Warning about student ‘money mules’

25 February 2013 Last updated at 19:03 ET

By Simon Gompertz Personal finance correspondent, BBC News

Fraud experts are warning that hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of being duped into laundering money for fraudsters.

They are being recruited as unwitting “money mules” who allow their own bank accounts to be used to disguise the proceeds of crime.

The study was carried out by Financial Fraud Action, which tackles fraud on behalf of banks.

It said that students and jobseekers could be especially vulnerable.

Some 19% of students who had been approached had agreed to become money mules.

“It’s a very serious problem,” warns DCI Dave Carter, an investigator from Financial Fraud Action.

“Almost every single criminal transaction that goes on depends on money mules, to turn the money from crime into something the criminals can spend themselves.”

How it works

Continue reading the main story

It just makes you feel sick. I don’t want it to happen again.”

End Quote Kayleigh Rance job-seeker

The fraudsters contact likely targets by sending out mass emails offering employment, or after sifting through CVs posted by job seekers on employment websites.

Then they offer jobs as “money transfer agents”, “payment processing agents” or “administration assistants” for salaries of hundreds of pounds a week.

It looks like a proper job offer, but the real purpose is to channel cash from criminal activity through a person’s own bank account, making them the fraudster’s money mule.

Kayleigh Rance has been hunting for work for a year. She was taken in and even signed a contract. Then, luckily, she pulled out.

“It just makes you feel a bit sick,” she complains, “I feel like I’ve got to go through all the websites now and take my CV off because I don’t want it to happen again.”

The dirty cash comes from credit card fraud, money stolen from bank accounts and other rip-offs.

Paying it into the money mule’s account disguises where it comes from. The mule transfers it to an account in an overseas bank, controlled by the fraudster. It is classic money laundering.

Some money mules are paid by a straightforward cut of the cash being handled. A typical share would be 8%.

Campaign

The first mules tended to be new entrants to the UK, processing funds generated by crime within their own communities in London and other major cities.

But the power of the internet has allowed the perpetrators to start targeting other groups, including students desperate to earn some extra cash.

Financial Fraud Action commissioned ICM to question 2,000 adults along with separate groups exclusively made up of students, jobseekers and new entrants to the UK.

Around 15% had received the suspect job offers. Overall 6% of those who had been approached accepted the offers, rising to 13% of the unemployed, 19% of students and 20% of new entrants.

Crimestoppers is running a campaign in universities across the UK to warn students not to be fooled into becoming involved, telling them: “Don’t be a mule!”.

‘Colossal risk’

Megan Owen, who is studying criminology, volunteered to help at one recent event in Birmingham City University.

“Lots of students we approached said they’d been affected or their friends had been affected,” she said.

Extrapolating from its survey, Financial Fraud Action concludes that 380,000 people could have become unwitting money mules.

The figure is a stab in the dark, but it is clear that the problem is becoming worse and that few of those who become involved understand the risks they are running.

Their bank accounts could be frozen. If prosecuted, they could be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

“It’s a colossal risk,” warns DCI Carter. “In fact you are taking almost all the risk on behalf of the criminal. That’s why they ask – the money mules are the ones most likely to be caught.”

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Warning about student ‘money mules’

25 February 2013 Last updated at 19:03 ET

By Simon Gompertz Personal finance correspondent, BBC News

Fraud experts are warning that hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of being duped into laundering money for fraudsters.

They are being recruited as unwitting “money mules” who allow their own bank accounts to be used to disguise the proceeds of crime.

The study was carried out by Financial Fraud Action, which tackles fraud on behalf of banks.

It said that students and jobseekers could be especially vulnerable.

Some 19% of students who had been approached had agreed to become money mules.

“It’s a very serious problem,” warns DCI Dave Carter, an investigator from Financial Fraud Action.

“Almost every single criminal transaction that goes on depends on money mules, to turn the money from crime into something the criminals can spend themselves.”

How it works

Continue reading the main story

It just makes you feel sick. I don’t want it to happen again.”

End Quote Kayleigh Rance job-seeker

The fraudsters contact likely targets by sending out mass emails offering employment, or after sifting through CVs posted by job seekers on employment websites.

Then they offer jobs as “money transfer agents”, “payment processing agents” or “administration assistants” for salaries of hundreds of pounds a week.

It looks like a proper job offer, but the real purpose is to channel cash from criminal activity through a person’s own bank account, making them the fraudster’s money mule.

Kayleigh Rance has been hunting for work for a year. She was taken in and even signed a contract. Then, luckily, she pulled out.

“It just makes you feel a bit sick,” she complains, “I feel like I’ve got to go through all the websites now and take my CV off because I don’t want it to happen again.”

The dirty cash comes from credit card fraud, money stolen from bank accounts and other rip-offs.

Paying it into the money mule’s account disguises where it comes from. The mule transfers it to an account in an overseas bank, controlled by the fraudster. It is classic money laundering.

Some money mules are paid by a straightforward cut of the cash being handled. A typical share would be 8%.

Campaign

The first mules tended to be new entrants to the UK, processing funds generated by crime within their own communities in London and other major cities.

But the power of the internet has allowed the perpetrators to start targeting other groups, including students desperate to earn some extra cash.

Financial Fraud Action commissioned ICM to question 2,000 adults along with separate groups exclusively made up of students, jobseekers and new entrants to the UK.

Around 15% had received the suspect job offers. Overall 6% of those who had been approached accepted the offers, rising to 13% of the unemployed, 19% of students and 20% of new entrants.

Crimestoppers is running a campaign in universities across the UK to warn students not to be fooled into becoming involved, telling them: “Don’t be a mule!”.

‘Colossal risk’

Megan Owen, who is studying criminology, volunteered to help at one recent event in Birmingham City University.

“Lots of students we approached said they’d been affected or their friends had been affected,” she said.

Extrapolating from its survey, Financial Fraud Action concludes that 380,000 people could have become unwitting money mules.

The figure is a stab in the dark, but it is clear that the problem is becoming worse and that few of those who become involved understand the risks they are running.

Their bank accounts could be frozen. If prosecuted, they could be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

“It’s a colossal risk,” warns DCI Carter. “In fact you are taking almost all the risk on behalf of the criminal. That’s why they ask – the money mules are the ones most likely to be caught.”

BBC News – Business

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Warning about student ‘money mules’

25 February 2013 Last updated at 19:03 ET

By Simon Gompertz Personal finance correspondent, BBC News

Fraud experts are warning that hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of being duped into laundering money for fraudsters.

They are being recruited as unwitting “money mules” who allow their own bank accounts to be used to disguise the proceeds of crime.

The study was carried out by Financial Fraud Action, which tackles fraud on behalf of banks.

It said that students and jobseekers could be especially vulnerable.

Some 19% of students who had been approached had agreed to become money mules.

“It’s a very serious problem,” warns DCI Dave Carter, an investigator from Financial Fraud Action.

“Almost every single criminal transaction that goes on depends on money mules, to turn the money from crime into something the criminals can spend themselves.”

How it works

Continue reading the main story

It just makes you feel sick. I don’t want it to happen again.”

