Monday Business Edition

Moody’s agency cut Ireland’s debt rating to Aa2 on Monday, blaming high debt levels, weak economic growth prospects and the huge cost of rescuing banks.

“Moody’s Investors Service has today downgraded Ireland’s government bond ratings to Aa2 from Aa1,” the group said in an official statement, but added that it had switched its outlook to stable from negative.

An iPad is sold on average every 2.3 seconds, with three million sold in the first 80 days after its launch in the US in April. Three million iPhone 4 smartphones were also sold in only three weeks since its June release.

The increase in demand has made this a hot summer so far for Taiwanese touchscreen maker Wintek, and not just because temperatures have risen to abnormally high levels.

European Union governments hope the results of “stress tests” on the banking industry, which will be released on Friday, will reassure investors worried about the banks’ exposure to the continent’s sovereign debt crisis.

“It is clear to my mind that the stress test exercise is of paramount importance to restore confidence in the European economy,” European Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said this week.

Energy ministers or senior officials from 21 nations will gather Monday and Tuesday in Washington in an initiative by President Barack Obama’s administration, which has made the creation of green jobs a top priority.

The US Energy Department said the two-day meeting will feature announcements of joint initiatives among the major economies, who together account for 80 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.

Private funds have made up nearly half of the hit they took in the market nightmare of 2008, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says on the basis of sample data for December 2009.

This means that at the end of last year, private investment funds had assets totalling 16.8 trillion dollars (13.0 trillion euros).

Stocks fell off a cliff Friday after a sagging consumer confidence index and mixed earnings spooked investors.

“What was looking like a nice week turned into a huge sell-off,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.

Tensions emerged as the government’s pointman on the worst environmental disaster in US history also told the energy giant to report swiftly on a “detected seep” and “anomalies” near the well.

BP — which said the bill from the leak had risen to 3.95 billion dollars — had earlier acknowledged some bubbles appeared near the wellhead but expressed optimism that the cap installed three days earlier could stay on.

“We have nothing,” said Hussein as he stood in the ruins of his hut through which the sky could be seen between the burnt roof timbers in a remote corner of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

India’s number of millionaires grew by 51 percent to 126,700 in 2009, according to US investment bank Merrill Lynch and consultants Capgemini, boosted by a buoyant economy which grew 8.6 percent in the last fiscal quarter.

The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) and de-facto central bank, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, plan to hire actors — including retirees and pregnant women — to make sure banks and brokerages use above-board techniques when selling investment products.

The controversial move has Hong Kong’s financial community up in arms, claiming the so-called “mystery shopper” program will entrap good and bad financial advisers alike — and ruin their careers.

Vietnam is the world’s second-largest exporter of rice and the Delta accounts for more than half of the country’s production.

But surpluses, the beginning of the wet season, and a shortage of places for drying wet rice are adding up to heavy potential losses, says Vo Tong Xuan, an internationally-recognised rice expert.

Later this year, top companies operating in Europe’s biggest economy are to begin testing “blind” applications that remove any reference to ethnic background or other personal information irrelevant to job performance.

Whether your first name is Dieter or Murat should play no role in whether you are employed by a company, or so goes the theory, and five major corporations plan to test the vetting of anonymous CVs to keep them honest.

Sources said U.S. planemaker Boeing would win an order of at least 20 and as many as 30 777 long-range passenger jets from Dubai’s Emirates, worth up to $7.5 billion at list prices.

Emirates airline already stole the limelight at the Berlin Air Show a month ago with an $11 billion order for A380 superjumbos from Airbus.

The abrupt removal of AIA CEO Mark Wilson shows AIG chief executive Robert Benmosche is stamping his authority on the bailed-out U.S. insurer and follows a boardroom battle at AIG that culminated in its chairman Harvey Golub quitting last week.

Benmosche and Golub were at loggerheads over the future of AIA and that acrimony intensified after British insurer Prudential’s $35.5 billion bid for AIA collapsed last month.

The one-notch downgrade to Aa2, which came a day ahead of a scheduled sale of up to 1.5 billion euros of Irish debt, put Moody’s on par with rival agency Standard and Poor’s AA rating and still one notch above Fitch.

Moody’s also changed its outlook to stable from negative.

Investors and European leaders have praised Ireland for austerity measures culminating in 4 billion euros ($5.2 billion) of spending cuts imposed in last December’s budget for 2010.

Green Party Chairman Dan Boyle told the Sunday Tribune it was “probably a heresy” for a government party to question whether the deficit could be cut to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2014 from more than 14 percent in 2009.

Shares on the Irish Stock Exchange slumped after Dietmar Hornung, Moody’s lead analyst for Ireland, announced that the New York-based agency was dropping its credit-worthiness rating one notch to Aa2. Moody’s previously cut Ireland’s rating to Aa1 from the top grade, Aaa, in July 2009 as Ireland plunged into its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Hornung cited what he called “the Irish government’s gradual but significant loss of financial strength as reflected by its deteriorating debt affordability.”

“I certainly hope so. It would be a nice option to have,” said Greg Lutz, an aquaculture specialist at the university’s agriculture center.

Lutz has placed about 2,000 juvenile shrimp crawfish into 60 outdoor tanks and is studying how they are growing and whether they could be raised profitably, like their distant kin, red swamp crawfish and white river crawfish. Those species are a staple of spring get-togethers in Louisiana and other areas of the South, but they’re gone before the first kickoff.

BP has been named in at least three lawsuits brought under the federal law known as RICO, which stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. Transocean, which leased the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP, has been named in two lawsuits filed in Louisiana and Florida.

The lawsuits accuse both companies of committing wire and mail fraud over a number of years by filing false documents with the U.S. government, and by misleading investors through other documents and falsehoods. They also claim both companies are guilty of bribery because they are part of an overall oil and gas industry effort to “infiltrate” federal regulators by providing favors such as alcohol and drugs, sex, golf and ski trips, concert and sports tickets, and more.

BP gained temporary control of its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday and is counting on shutting it off permanently within weeks. Its shares have regained more than a quarter of the value lost in the wake of the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Talk of a possible bankruptcy or takeover of the company has mostly faded.

But the company still faces the daunting task of paying huge government fines and royalty payments, cleanup costs, damage claims and legal expenses for years. Analysts estimate BP’s final tab for the Gulf oil spill will be anywhere from $50 billion to $100 billion.

That’s one way to characterize investors’ suddenly blase view of Corporate America’s single most important figure. Earnings gushed last week like oil from the ruptured BP well and were greeted like the same gooey mess. Steel giant Alcoa Inc. blew past expectations, followed by chipmaker Intel Corp.’s best showing in a decade and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s 76 percent rise.

By week’s end stocks of all three had lost earlier gains. On Friday, all major market indices fell more than 2.5 percent.