Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

• Coeure Triggers Bets ECB Will Restart Bond Purchases for Spain. European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure triggered speculation that the bank will revive its bond-purchase program to lower Spain’s borrowing costs as the region’s debt crisis threatens to boil over again.
• Italy Sells 11 Billion Euros of Bills as Crisis Returns. Italy sold 11 billion euros ($14.4 billion) of Treasury bills, meeting its target for the auction as rates rose on one-year debt for the first time since November amid a return of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. The Rome-based Treasury auctioned 8 billion euros of 361- day bills at 2.84 percent, up from 1.405 percent at the last sale of similar-maturity debt on March 13. Investors bid for 1.52 times the amount offered, up from 1.38 times last month. Also sold were 3 billion euros of three-month bills at 1.249 percent, compared with 0.492 last month. Italy will auction as much as 5 billion euros of bonds tomorrow. “After three months that were calmer than expected, the euro crisis is back,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London, said in an e-mailed note before the auction. While current 10-year yields are still “affordable” for Italy and Spain, “if fear feeds on fear, as has often been the case in previous waves of crisis, things could potentially get worse,” he said.
• Spain's Debt Struggle Opens Door to Sarkozy Campaign Message. “Do you want to be in the same situation as Spain or Greece?” Sarkozy said today on France Info radio, the same rhetorical question he’d asked the night before in a Canal-Plus television appearance. “If I hadn’t done pension reform, if I hadn’t decided to only replace one of every two retiring state workers, can you doubt that we’d be in the same situation.” While Sarkozy trails Socialist challenger Francois Hollande in polls for the decisive May 6 vote, the gap has narrowed in recent weeks.
• U.S. Import Prices Jumped 1.3% in March on Fuel, Materials. Prices of goods imported into the U.S. rose more than forecast in March, reflecting higher costs for fuel and industrial materials such as metals. The 1.3 percent gain in the import-price index was the biggest since April 2011 and followed a revised 0.1 percent drop in February that was previously reported as an increase, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Economists projected the March gauge would increase 0.8 percent, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey. Prices excluding fuel climbed 0.5 percent, also the most in 11 months. The cost of imported petroleum and products jumped 4.3 percent in March, the most since April 2011, from the prior month and was up 9.6 percent from a year earlier. Central bank officials indicated they will probably hold off on more monetary accommodation unless prices rise more slowly than their 2 percent target or the economic expansion falters, according to the minutes. Their preferred price gauge, tied to consumer spending and issued by the Commerce Department, rose 2.3 percent in the year ended in February.
• Copper Futures May Fall for Third Day on Signs Demand Will Ebb. Copper may fall for a third day in New York as signs of a worsening debt crisis in Europe and slowing growth in China fuel concern that demand will stall. Rising bond yields and missed deficit targets in Spain signaled that the region’s fiscal crisis may escalate. Copper dropped to a 12-week low yesterday after reports showed lower imports of the metal than a month earlier in China, the world’s biggest user. “Concerns about the health of the global economy are weighing on copper,” Frank Cholly, a senior commodity broker at RJO Futures in Chicago, said in a telephone interview. “The Euro-zone crisis may reignite. It looks like China is slowing.” Yesterday, prices closed lower than the 100- and 200-day moving averages. Falling below the measures can be a bearish signal to some investors who follow historical price patterns.
• Oil Extends Gain as Distillate, Gasoline Inventories Drop. Crude oil for May delivery rose $1.56, or 1.5 percent, to $102.58 a barrel at 12:19 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil traded at $101.50 before release of the inventory report at 10:30 a.m. Brent oil for May settlement increased 49 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $120.37 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange.
• Unemployment Falls Fast in U.S. If Men Get College Degree. The U.S. workplace is polarizing between the education haves and have-nots, says David Autor, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. So-called middle-skill jobs, typically well-paying work that doesn’t require extensive higher education, are vanishing, dividing the labor force into high- and low-skill positions. While women are moving up the knowledge ladder, male educational attainment is growing at a slower rate. “It is terrific that women are getting higher levels of education,” Autor says. “The problem is that males are not.”
• North Korea Defies U.S. in Readying Missile Launch as Soon as Tomorrow. North Korea moved ahead with plans to fire a long-range rocket as soon as tomorrow in defiance of warnings from the U.S. that doing so would destabilize the region and scuttle a deal for American food assistance. North Korea has begun fueling the rocket that will put a satellite in orbit sometime between April 12 and 16, Yonhap News cited space agency official Paek Chang Ho as telling a group of foreign journalists in the capital of Pyongyang.
• Fed's Lockhart Says Weak Jobs Report Doesn't Require More QE. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart said while the jobs report for March was disappointing, it doesn’t alter his view that the U.S. economy is growing moderately, and he would be “reticent” to support additional asset purchases, or quantitative easing. “I am still not convinced that another round in this time frame would achieve a great deal,” Lockhart told reporters in Stone Mountain, Georgia, today. “I view it as a policy that would respond more to a fairly dramatic negative change of direction of the economy that could be evidenced by rising unemployment, evidenced by plummeting growth.”
• U.S. Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple(AAPL), Hachette. The U.S. sued Apple Inc. (AAPL), Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York district court, claiming the publishers colluded to fix eBook prices. CBS Corp. (CBS)’s Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group and News Corp. (NWSA)’s HarperCollins settled their suits today, two people familiar with the cases said.
• Rosengren Says U.S. Money Funds Threaten Financial Stability. Money-market funds in the U.S. may be taking excessive risks that pose a threat to financial stability by holding European debt whose value could decline if the region’s crisis worsened, said Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren. “A significant source of the credit risk in many prime money market funds over the past year has been the large exposure to European banks,” Rosengren said at Stone Mountain, Georgia, today. In evaluating “risk from unexpected problems in Europe, money-market funds remain an important potential transmission channel to the United States,” he said.