End Quote Kayleigh Rance job-seeker

The fraudsters contact likely targets by sending out mass emails offering employment, or after sifting through CVs posted by job seekers on employment websites.

Then they offer jobs as “money transfer agents”, “payment processing agents” or “administration assistants” for salaries of hundreds of pounds a week.

It looks like a proper job offer, but the real purpose is to channel cash from criminal activity through a person’s own bank account, making them the fraudster’s money mule.

Kayleigh Rance has been hunting for work for a year. She was taken in and even signed a contract. Then, luckily, she pulled out.

“It just makes you feel a bit sick,” she complains, “I feel like I’ve got to go through all the websites now and take my CV off because I don’t want it to happen again.”

The dirty cash comes from credit card fraud, money stolen from bank accounts and other rip-offs.

Paying it into the money mule’s account disguises where it comes from. The mule transfers it to an account in an overseas bank, controlled by the fraudster. It is classic money laundering.

Some money mules are paid by a straightforward cut of the cash being handled. A typical share would be 8%.

Campaign

The first mules tended to be new entrants to the UK, processing funds generated by crime within their own communities in London and other major cities.

But the power of the internet has allowed the perpetrators to start targeting other groups, including students desperate to earn some extra cash.

Financial Fraud Action commissioned ICM to question 2,000 adults along with separate groups exclusively made up of students, jobseekers and new entrants to the UK.

Around 15% had received the suspect job offers. Overall 6% of those who had been approached accepted the offers, rising to 13% of the unemployed, 19% of students and 20% of new entrants.

Crimestoppers is running a campaign in universities across the UK to warn students not to be fooled into becoming involved, telling them: “Don’t be a mule!”.

‘Colossal risk’

Megan Owen, who is studying criminology, volunteered to help at one recent event in Birmingham City University.

“Lots of students we approached said they’d been affected or their friends had been affected,” she said.

Extrapolating from its survey, Financial Fraud Action concludes that 380,000 people could have become unwitting money mules.

The figure is a stab in the dark, but it is clear that the problem is becoming worse and that few of those who become involved understand the risks they are running.

Their bank accounts could be frozen. If prosecuted, they could be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

“It’s a colossal risk,” warns DCI Carter. “In fact you are taking almost all the risk on behalf of the criminal. That’s why they ask – the money mules are the ones most likely to be caught.”

BBC News – Business

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German Economy Min says no alternative to Italy reforms

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Economy Minister Philipp Roesler said on Tuesday he could have imagined a better outcome for pro-reform parties in Italian elections and added that the euro zone’s third largest economy needed to continue to implement reforms.

“There is no alternative to the structural reforms that are already underway and which include consolidating the budget and boosting competitiveness,” Roesler said in a statement, adding that all parties in the country needed to help stabilize the heavily indebted state.

Italy faces political deadlock after a stunning election that saw the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of comic Beppe Grillo become the strongest party in the country but left no group with a clear majority in parliament.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin, editing by Gareth Jones)

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Egypt’s Citadel sees higher revenues from weak currency

DUBAI (Reuters) – Egypt‘s Citadel Capital hopes to raise $ 300 million from divesting non-core assets within three years, its chairman said, predicting that some of its businesses would benefit from an export boom because of the weak Egyptian pound.

The pound has tumbled about 8 percent to record lows against the U.S. dollar since late December, when the central bank softened its defence of the currency, which is under pressure because of the country’s political and economic turmoil.

Citadel, one of Africa’s largest investment firms managing $ 9.5 billion worth of assets, has stakes in companies which export over $ 300 million a year across different businesses, including food, founder and chairman Ahmed Heikal said in an interview on Monday.

“Currency devaluation is affecting our business positively. If you are investing in an exporter or import substitute, then you’ll benefit,” Heikal said.

“We expect that (exports) will be increased substantially rather than go down.”

Since the ouster of authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, Egypt’s transition to democracy has been plagued by conflict between Islamist and secular forces, disrupting the economy and leading to capital flight.

“We took a view a long time ago that Egypt will go into tough conditions. Since we saw it coming, we positioned our portfolio to have investments that will be least affected, if not positively affected, by what’s happening,” Heikal said.

“The management of the transitional period in Egypt aggravated things and made them worse. The economy is now being negatively affected in a faster way than we expected.”

ASSET SALES

As part of its strategy to focus on core businesses, Citadel plans to sell its stakes in eight firms and focus on five industries: energy, transportation and logistics, agriculture and consumer foods, mining, and cement manufacturing.

The company will sell its stakes in an “orderly manner” and may take up to three years, depending on market conditions, Heikal said.

“Given the restrictions that are there in the region on capital, we need to focus and grow only a select number of our companies. Those five sectors offer the best risk/return for shareholders.”

The company expects to raise $ 300 million from the sale of non-core portfolio companies worth a total of $ 1 billion.

Citadel narrowed its third-quarter net loss by 13.4 percent from a year earlier to $ 22 million.

The company has said it sees great opportunities in Africa, given growth in population, the supply of natural resources and improving governance in target countries such as Mozambique, Ethiopia and Kenya.

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Regulator raps Big Four accountants

22 February 2013 Last updated at 06:09 ET

PWC’s Richard Sexton says there is no conflict of interest in auditing and being appointed by company management

Britain’s four biggest accountancy firms have been heavily criticised by the Competition Commission.

The regulator has accused PWC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG of being too dominant and not always meeting a shareholder’s needs.

The four accountancy firms act as auditors for 90% of the UK’s stock-market listed big companies.

They have also been criticised in the past for not doing enough to warn of the financial crisis.

Critics say accountants failed to scrutinise the banks’ balance sheets properly, missing the warning signals that led to government bailouts.

The concern is that the relationship between auditors and company management becomes too comfortable with a “tendency for auditors to focus on satisfying management rather than shareholders’ needs”.

Continue reading the main story

What do accountants do?

• Review a company’s financial position for investors


• Help with tax compliance


• Structure business in a tax efficient way


• Help to detect fraud


• Look after companies when they go bust


• Restructure companies to stop them going bust


• Help raise finance for company takeovers


• Help companies to float on the stock exchange

“It is clear that there is significant dissatisfaction amongst some institutional investors with the relevance and extent of reporting in audited financial reports,” said Laura Carstensen, chair of the Audit Investigation Group.

She added that “management may have incentives to present their accounts in the most favourable light, whereas shareholder interests can be quite different”.

“We have found that there can be benefits to companies and their shareholders from switching auditors, but too often, senior management at large companies are inclined to stick with what they know.”

The Competition Commission pointed out that companies do not tend to change their auditors – with almost a third of the FTSE 100 having used the same one for more than 20 years.

‘Gross underestimation’

She said her organisation was looking into different ways of encouraging competition in the industry. Mandatory rotation of audit firms is one idea being considered, as well as forcing companies to put the contract out to tender after a certain period.

The Big Four argue that the market is competitive and say many big clients doubt that smaller firms could build up their expertise fast enough.

“We are very clear that we report to the shareholders and engage with the Audit Committee as their representatives,” said PWC’s Richard Sexton.

