over the last five years, estimates Kevin Jiang, a researcher at the Mall China Information Center. All of them are waiting for the arrival of this coming mega-middle class, as are the rest of China’s countless “visionary” development projects. These include a from-scratch “eco-city” for 500,000 residents north of Shanghai, a compound of a hundred luxury villas in the Ordos desert of Inner Mongolia and a thousand-acre theme-park replica of the old imperial Summer Palace, which was destroyed by British and French troops in the nineteenth century.

Gross domestic product in the three months ending tomorrow will fall at almost three times the 4.1 percent rate previously predicted, said Kyohei Morita, chief Japan economist at Barclays in Tokyo, after reports last week showed industrial production and exports posted the biggest declines on record in November.

"The energy crisis and the drinking water supply have a direct connection. If there is no electricity, in most cases it means there is no water," Talant Ormushev, head of production at the Department of Rural Water Supply, told EurasiaNet.

According to Ormushev, the majority of Kyrgyzstan’s villages receive water supplied by water towers that, in turn, depend on electricity to fill their tanks. But electricity supplies are sporadic, with some villages reportedly receiving only five hours of power per day.

Ishenbaev explained the increasing burden the burnt-out pumps are having on consumers. Villages collectively scrape together the repair fees. "To change a broken pump machine ... costs around 60 thousand som ($1,500). Every household must collect 100-200 som (up to $5). It’s a big financial burden for villagers."

Domestic stocks will account for 17 percent of its assets by the end of 2009, down from its initial plan of 20.3 percent, the fund said today in an e-mailed statement. Bonds will make up 69.3 percent of assets next year, from 60.4 percent earlier, according to the statement. The fund expects assets to rise to 256 trillion won by the end of next year, it said.

The NPS, which had 228 trillion won ($189 billion) of assets at the end of August, was among pension funds that were net buyers of 3.2 trillion won in Kospi Index shares this month, according to stock exchange data. That helped to buffer overseas investors' net sales of 2.7 trillion won.

The pension fund's return averaged a negative 1 percent between January and August, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs said in a statement today. It forecast annual returns to fall, the first drop since 2005. The fund had 228 trillion won ($197 billion) of assets at the end of August.

ABP has notified De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) that the coverage ratio of the pension fund has fallen below the required coverage ratio of about 125%. At the end of the third quarter the coverage ratio was 118%. With this percentage the pension fund still has financial buffers of several tens of billions of euros, but less than pension fund regulator De Nederlandsche Bank requires. There is therefore a shortage of reserves.

ABP is now legally required to draw up a recovery plan in which the fund shows that the asset position will satisfy the statutory requirements within a period of 15 years maximum. ABP will present DNB with a recovery plan by the end of this year.

His remarks coincided with criticism of the Kremlin’s rough handling of the protests in Vladivostok. Moscow-based Omon riot police detained about 61 people in the protests against car import duties designed to prop up domestic car producers, but making foreign vehicles prohibitively expensive for ordinary Russians.

“It was a deal,” he told the FT in an interview this week. “But it has fallen apart and that is why people are appearing on the streets. The process has started . . . Things could spin out of control when people wake up and realise their neighbours have lost their jobs and they are at risk of losing theirs.” He added that “the authorities had reacted “cynically and in a very nervous manner for nothing,” against a peaceful demonstration.

Today, Gazprom is deep in debt and negotiating a government bailout. Its market cap, the total value of all the company’s shares, has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year. Instead of becoming the world’s largest company, it has tumbled to 35th place. And while bailouts are increasingly common, none of Gazprom’s big private sector competitors in the West is looking for one.

As a result, by the time the downturn came, they entered the credit crisis deeply in debt and with a backlog of capital investment needs.

Das Kabinett habe das Projekt K-Dow Petrochemicals abgesagt, gegen das sich Widerstand im Parlament regte, meldete die amtliche kuwaitische Nachrichtenagentur Kuna am Sonntag. Kuwait sehe angesichts der Finanzkrise keine Vorzüge mehr in dem Projekt, hieß es in Medienberichten.

Die staatliche Petrochemical Industries (PIC) hatte das Joint Venture erst Anfang des Monats mit Dow Chemical besiegelt. Im Zuge der Vereinbarung sollte Dow Chemical von Kuwait für seinen Anteil etwa 7,5 Mrd. $ erhalten. Mit dem Geld wollte Dow einen Großteil der 18,8 Mrd. $ teuren Übernahme des US-Spezialchemiekonzerns Rohm & Haas bezahlen.

In India, too, Dow Chemical International Pvt. Ltd is writing a new script. Ramesh Ramachandran, who took over as president and chief executive of the company’s India operations last year, wants to exit the petrochemical business in the country to focus on speciality chemicals. The company currently buys petrochemical products from its parent for trading in India.

Über die für 2010 anvisierte Währungsunion debattiert die GCC, eine vergleichsweise lose politische und wirtschaftliche Vereinigung, bereits seit Jahren. Das Treffen des Kooperationsrats am Montag und Dienstag war durch einen Streit zwischen den beiden größten Mitgliedstaaten Saudi-Arabien und den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten über eine Abkehr von der Dollar-Bindung und die Einführung eines Währungskorbes belastet worden.

Economic growth in the U.A.E., the second-biggest Arab economy, will slow to 2.7 percent in 2009 and 3.5 percent in 2010, led by a slump in its real-estate and banking industries, Standard Chartered Plc said Dec. 15. The U.A.E. economy probably grew 7 percent this year, the International Monetary Fund estimates.