Wall Street Journal:

• Fed Considers Refining 'Stress Tests'. A Federal Reserve official responded Tuesday to widespread criticism of the most recent round of "stress tests," saying the central bank will consult with academics, analysts and banks to improve the process. Fed governor Daniel Tarullo signaled, however, that the Fed would continue to resist calls from bank executives to disclose the details of how it calculates the test results.
• China Seen Bolstering Oil Reserves. China's crude-oil imports jumped to near-record levels in March, bolstering the belief among some energy analysts that the country is again hoarding oil for its strategic reserves. If the predictions prove accurate, China's growing thirst for oil could underpin already-high crude prices and push the country's oil imports above market expectations. On Tuesday, China said its oil imports reached 5.57 million barrels a day in March, the third-highest month on record and a rise of 8.7% from the year-ago month. For the quarter, China's crude imports rose 11% from the year-ago quarter, a much stronger pace than full-year 2011's increase of 6%, the China's General Administration of Customs said.

CNBC.com:

• Forget China GDP, Other Indicators Paint Bearish Picture. Markets may be fixated on China's widely-anticipated growth data due on Friday, but some analysts tell CNBC investors should look beyond the figures and focus on several other indicators which, they say, paint a more dire picture of the economy. According to Paul Gambles, managing partner at MBMG, China's gross domestic product (GDP) data — widely regarded as a barometer of the country's economic health — are among the "less reliable" figures from the government. "We tend to take the view that the least reliable statistics that come out of China are perhaps the GDP numbers, the unemployment numbers and the CPI numbers," Gambles told CNBC on Wednesday. Instead, investors should place more importance on data like energy usage, new car sales external Purchasing Managers' Index, which he said pointed to a less robust Chinese economy.
• Next Generation of US Doctors Sees Gloomy Future. A majority of young doctors feel pessimistic about the future of the U.S. healthcare system, with the new healthcare law cited as the main reason, according to a survey released to Reuters on Wednesday.
• Wasn't Europe Fixed? Fears Arise Again Over Debt Crisis. Europe's debt problems, pushed into the background by an American-style central bank liquidity surge, have come back to revisit the markets, perhaps sooner than many investors had expected. "If the periphery's credit crunch continues, the region's recession could be deeper and its recovery prospects weaker than market expectations," Athanasios Vamvakidis, forex strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told clients.

Business Insider:

• Natural Gas Market Falling Victim to the Bear. The natural gas market has hit a lull having fallen below $2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to record a new 14-year low.
• George Zimmerman to be Charged in Shooting of Trayvon Martin.
• Pretty Soon, We Need to Start Talking A LOT About This Budget Chart.
• 49 Former NASA Scientists Send A Letter Disputing Climate Change. Some prominent voices at NASA are fed up with the agency's activist stance toward climate change. The following letter asking the agency to move away from climate models and to limit its stance to what can be empirically proven, was sent by 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts. The letter criticizes the Goddard Institute For Space Studies especially, where director Jim Hansen and climatologist Gavin Schmidt have been outspoken advocates for action.
• China Went Ahead And Sold Iran $9 Million Of Forbidden US Computer Equipment.
• Obama's DISASTER: People Hate Obamacare More Than Ever.
  

Zero Hedge:

• The Anatomy of a USD-Funding Crisis and the Fed's Global Swap-Line Bailout.
• US Posts Biggest March Budget Deficit In History, Or How The ???? Chart Became The ????+? Chart.
• Beige Book Makes New QE Less Likely.
  

Chillicothe Gazette:

• Paccar's(PCAR) Kenworth Plant to Lay Off 10% of Workers. One in 10 workers at Kenworth Truck Co.'s Chillicothe plant no longer will have a job Monday. Plant Manager Scott Blue confirmed the manufacturer will lay off 10 percent of its work force to prepare for a reduction in production at the site. Blue said orders have fallen off by about 10 percent and the company has to decrease its work force to match the demand. Blue said it's fair to say the news is surprising, but said truck manufacturing companies across the globe are seeing a slump in demand. "We (Kenworth) still have a record market share, so this is absolutely (happening) across the industry," Blue said. In February, PACCAR Inc. reported its fourth quarter sales for 2011 almost doubled but warned the ongoing European debt crisis has resulted in smaller truck orders from eurozone countries.

Reuters:

• Italy Bond Yield Rise Due to Spain Contagion - Debt Management Chief.
  

Telegraph:

• Spanish Epiphany as Depression Deepens? Spain’s industrial output is sliding at an accelerating rate, as is entirely predictable if you enforce draconian fiscal tightening on an economy in deep recession with no offsetting monetary stimulus or exchange rate devaluation. The latest data show that output fell 5.1% (y/y) in February, after 4.3% in January and 3.5% in December. Durable goods fell 14.8pc, the sixth successive monthly fall. Capital goods output fell 10.6pc, according to Raj Badiani from IHS Global Insight. This is politically untenable. Unemployment is already 23.6pc on the Eurostat measure. David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income expects this to reach 27.5pc by the end of the year (which is roughly 32pc using the old measure from the 1990s, based on a Bank of Spain study).
• Pension Risks Threaten UK Finances, IMF Warns. Britain is at risk of pensions timebomb that could cost the state as much as £750bn, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.

El Confidencial:

• Madrid will raise the price of bus and train tickets by an average of 11%. The price rise is due to increasing fuel prices.