Continue reading the main story

Lack of competition

FTSE 100 firms

• 31% had same auditor for more than 20 years


• 67% had same auditor for more than 10 years

FTSE 250 firms

• 20% had same auditor for more than 20 years


• 52% had same auditor for more than 10 years

Source: Competition Commission

“We believe that the Competition Commission have grossly underestimated the critical role that Audit Committees play in protecting the interests of shareholders.”

‘Significant flaws’

This was echoed by Ernst and Young, who said that competition in the market was “healthy and robust”.

Ernst and Young’s Hywel Ball added that they would co-operate fully with the inquiry but states that he did not believe that mandatory audit firm rotation was in the public interest.

Deloitte said it did not believe that the current market led to high prices, as contended by the Competition Commission, and added: “We categorically disagree that auditors typically place the interests of management over shareholders.”

However, one of the smaller rivals to the Big Four, the BDO, said it was pleased that the report had confirmed “significant flaws” in the market.

“No one solution will achieve market correction, but rather a combination of tendering requirements, encouragement of transparency and dialogue between auditors, companies and investors, and reform of outdated exclusionary practices should provide a backdrop for a healthier FTSE 350 audit market,” said Simon Michaels, managing partner at BDO.

The report is a preliminary one, with the final version due to be published in October. No evidence of tacit collusion was found.

Europe and the US are also looking into new rules for accountants. US audit regulators are also considering forcing companies to change auditors at regular intervals.

The European Commission wants to break up the Big Four, splitting their audit and their consulting businesses. Any new division would have to use a different name.

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In the Debate Over French Labor, Everyone Is Wrong

Maurice Taylor Jr., the blunt-talking chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. tiremaker Titan International (TWI), has outraged France by claiming that the country’s “so-called workers” fritter away their working days with breaks and chitchat.

In a letter to French Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, Taylor said Titan had no interest in taking over a factory in the city of Amiens that Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT) plans to close. “I have visited the factory a couple of times,” he wrote. “The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told the French union workers this to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!”

Montebourg on Feb. 20 fired back with a letter blasting Taylor for his “perfect ignorance of our country” and extolling what he described as France’s “globally recognized attractiveness” for business investment.

Taylor and Montebourg are both dead wrong.

Even allowing some room for exaggeration—would Goodyear really pay employees for a full day when they worked only three hours?—Taylor is mistaken that French workers are lazy and overpaid.

France’s productivity—total economic output divided by the number of hours worked—is among the highest in the developed world, higher even than Germany’s. Nor are French paychecks lavish. Average after-tax incomes in France are about one-third lower than in the U.S., and trail those in many Western European nations as well. You can’t really blame French unions, either. Union membership in France is much lower than in Germany.

Why, then, are French labor costs so high? On average it costs a French employer €34 ($ 44.89) an hour to keep a worker on the payroll, more than in any euro-zone country except Belgium.

The answer—and this is where Monsieur Montebourg gets it wrong—is that the government burdens employers with payroll taxes and regulations that drive costs through the roof. That explains why France has lost more industrial jobs than any European country during the past decade. Tens of thousands more, including some 1,173 positions at Goodyear’s Amiens plant, are at risk.

Recent government initiatives, including temporary credits to offset payroll taxes, don’t appear to be helping much, as unemployment claims are at a 15-year high. And the government hasn’t had much success in finding buyers for ailing factories. Titan, based in Quincy, Ill., is one of several that have walked away from such deals in recent months.

Even some unions now agree that France needs to overhaul its stifling 3,200-page labor code that imposes costly job protections and benefits, which cause employers to avoid hiring workers on permanent contracts. Then there’s the maximum 35-hour workweek, imposed by a previous Socialist government in 2000. It’s been watered down since then but still adds significantly to business costs.

Still another factor are the charges piled on employers to support French government spending, which accounts for a staggering 56 percent of the economy. Mandatory employer contributions toward pensions, unemployment insurance, health care, and other benefits can add 50 percent to an employee’s base salary.

True, French workers benefit from those programs, which help offset their relatively modest wages. It’s a safe bet, though, that most of the country’s 3 million unemployed would rather be working than on the dole. Otherwise, why would employees be fighting so hard to save their jobs at Goodyear, Peugeot (UG), ArcelorMittal (MT), and other companies that are downsizing their French operations?

Yet despite all these problems, French labor is among the most productive in the world. How can that be? Weird as it may seem, the 35-hour work week and chronically high unemployment have actually helped improve productivity, says Renaud Bourlès, an economist who has studied the phenomenon. “When you have a longer working day, at some point because you’re becoming tired, it decreases your productivity,” says Bourlès, who works at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics and the École Centrale Marseille. And when unemployment is high, companies tend to hire and retain the best-qualified and most-productive workers, he says.

Whether they’re productive or not, Taylor has made it clear he has no interest in French workers. The combative 68-year-old CEO—whose nickname is “The Grizz,” and who sought the Republican presidential nomination on a platform that included eliminating sick pay for government workers—told Montebourg he’ll invest elsewhere.

“Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one euro per hour wage, and ship all the tires France needs,” he wrote. “You can keep the so-called workers.”

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Sony Seeks an Extra Life in the New PlayStation 4

Trinitron. Betamax. Walkman. CD. MiniDisc. PlayStation. Blu-ray.

All of those things have come from Sony (SNE). Only one of them remains at all relevant. (I’ll give you a hint: It’s not the MiniDisc.)

Wednesday, Sony introduced its new PlayStation 4 gaming console to the world. The last time Sony had such a major upgrade to its gaming system was November 2006, which seems like eons ago. Think about it: When the PlayStation 3 was introduced:

• There were no iPhones.


• There was no Android.


• There was no iPad, nor any modern tablets.


• There was no Angry Birds.


• Netflix could send video directly to your home—by mail.

This isn’t just a walk down memory lane. All of these developments have, in different ways, upended the traditional structure of console gaming, and none of them came from Sony.

Today we play games on mobile devices with abandon. Smartphones and tablets may not provide the experience that harder-core gamers look for, but they certainly satisfy the much larger group of occasional players. We’re accustomed to deviceless services now—streaming Netflix (NFLX) requires a commoditized piece of hardware that’s as unobtrusive as a drinks coaster.

Sony has a proud tradition of making great hardware. Maybe too proud: The company continues to develop new technologies, only to misjudge what consumers want. Sony was the first major manufacturer of an e-book reader, long before the Kindle, but the device was bogged down with a clumsy syncing process and a limited library of titles.

The PS4 is not at all the same: It’s the fourth generation of a franchise that has been, at times, the only bright spot in Sony’s constellation of products. But developing a new console—even an extremely capable one—seems somewhat out of step at a time when the idea of the console itself is in question.

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Amazon Hits a Snag in Germany Over Alleged Worker Abuse

Online retailer Amazon.com (AMZN) is under attack in Germany for alleged mistreatment of its workers after a television documentary showed immigrant employees living in cramped housing under surveillance by security guards in neo-Nazi garb.

Amazon on Feb. 18 said it had canceled a contract with a security company whose guards were accused of harassing workers, searching their rooms, and frisking them to make sure they had not taken food from the dining room. “The criticized security service is not used any longer,” a Munich-based Amazon spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “Amazon has zero tolerance for discrimination and intimidation.”