The price of used and new homes fell 1.7 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months when prices declined 0.3 percent, the Madrid-based National Statistics Institute said today. Compared with a year earlier, home prices fell 3 percent in the third quarter.

The four-week moving average for gasoline demand, which is often more indicative of long-term trends, was down 3.0 percent compared to year-ago levels, according to MasterCard. Year-to-date, gasoline demand was running 3.2 percent below 2007, the report said.

The rates range from no interest to 5.9 percent annually, are available through Jan. 5 and may be used with cash rebates of as much as $4,250, Detroit-based GM said today in a statement. The interest-free financing is on models including 2008 Chevrolet TrailBlazer sport-utility vehicles and Saab 9-5 sedans.

“The economy has stopped on a dime, and the Fed is looking anywhere there are large markets they can affect in big ways,” said Greg Prost, chief investment officer at Ambassador Capital Management in Detroit, which manages about $800 million. “If they are going to save the car companies, there is going to have to be financing.”

GMAC will now lend to vehicle buyers with credit scores of 621 or higher, compared with a previous standard of at least 700, according to a company statement. The higher threshold had excluded about 42 percent of U.S. consumers.

Sixty percent of the injection will be used to issue new shares while the remaining 40 percent will be for subordinated debt, both to be acquired by the New York-based banking giant, Citi said.

The indexes showed prices in 10 major metropolitan areas fell 19% in October from a year earlier and 3.6% from September. The drop marks the 10-city index's 13th straight monthly report of a record decline.

In 20 major metropolitan areas, home prices dropped 18% from the prior year, also a record, and 2.2% from September.

Year-over-year, Dallas and Charlotte again had the best relative performance, with declines of 3% and 4.4%, respectively.

It is important to remember that the index averages sale prices over the three months from September through November. Sales contracts are typically signed 6-8 weeks before sales are closed. This means that the contracts for the homes sold during this period were mostly written up in the months July through September. Most data show the economy turning sharply lower in September, which means that two of the three months in which the contracts in the October index were signed preceded the sharp downturn.

That reminds me of one of the best advantages to buying real estate, the benefit of leverage. As I said, if you buy a house for $400,000 in ten years it'll be worth $800,000 so you doubled your money in 10 years. By the way, this is not theory, but actual events that we have witnessed and participated in. We own many properties ourselves, and so I'm able to look back and give you the benefit of having done it.

But here's my point - you didn't have to come up with the whole $400,000 for the house, you only put 10% down. You only invested $40,000! So when your $40,000 becomes $400,000, that isn't a double, it's a ten-fold increase in your money!

“In our world, it was tolerated,” said Sherri Zaback, who worked for Mr. Parsons and recalls seeing drug paraphernalia on his desk. “Everybody said, ‘He gets the job done.’ ”

If Ms. Zweibel doubted whether customers could pay, supervisors directed her to keep selling, she said.

“We were told from up above that that’s not our concern,” she said. “Our concern is just to write the loan.”

“WaMu came out with that slogan, and that was what we had to live by,” Ms. Zaback said. “We joked about it a lot.” A file would get marked problematic and then somehow get approved. “We’d say: ‘O.K.! The power of yes.’ ”

He used the mariachi singer as inspiration: a photo of the borrower’s truck emblazoned with the name of his landscaping business went into the file. Approved.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. “She said, ‘We don’t call the bank to verify.’ ” Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: “Too bad.”

“We had a flier that said, ‘A thin file is a good file,’ ” recalled Michele Culbertson, a wholesale sales agent with WaMu.

“We were looking for people who understood how to do loans at WaMu,” Ms. Lado said.

A mile or two down the Strip, MGM Mirage just sold off Treasure Island for $775 million to billionaire casino operator Phil Ruffin. The cash infusion should help the corporation finish construction on its $9.1 billion CityCenter, the largest private construction job in the U.S.

Lottery officials have long praised their games as low-cost entertainment that grow even more appealing to players when the economy turns down. But lottery sales nationwide fell about $215 million, or nearly 2%, from July through September compared with the same stretch in 2007, according to La Fleur's magazine, which tracks the lottery business.

In Bridgewater, 25 miles south of Boston, that aid accounts for about 10% of town revenue, and a cut this year would probably require closing a library or a center for senior citizens, said Paul Sullivan, the municipal administrator.

Just four years after South Florida recruiters struggled to meet even half their quotas, the Army is exceeding enlistment goals by appealing to a wide range of candidates who see limited job options in the civilian world.

Now, fatalities in Iraq are fewer, jobs are scarce and the Army has sweetened incentives. Enlistment bonuses can run as high as $40,000. A new GI Bill taking effect next year will cover tuition and fees for any in-state public university and provide allowances for housing and books.

The maximum age for enlistment was raised to 42 in 2005, minimum test scores were lowered and the Army began issuing more waivers for criminal offenses. A felony conviction for cocaine possession, for example, does not necessarily disqualify an otherwise good candidate.

Chavez named no specific contracts or companies to be affected, but his mining minister has vowed to next year take over the nation's largest mine, Las Cristinas, which is operated by Canadian mining company Crystallex International Corp.

"We are taking back some concessions that former governments have given, and whose permits are still held by some rich people," in order to reduce public reliance on oil, Chavez said.

Mining operations have not yet begun at Las Cristinas — located in Venezuela's biologically rich Imataca Forest Reserve, which covers 8.6 million acres (3.5 million hectares). Environmentalists warn that mining there could upset the delicate ecology.

Venezuela produced roughly 4.2 tons (4.3 metric tons) of gold in 2007, and Chavez said he hopes to double that figure next year. The country is also rich in diamonds, bauxite and other minerals.