In the documentary, aired last week on the public ARD network, employees from Eastern Europe and Spain said they had been recruited in their home countries for short-term jobs during the pre-Christmas season at an Amazon logistics center in Bad Hersfeld, about 100 miles northeast of Frankfurt.

The workers said they were informed shortly before going to Germany that they would be employed by a temporary-services agency, rather than by Amazon. Upon arrival, they said, they learned they would be paid only €8.52  ($ 11.37) per hour, compared to €9.69 promised earlier. They were housed in an overcrowded resort complex and bused daily to the Amazon facility. “The people are stuffed in little huts, seven of them, and fed in the cellar of the restaurant like pigs,” one of the bus drivers told an interviewer on the TV show. Like most of those interviewed, he did not give his name.

Amazon’s German press service did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday from Bloomberg Businessweek about the recruitment and housing of immigrant workers. A telephone message left at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters was not immediately returned.

Some of the most sensational footage showed security guards on duty at the resort complex. The guards had military-style haircuts and wore black hoodies made by Thor Steinar, a company that produces similar garb worn by neo-Nazi groups. Because of that association, Thor Steinar apparel is banned at some German soccer stadiums, and Amazon’s German site has refused to sell the brand since 2009. Adding to the shock value, the guards’ apparel were emblazoned with the letters HESS—representing Hensel European Security Services, the now-fired security company—but also reminiscent of Rudolf Hess, a top deputy to Adolf Hitler.

The security guards “go into our housing when the people are not there, or are sleeping, or taking a shower,” a worker who identified herself only as Selvina told interviewers on the documentary. A second worker, who said her name was Maria, said security guards intimidated her after she complained about housing conditions, and the next day she was fired.

The incident casts a shadow over Amazon’s rapid growth in Germany, its second-largest market after the U.S. The company employs about 8,000 workers at eight German logistics centers, five of which have opened since December 2011, according to a list compiled by MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting company based in Montreal.

A spokeswoman for Germany’s Labor Ministry told Bloomberg News that the government would review the activities of the temporary employment company that recruited the workers and could revoke its license if wrongdoing is found. Amazon has sometimes drawn criticism for working conditions at its other European facilities, which include eight logistics centers in Britain, four in France, and one apiece in Italy and Spain, according to consultant MWPVL.

A report this month in the Financial Times quoted employees at a facility in the British town of Rugeley complaining about grueling work schedules and blisters caused by having to walk long distances in required safety boots. Amazon told the newspaper in a statement: “Some of the positions in our fulfilment centers are indeed physically demanding, and some associates may log between seven and 15 miles walking per shift. We are clear about this in our job postings.”

Workers at Amazon logistics centers in France have staged brief strikes in recent years over complaints, including high injury rates and heavy-handed security measures.

None of the disputes, though, has stirred as much anger as the German documentary. Heiner Reiman, a representative of Germany’s Ver.di labor union who was interviewed on the program, said Amazon was taking advantage of foreigners who are desperate for work. “The foreign temp workers have no voice,” he said. “There is a great fear of being sent back home without having received money. As long as this works, Amazon is going to continue with this practice.”

With reporting by Joseph de Weck of Bloomberg News in Berlin

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The Price Tag for Obama’s Antipoverty Moonshot

If there was a moonshot moment in President Obama’s State of the Union speech, it involved global development. The U.S., Obama pledged, “will join with our allies to eradicate extreme poverty in the next two decades.”  Part of that effort would involve saving the world’s children from preventable deaths and “realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation.”

In one short paragraph, Obama committed the U.S. and its partners to ending absolute poverty planetwide and saving millions of lives each year. Even more astounding is that the goal is plausible—if, that is, the U.S. is willing to spend the same as we did on the original moonshot and ask the rest of the world to do the same.

The goal of eliminating $ 1.25-a-day poverty over the next 20 years may be the most straightforward part of the president’s package. It also demands the least of the American taxpayer. Forecasts of poverty rates from Martin Ravallion of the World Bank and the Center for Global Development suggest that economic growth in developing countries alone will be rapid enough to reduce the number of people in the developing world living below the $ 1.25-a-day line from 20 percent to 3 percent. Even a slight “bending of the curve” through more rapid growth, lower inequality, or (even) transfers from richer countries would get us to zero. This can be accomplished with minimal assistance from the West, if the record of the past 20 years is anything to go by. The decline in the proportion of people in absolute poverty from 43 percent to 21 percent worldwide between 1990 and 2010 was led by China and India, both countries that receive aid worth a fraction of a percent of their GDP.

The health goals pose bigger challenges. We’ve seen immense progress in the fight against child mortality over the past 50 years, for example—and particularly heartening improvement in Africa over the past 10. But we’re still a long way from the level considered necessary to avoid easily preventable deaths. The child mortality rate in developing countries today averages close to 5 percent. In Africa it averages 12 percent. The United Nations forecasts that Africa is likely to continue to see child mortality of 8.5 percent in 2030. Forecasts I created with colleagues at the Center for Global Development last year were more optimistic: We suggested Africa might see a rate of 6.6 percent in 2030. Either way, Obama has called for Africa to reach a rate less than one-third the predicted level within two decades.

That’s not to say it’s impossible—just very, very difficult. We have the technology to keep nearly all kids healthy. Vaccines already prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths a year, and 1.5 million more children could be protected if everyone worldwide got their shots, according to the WHO. Add in a few other techniques, such as breastfeeding, hand washing, access to antibiotics, providing zinc and micronutrient pills, and mixing oral rehydration salts alongside bed nets, and you are close to declaring success. The problem is that all of the above rely on overburdened, underskilled, poorly run health systems in the developing world to provide, regularly and universally, the basic package of care that’s also required. Outside finance is only one small part of the story.

Still, more money would surely help save more kids. A recent study in the medical journal The Lancet suggested that for each $ 1 million invested in equity-focused national health programs, 81 deaths of children under age five could be prevented. That implies that reducing the current 7 million child deaths worldwide by two-thirds might cost as much as $ 86 billion a year. Much of that money will come from parents and national governments, but aid accounts for nearly a fifth of health spending in low income countries—a share that would have to rise were such ambitious health targets to be met.

If the U.S. takes on just 10 percent of the likely full additional costs of reducing child mortality by two-thirds, that’s $ 8.6 billion a year. And as a first step toward an AIDS free-generation, UNAIDS estimates we need a little more than $ 7 billion in additional annual spending in low and middle-income countries by 2015. If the U.S. were to keep its current share of overall spending in those countries, budget allocations would need to rise by about $ 1.7 billion—or about 26 percent. Add the two together, and that’s $ 10.4 billion in additional spending on health aid.

So to return to the moonshot analogy: How would the costs of substantially ending deaths from AIDS and preventable childhood diseases stack up against what the U.S. spent to put a dozen men on a lifeless orbiting rock? In total, the Apollo Program amounted to $ 98 billion over 14 years. If the president is serious about his State of the Union pledges, this year’s White House budget proposal should show a commitment on a similar scale—perhaps $ 7 billion in additional health spending this year, rising something more than $ 10 billion (less than 0.3 percent of the federal budget) in the near future.

Anything less, and it might be hard to take his soaring rhetoric seriously.

Kenny is a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation.

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Japan shares up on weaker yen hopes

18 February 2013 Last updated at 02:04 ET

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Japanese shares have risen after finance ministers of the G20 group of nations avoided singling out Japan for criticism over the recent yen weakness.

The yen has dipped nearly 15% against the US dollar since November amid Japan’s efforts to stoke inflation.

There were concerns that a criticism from G20 may prompt Japan to alter its aggressive stance. The fears were that it would result in the yen rising again and hurt Japan’s plans to spur growth.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 2%.

Meanwhile, the Japanese currency continued to weaken. It fell 0.6% to 94.12 yen against the US dollar.

It also dipped 0.5% to 125.50 yen against the euro in early Asian trade.

“At the G20 meeting, there wasn’t as much criticism from emerging countries about the recent yen’s weakness as feared. That spurred yen selling,” said Kyoya Okazawa, head of global equities at BNP Paribas.

Further weakness?

Analysts say the G20 communique at the end of its meeting in Moscow on Saturday was an endorsement for Japan’s recent monetary moves.

The policies have seen Japan’s central bank, the Bank of Japan, double its inflation target to 2% in attempt to spur domestic consumption.

The central bank has also expanded a key stimulus measure aimed at keeping long term interest rates low.

Analysts say that as Japan continues to pursue these policies, the yen is likely to weaken further.

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“With Japan, as yet, using various measures to ease monetary conditions domestically, we do not expect a large international backlash against its efforts and look for the Japanese yen to continue to decline gradually as the easier monetary conditions feed through,” Barclays Capital said in a note.

A weak yen bodes well for the Japanese exporters and its economy on various fronts.

To begin with, it makes their goods more affordable to foreign buyers. It also helps boost the exporters’ profits when they repatriate their foreign earnings back home.

And as firms see their profits rise, they are likely to have a bigger cash pile to invest in research and development or expansion of their facilities.

Investment in research helps the firms become more competitive as they develop new products. Meanwhile, increased capital investment helps boost Japan’s overall economic growth.

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Al Franken’s Fanciful Post Office Fix

The U.S. Postal Service has another would-be savior: Al Franken, the U.S. senator from Minnesota and former Saturday Night Live cast member. On Thursday, he and seven Democratic colleagues introduced a bill to “modernize” the financially troubled agency, which is losing $ 25 million a day.

By “modernize,” Franken and his allies mean expand the Postal Service’s operations. This is from his press release: “The measure would let the Postal Service look for innovative new ways to generate revenue by allowing post offices to notarize documents, issue hunting and fishing licenses, and allow shipments of wine and beer—all services currently prohibited at post offices.”

There is also vague language about how the legislation would “clear the way for the Postal Service to help customers take advantage of e-mail and Internet services.”

These ideas are worth considering, but there are already plenty of reform proposals floating around Congress. The Senate passed a reform bill last April, only to have it languish in an election year. So presumably, Franken and his allies have already had their say on the matter. There are also competing bills in the House.

What Congress needs to do now is come up with a compromise that can make it though both houses. It will be difficult for Republicans and Democrats to reach such an agreement. Democrats are heavily supported by postal worker unions, which hope to protect the jobs of their members at a time when mail volume is declining. That surely has something to do with Franken’s proposal to increase the duties of clerks in rural areas. It’s job security for them.

House Republicans talk about the need to shrink the federal government. But they haven’t been able to pass an existing bill that would eliminate Saturday delivery, which the public supports to save the USPS.

When it comes down to it, Franken’s new bill is another attempt by Congress to look like it’s doing something to ease the Postal Service’s woes. But it’s really just another distraction.

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Flooding payouts broke £1bn in 2012

15 February 2013 Last updated at 06:29 ET

Insurers paid out £1.19bn for flood and storm damage in the UK in 2012 – the highest annual figure for five years, an insurance trade body has said.

Some 486,000 claims were made by homeowners, businesses and motorists, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI).

The average payout for flood-damaged properties was £18,200, the ABI said.

Last year was the second wettest on record in the UK, according to figures from the Met Office.

The total rainfall for the UK during 2012 was 1,330.7mm (52.4in), just 6.6mm short of the record set in 2000.

However, it was the wettest on record in England and Wales.

Claim levels

The ABI, which represents 90% of the UK’s insurance industry, said that flooding struck a number of times during the year.

The total payout was slightly higher than in the year 2000, but was still dwarfed by the £3bn bill from the floods that had such a serious impact on the country in 2007.

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1. 2000 – 1,337.3mm

2. 2012 – 1,330.7mm

3. 1954 – 1,309.1mm

4. 2008 – 1,295.0mm

5. 2002 – 1,283.7mm

(Source: Met Office)

The insurance industry faced considerable criticism for its response to those floods, and insurers now often put teams in place in areas that are hit by storms or flooding.

The 1987 hurricane and the storms of 1990 also cost insurers more than last year.

In 2012, insurers received 411,300 claims totalling £690m for damage to homes as a result of floods and storms, the ABI said.

Commercial property accounted for considerably fewer claims, just 47,000, but the value of those claims amounted to £373m.

Insurers handled 26,800 claims for vehicles damaged by the extreme weather, paying out £84m, and 1,200 claims for interruption to business operations, costing them £40m, the ABI said.

“Insurers expect bad weather to strike anytime, anywhere and last year highlighted the vital role insurance plays in helping communities recover from our increasingly volatile weather,” said Nick Starling, the ABI’s director of general insurance.

Cover ‘at risk’

The ABI has been in talks with the government for months searching for a deal to avoid 200,000 homes being left without flood cover.

Many thousands more householders could see premiums rise if no deal emerges.

An existing agreement, reached in 2008, obliges insurers to provide cover for high-risk properties while the government continues to improve flood defences. This arrangement comes to an end in June.

The ABI wants the government to share the financial risk for the areas with the most homes at significant flood risk – defined as a greater than one in 75 chance of flooding in any given year.

The government said it was determined to come up with an affordable solution that did not put an unjustifiable burden on the taxpayer.

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Tesla vs. the ‘Times’: Cars Are Now Gadgets

Late Wednesday night, Tesla Motors (TSLA) issued its much-anticipated response to a scathing New York Times review of its all-electric Model S sedan. In a blog post, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk used data logs gathered from the car to accuse reporter John Broder of outright lies. Broder, for example, complained about freezing inside the car, since he had to turn the heating system off to save electricity and keep driving. Balderdash, says Musk: The data show the cabin had an average temperature of 72F for the majority of the trip.

Broder, in a series of posts, has argued that he followed Tesla’s instructions and that the car simply did not handle the cold weather of the Northeast well. He also claims to have been testing not really the Model S itself, but rather the network of free, superfast charging stations Tesla has started putting up around the country. This is how Broder explains away the baffling circumstances in which he didn’t charge the car while spending the night at a hotel.

The tit-for-tat squabble is entertaining. Musk’s data-heavy beatdown, especially, is great reading.

To me, the real takeaway here is that we’ve reached a moment in which the car has turned into a gadget, and we’re seeing the good and bad that comes with that. A lot of the flaws Broder brings up, such as discrepancies between the car’s estimated range vs. the actual range, come down to software issues. The same can be said for many of the gripes from Model S owners, who have seen their 17-inch touchscreen display act funny or their motorized door handles not work quite right.

Tesla’s software is good, but it’s not working perfectly. The company is issuing over-the-air updates that fix many of these problems. One day your door handle doesn’t work. The next day it does. It’s also been issuing updates that, for example, suddenly allow the cars to charge much faster than they could before by taking advantage of new Tesla supercharging technology. This is a strange new world for car owners.

Guys like Broder and many of the Tesla owners obviously want to see the Model S act as billed. And Musk has said the car is not meant to be some grand beta experiment in which people pay $ 100,000 to serve as Tesla’s guinea pigs.

But let’s be clear. The Model S has pushed automotive innovation forward by leaps and bounds. It offers space, speed, and safety in a package that outstrips rivals while also introducing a whole new set of computing and fuel technology. You don’t have to stretch to compare the Model S to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone in terms of a device changing the rules of engagement in its respective field. And let’s all remember that the iPhone has come with its antenna, map, screen, and other fundamental issues.

We’re used to buying cars that at best stay static over time but usually get worse. The Model S seems more similar to the iPhone. It has the chance of getting better (at least for a while) as flaws get fixed and new features arrive.

Some people are willing to live in this fast-moving, imperfect world. Here in Palo Alto, the Tesla Model S has become a common sighting. This is a place full of early adopters who don’t mind paying extra for the latest and greatest gadget—even if it has some glitches. Tesla only needs to sell about 20,000 people on this premise for the Model S to be wildly successful.

Moving forward, though, the company will have to do much better if it’s to make follow on vehicles like the Model X mainstream. The public wants amazing gadgets but is less tolerant of the types of issues the Model S has seen so far. So here’s Tesla’s real moment to prove it’s more Apple and Silicon Valley than Detroit—and to show the world what technology mettle it’s really got.

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Now You Can Shop With a Single Tweet

This week American Express (AXP) and Twitter announced a partnership to allow people to buy things by tweeting. It works like this: You sync your Amex card to your Twitter account, and then you can start making purchases by putting hashtags in your tweets that correspond with special deals Amex is offering—today as of noon, for example, a limited supply of Kindle Fires, Xbox consoles, and special Donna Karan-designed Urban Zen bracelets, among other items, are on offer. You send your tweet out to your followers—“So excited to wear my Donna Karan Urban Zen bracelet while playing Halo 4!” or something like that—and include the hashtags. Amex sends you a confirmation tweet, and when you respond to it, the transaction is complete.

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium of exchange is the message.

There is, at first blush, something conceptually confusing about the whole idea. We tend to think of Twitter as a form of communication, not commerce. Paying by Twitter seems to make as much sense as keeping up with your old college roommate by PayPal. But American Express is betting that there’s a whole market of consumers who treat shopping as a sort of performance, who like spreading the word about good deals and great finds. The kind of people who love explaining how much of a discount they got on their new shoes, or who make “unboxing” videos on YouTube where they spend five minutes unpacking a new tech gadget while narrating the process. Amex is also confident that the rest of us find those people’s advice and tips valuable rather than a nuisance.

According to Leslie Berland, who runs digital partnerships for American Express, that confidence comes from previous collaborations with Facebook (FB), Foursquare, and Twitter itself. (It was possible even before this week to get Amex deals by tweeting hashtags, but you had to go to the store or store website to redeem them.) “Customers loved sharing with other people,” Berland says. “There was so much viral activity, we saw new customers who walked into establishments, and those who redeemed the offers went back again.” She doesn’t provide exact figures but says that Amex customers cumulatively saved millions of dollars on the deals.

The partnership is part of a larger push by social networks into e-commerce, as they take all the information they have about users and try to make money off it. In Twitter’s case, that means taking the web of relationships people have built on the network and using it to push products. The idea is that we’re more willing to pay attention to a plug for something if it comes from someone we have decided, in Twitter’s religion-tinged term, to “follow.” (Twitter doesn’t get a cut of the Amex purchases.)

The big hurdle for this particular endeavor is that Twitter doesn’t have the best reputation for security—Twitter accounts are notoriously hackable. And while that’s a problem when someone commandeers a person’s Twitter account and blasts out a stream of embarrassing tweets, it’s for many people a problem of a different order when credit-card information enters the picture. To allay those concerns, Berland emphasizes that Twitter never gets the credit-card information; it stays with Amex. In addition to the confirmation tweet, Amex sends a confirmation e-mail when a transaction goes through, so if someone does hijack your Twitter account and run up a tab, you’ll know right away.

Berland doesn’t think security concerns will give consumers pause. American Express, she points out, has a very good reputation for keeping customer information safe. “We’re trusted and well-known for safety and security. That’s a very important part of the story,” she says. Whether that can survive a partnership with Twitter remains to be seen.

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Obama pledges to reignite economy

13 February 2013 Last updated at 01:45 ET

President Obama: “Time for tax reform that encourages job creation”

President Barack Obama has urged Congress to back government action to revive the sluggish US economy, in his annual State of the Union speech.

The Democratic president promised “smarter” rather than bigger government for “the many, and not just the few”.

He also called for action on gun violence, climate change and immigration reform.

In the Republican response, Senator Marco Rubio urged Mr Obama to drop his “obsession” with raising taxes.

Speaking in the House of Representatives, Mr Obama told his audience that his generation’s task was “to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class”.

‘North Star’

“We have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is strong,” Mr Obama said in an hour-long address.

Delivering growth and jobs will be the “North Star that guides our efforts”, he added.

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Those hoping for a more conciliatory tone than this notably aggressive State of the Union speech were disappointed”

End Quote

But he insisted that nothing he planned would raise the deficit “by a single dime”.

Mr Obama proposed reforms to reduce the cost of Medicare, a federal healthcare programme for pensioners, but argued “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity”.

In his speech, Mr Obama went on to call for federal investment in infrastructure, clean energy and education.

And he vowed to act on climate change himself if Congress failed to enact legislation.

“I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change…,” he said.

“But if Congress won’t act sooner to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Mr Obama also said he would reduce by more than half the number of US troops in Afghanistan over the next year.

Watch President Obama’s full address

He asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, called for legislation to ensure women are paid equally to men, and announced a commission to improve the voting process.

On gun control, Mr Obama said an “overwhelming” majority of Americans supported “common-sense reform” on firearms, including tighter background checks and restrictions on “weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines”.

And he urged gun-control opponents to allow a vote in Congress on his proposals.

“The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote,” he said.

Conservative divisions

He also praised bipartisan efforts to draw up an immigration reform bill, adding that if he is sent legislation, “I will sign it right away”.

Less than a day after North Korea tested a nuclear device, Mr Obama said the US will “lead the world in taking firm action in response to these threats”.

Mr Obama will take to the road in the coming days to push his economic recovery proposals, stopping in the US states of North Carolina and Georgia and in his hometown of Chicago, Illinois.

Republican Senator Rubio: ‘I hope the president will abandon his obsession with raising taxes’

Sen Rubio, a possible 2016 Republican presidential candidate, delivered his party’s official riposte.

In it, he attacked Mr Obama’s economic policies and said “more government isn’t going to help you get ahead, it’s going to hold you back”.

The Cuban-American senator, who also made his address in Spanish, referred to the pain felt by residents of the working-class neighbourhood in which he grew up.

He told Mr Obama: “I don’t oppose your plans because I want to protect the rich. I oppose your plans because I want to protect my neighbours.”

The Florida senator also warned the president that the “tax increases and the deficit spending you propose will hurt middle-class families”.

Underscoring conservative divisions, immediately after the Rubio speech Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul delivered the Tea Party’s rebuttal to Mr Obama’s address.

He said both parties had failed voters by driving up trillion-dollar deficits.

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The Chocolate Business is Losing Its Workers

This Valentine’s Day, Americans will spend a record $ 1.05 billion on chocolate and candy, according to the National Confectioners Association. But while Mamert Kablan Angora helps keep sweethearts sweet by growing cocoa on part of the 15 hectares (37 acres) of Ivory Coast land his family has farmed for generations, his 31-year-old son with the same name prefers an office job in the nation’s biggest city. “I have seen my parents suffering in hoping that days will be better in growing cocoa, but the situation is deteriorating year after year,” says Mamert’s son, who works at an import/export firm in Abidjan, where he can use his master’s degree in business. “Cocoa can no longer allow someone to take care of oneself or of a family.”

Villagers in West Africa, which produces 70 percent of the world’s cocoa, are abandoning the crop because its price is volatile, farms are too small to be economical, yields haven’t risen for decades, and alternative crops such as rubber are more lucrative. “Everybody is worried that the farmer is living on the edge of poverty,” says Barry Parkin, the head of global procurement and sustainability at Mars, whose products include M&M’s, the best-selling chocolate candy in the U.S. “They produce half a ton per hectare of cocoa, and it has been that way forever. All major agricultural products have improved their yields by a factor of 5 to 10 in the last 50 years, and cocoa hasn’t.”

The chocolate market expands by 2 percent to 3 percent a year, according to Zurich-based Barry Callebaut (BARN), the world’s biggest maker of bulk chocolate. Cocoa supplies, though, have lagged demand in 10 of the past 20 years, according to data from the International Cocoa Organization in London. The ICCO forecasts a shortfall of about 50,000 tons for the annual season, which began in October. And Parkin at Mars reckons demand will outpace production by 1 million tons by the end of the decade.

That means your chocolate kisses may cost more next Valentine’s Day. To deal with more frequent cocoa shortages, confectioners have been shrinking the size of chocolate bars and bon bons, adding more air bubbles to chocolate, or simply substituting more vegetable oil for cocoa butter. They also can pull from global stockpiles, which stood at 1.8 million metric tons as of Sept. 30, according to the International Cocoa Organization. But experts say it will be tougher to cope beyond 2020 without improved production.

“You must start with that core fundamental of improving cocoa yields, improving productivity on the farm … to build sustainable year-after-year strong crops that are more disease-resistant, that provide more pods per tree,” says Tim Cofer, European president of Mondelēz International (MDLZ), the world’s biggest chocolate company, with a 15 percent market share. Mondelēz sells more than $ 1 billion of Milka and Cadbury Dairy Milk bars a year.

Cocoa is hard to grow, and the trees don’t start producing until three to five years after being planted. Also, climate change threatens to make farming it even more challenging. The crop needs hot, humid conditions, with temperatures no lower than 18C (64F) and no higher than 32C, according to U.K. risk advisory firm Maple-croft. Temperatures in growing regions of Ivory Coast and Ghana, the second-biggest producer, are forecast to rise as much as 2C by 2050, while the optimum growing altitude will be 450 to 500 meters (1,476 to 1,640 feet) above sea level by then, compared with 100 to 250 meters now, according to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

Mondelēz says it will invest $ 400 million in the next decade to help growers raise yields and improve incomes. Barry Callebaut will spend 40 million Swiss francs ($ 44 million) in the same period to train farmers and help double yields. Blommer Chocolate, the largest U.S. cocoa bean processor, and Singapore-based trader Olam International (OLAM) last year formed a joint venture to invest $ 12 million to raise yields by 2015. And candy giant Nestlé (NESN) will invest 110 million Swiss francs in cocoa science and sustainability initiatives from 2010 to 2019.

Due to shortages and political instability, cocoa prices experienced annual swings of more than 20 percent in 10 of the past 20 years. Prices were below $ 1,000 a ton in the early 1970s and more than tripled by the end of that decade. By 1989 they were again below $ 1,000 a ton. Cocoa climbed to a 32-year high in 2011 but has since fallen 74 percent. After peaking at more than $ 2,700 in September, the price has slumped 18 percent to about $ 2,220. “The volatility of cocoa prices is one of the reasons we are facing this situation,” says Jean-Marc Anga, the ICCO’s executive director. “Some farmers have left cocoa and gone into rubber, palm oil, and other commodities. Unless you find a sustainable solution, you are not going to attract these people back into cocoa and keep them there.”

The bottom line: The global chocolate industry is girding for shortages of its key raw material, cocoa. Its price has fallen more than 70 percent since 2011.

With Baudelaire Mieu

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To Cure a Hangover, Hang an IV Bag

In the words of every person who’s ever had too much to drink: Hangovers are the worst. They also cost a lot of money. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the economy suffers about $ 161 billion a year in lost productivity from people who are too hung over to do their jobs. People like Michael Thorns, a fundraising officer for the University of Essex, in Colchester, England, who was once so hung over he fell asleep in a training meeting with his manager. Oscar Madrigal, a call center supervisor in Costa Rica, came to work still drunk from a Super Bowl party and couldn’t remember his computer password—so he took a nap for six hours. As Oscar Wilde put it, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”

Dr. Jack Dybis, a 45-year-old trauma surgeon at Evanston Hospital near Chicago, is out to end the curse, one overserved soul at a time. Two months ago, Dybis opened Revive, a hydration clinic that claims to be able to cure lingering jet lag or a wicked hangover by hooking patients up to a rehydration IV. “It’s a well-known trick among doctors and paramedics,” says Dybis. When he was younger, he and his friends sometimes used IV bags to help them get through 36-hour rotations at the hospital. “We put nails in the wall over our beds so we could hang an IV bag whenever we needed one,” he says. Most IV solutions are nothing but saline and vitamins. At Revive, Dybis can add nausea or headache medicine, depending on your needs. The whole process takes less than an hour and costs $ 99.

Revive isn’t the first hangover cure in a bag. Dr. Jason Burke, an anesthesiologist, does the same thing out of a bus on the Las Vegas Strip. Burke’s business, Hangover Heaven, recently started making house calls to hotel rooms; over New Year’s Eve weekend he served 80 clients (his prices range from $ 99 to $ 199), including one guy who puked 25 times. “Then there was the woman who showed up at 2 p.m. sick on cheap Chardonnay,” says Burke. “She was throwing up uncontrollably but wanted to be able to eat dinner at Craftsteak with her husband.” Burke worked his magic, and the woman ate her steak.

A hangover cure that actually worked sounded too good to be true and begged a rigorous investigation. Someone needed to get drunk—and that someone was me. I organized a team consisting of a photographer named Ryan, some of Ryan’s pals, and my high school friend Julia, who provided useful commentary: “This is much more fun than the time we mixed gin with Diet Sprite in your parents’ basement.”

We started the evening at Scofflaw, a craft cocktail lounge where every drink contains at least seven ingredients, none of which are Diet Sprite. At one point we did shots of something called Malört, which sounds like a Harry Potter villain but is actually a bitter wormwood liquor that’s made and sold only in Chicago. “I like it because it tastes like a bunch of chemicals I’m not supposed to drink,” said Matt, Ryan’s roommate. Then Matt and Ryan suggested we go to a Goth club. Under Malört’s spell, this sounded like a great idea.

Photograph by Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg BusinessweekShots for everyone at Scofflaw

It was a terrible idea. The next morning, the Malört and the Goth club, plus my workweek exhaustion and a slight cold, all left me feeling, on a scale from 1 to 10, like I wanted to die. I hadn’t eaten much dinner, and I’d forgotten to drink water before bed—two things Dr. Michael Oshinsky, a hangover headache researcher at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, recommends as preventives. Oshinsky explains that I felt so horrible because my liver had converted the alcohol into a toxin called acetaldehyde, which has been linked with nausea and other hangover symptoms, and then into acetate, which causes headaches. “But alcohol is also a diuretic, so on top of that you’re dehydrated, and you lose electrolytes,” he says.

Photograph by Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg BusinessweekPulling a Lindsay Lohan

I crawled over to Revive, where Dybis had me fill out some paperwork and asked questions about my medical history, such as “You don’t have any kidney problems, right?” One nurse took my blood pressure while another, Samantha, assured me that injecting myself with a giant bag of fluid wasn’t a big deal. “I did it last week when I was hung over,” she said. “You’ll feel great afterward. But you’ll have to pee a lot.”

The nurses put a needle in my arm and hooked up the IV bag while Dybis explained what he’d prescribed. He crafts each solution to fit the patient’s needs and had ordered me up a standard saline mixture full of potassium, vitamin C, and calcium, along with an anti-inflammatory drug called Toradol—a favorite of National Football League players—that promised to relieve my headache. Dybis also gave me a dose of vitamin B, which turned the IV bag bright yellow. “You may start to taste the vitamins in your mouth,” Dybis warned. Within a minute, I felt like I was licking a large One A Day.

Photograph by Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe IV goes in at Revive

The nurses moved me to a secluded room with lounge chairs, blankets, magazines, mint gum, coconut water, and cold eye masks. In another room, a man in his mid-30s sat on a couch with his IV bag, watching football on a large, flat-screen TV. Revive is technically a medical facility, but it looks more like a spa: Patients recuperate separately in rooms that offer everything from wooden desks for busy professionals to quiet, windowless areas perfect for people with the flu. (Revive has recently been treating a lot of flu patients; the hydration and vitamins alleviate the symptoms.) About 10 customers come to Revive each day, usually in the morning and almost always alone. “Sometimes we’ll get a group of friends who went out the night before,” Samantha said. “It’s fun to listen to their stories about what they did to land them in this place.”

It took two IV bags and a second shot of Toradol, but after about an hour I was fully hydrated and ready to go. My headache was gone, and I actually felt better than I do most workdays. Dybis wasn’t surprised; he has one patient who’s started coming into the clinic just for the pick-me-up. “The last time she showed up I told her I didn’t think she needed an IV. This is a medical facility, not a theme park. You can’t just come in here and ask to ride the ride,” he said as the nurses wrapped gauze on my arm where the IV had been and told me to apply pressure to lessen the likelihood of a bruise.

Photograph by Ryan Lowry for Bloomberg BusinessweekStarting to feel like a champ

Afterward, I met Julia for lunch. “It worked!” I told her. “That’s cool,” she said. “I just had a cup of coffee and some water. I feel better, too.”

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World stocks rise as China posts big trade jump

BANGKOK (AP) — World stock markets were mostly higher Friday, boosted by better-than-expected trade data from China that provided new evidence of an upswing in the world’s second-largest economy.

Exports rose 25 percent in January from a year earlier, the government reported, while imports soared 28 percent. A large part of the increase was due to companies rushing to fill orders before shutting down for up to two weeks for the Lunar New Year holidays that begin Sunday.

“Seeing the underlying trend is a little difficult. Nevertheless, the data were above expectations and seem generally positive,” said Moody’s Analytics economist Alaistair Chan in a report.

A more accurate picture of China‘s trade at the beginning of the year will emerge once February’s data is released, said Dariusz Kowalczyk of Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong. But he added that investors still might interpret the January figures at face value and push up stock markets.

European stocks rose in early trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.5 percent to 6,257.97. Germany’s DAX added 0.4 percent to 7,616.93 and France’s CAC-40 advanced 0.6 percent 3,623.22.

Wall Street was poised for a higher opening after a session of losses. Dow futures rose nearly 0.1 percent to 13,909 and S&P 500 futures advanced 0.1 percent to 1,506.70.

Hong Kong‘s Hang Seng rose 0.2 percent to 23,215.16. South Korea‘s Kospi advanced 1 percent to 1,950.90. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.7 percent to 4,971.30. Benchmarks in Singapore, mainland China and Thailand also rose.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 tumbled 1.8 percent to 11,153.16, slumping after a recent rally spurred by a weakening yen.

Some analysts believe the yen’s weakness may have bottomed out. A weaker yen benefits Japan’s export manufacturers because it makes their products cheaper in overseas markets.

Many stock markets across Asia, including those in mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, will be closed Monday for holidays celebrating the Lunar New Year. Hong Kong‘s holidays run through to Wednesday while China and Taiwan are closed all week. Japan’s markets are also closed Monday.

Among individual stocks, Japan’s Panasonic Corp. fell 5.4 percent while Sony Corp. plummeted 10.1 percent. The struggling electronics giant reported a 10.7 billion yen ($ 115 million) loss for the October-December quarter on Thursday.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics rose 3 percent. Australia’s Newcrest Mining advanced 5 percent.

Wall Street fell Thursday as weaker earnings unnerved investors despite data suggesting that company layoffs are easing. Media conglomerate News Corp. cut its forecast for annual earnings. Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., lost $ 1.3 billion in its latest quarter as it revamped its network to take on larger competitors.

On the bright side, fewer Americans sought unemployment benefits last week. Applications for unemployment benefits falling 5,000 to 366,000.

Benchmark oil for March delivery was up 14 cents to $ 95.97 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 79 cents to finish at $ 95.83 a barrel on the Nymex on Thursday.

In currencies, the euro rose to $ 1.3407 from $ 1.3401 late Thursday in New York. The dollar was down at 92.80 yen from 93.52 yen.

___

Follow Pamela Sampson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pamelasampson

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