Today's Headlines

Bloomberg: 

• Boehner Says ‘We’ve Got Some Serious Differences’ on Budget Plan. Republicans in Congress hardened their resistance to President Barack Obama’s proposed higher taxes for top earners and called on him to propose spending cuts. Obama’s budget plan is “mainly tax hikes,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters today in Washington. “We’ve got some serious differences,” he said. During a phone call yesterday, Boehner said, he and the president were “frank” about “how far apart we are.”
• Fed Expands Asset Buying, Links Rates to Joblessness. The Federal Reserve said it will buy $45 billion a month of Treasury securities starting in January, expanding its asset-purchase program, and for the first time linked the outlook for its main interest rate to unemployment and inflation. “The committee remains concerned that, without sufficient policy accommodation, economic growth might not be strong enough to generate sustained improvement in labor-market conditions,” the Federal Open Market Committee said today at the conclusion of a two-day meeting in Washington. The Fed said interest rates will stay low “at least as long” as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent and if inflation “between one and two years ahead” is projected to be no more than 2.5 percent. The committee “views these thresholds as consistent with its earlier date-based guidance.” The Fed dropped its earlier pledge to hold interest rates near zero “at least through mid-2015.” 
• Greece Plans to Retire $41.5 Billion of Debt in Buyback. Greece plans to repurchase government bonds with a face value of 31.9 billion euros ($41.5 billion) from private investors including its own banks to free up aid for the cash-strapped country. Greece will pay an average weighted price of 33.8 percent of face value for government bonds maturing from 2023 to 2042 after agreeing to pay the maximum price from the range it had indicated for each bond, the Athens-based Public Debt Management Agency said in a statement on its website today. The buyback offer began Dec. 3 and ran until noon London time yesterday. The buyback was part of a package of measures approved by euro-area finance ministers to cut the nation’s debt to 124 percent of gross domestic product in 2020 from a projected 190 percent in 2014.
• EU Lawmakers Seek Greek Swap Details After ECB Bars Files. Lawmakers in Italy and Germany are urging their governments to demand greater transparency from the European Central Bank after a court upheld its decision to keep documents secret that show what the central bank knew about Greece’s finances before its bailout. “Technocracies and kleptocracies cannot prevail over politics and democracy,” Senator Elio Lannutti, a member of the Italian Values party, said in a phone interview today. “The ECB is impermeable to transparency.”
• Spanish Repossessed Property Prices Tumble 65% in Credit Crunch.Prices of repossessed Spanish homes offloaded by lenders this year tumbled 65 percent as a million new properties remain unsold and buyers find it more difficult to get mortgages, according to Fitch Ratings. The price decline is relative to the value of the property when the loans were made and is more than double the drop in real estate values recorded in government data. That compares with a 45 percent slump in Portuguese repossessed house values. 
• London’s Dominance in Shipping Seen Threatened by EU Regulation. The Baltic Exchange, the London- based bourse whose data are used to set freight rates for about 75 percent of seaborne trade, said European moves to tighten controls over financial benchmarks may drive business abroad.
• Unilever CEO Polman Says Europe Faces 10-Year Economic Slump. Unilever Chief Executive Officer Paul Polman said Europe is facing 10 years of economic stagnation while the U.S. grapples with the rise of an “emerging poor” class dependent on government benefits.“We are in for at least 10 years of slow economic growth in Europe, and I don’t see that changing,” Polman said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “If you run a business like mine and don’t assume that, you are fooling yourself. I hope for the benefit of Europe I am proven wrong, but even then we are in a better position by taking that as our starting point. The key thing is to see reality in the eye.” Polman said declining consumer confidence in the U.S. has “people worried” and the recovery in the world’s largest economy will be muted, with GDP growth of 2 percent “if you’re lucky.” With 46 million people relying on government benefits to buy food, he said, “people scrape by until the end of the month.”
• Swiss Feel Jobless Chill as Axe Falls on Alpine Idyll.For decades, the town of Visp at the foot of the Swiss Alps enjoyed the steady stream of affluent skiers heading to Zermatt and the tax income from chemicals maker Lonza Group AG. (LONN) Lately, the inflow of money has ebbed. Lonza is making the deepest cuts in its 115-year history, as the drug-additive maker seeks to eliminate 400 jobs out of 2,890 at its complex in Visp. The plant employs about one in 10 of the valley’s workers, and every third person depends on the site indirectly, facility manager Stefan Troger said.
• Japan’s Abe Set to Inherit Deepest Manufacturing Gloom Since ‘10. When Shinzo Abe was prime minister in 2007, optimism among Japanese manufacturers such as Sony Corp. (6758) was near a 16-year high. Now, as polls suggest Abe’s party will retake power in elections on Dec. 16, the Bank of Japan’s Tankan survey will probably show tomorrow that large manufacturers are the most pessimistic since the aftermath of the global recession. Sony hasn’t made a net profit in four years.
• California Psychiatrists Paid $400,000 Shows Bidding War. The prisons raised pay to lure psychiatrists, the mental health department followed suit to keep employees, and costs soared. Last year, 16 California psychiatrists, including Safi, made more than $400,000, while only one did in the other 11 most populous states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jockeying between agencies for the same doctors demonstrates a payroll system run amok and chronic mismanagement, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale University School of Management and founder of a training institute for chief executive officers.

Wall Street Journal: 

• The Fiscal Cliff: Live Stream.
• Apple(AAPL) Moves Closer to Making TV Set. 
• Hispanics to Nearly Double Share of U.S. by 2060. 
• 3M(MMM) Forecasts 2013 Profit Slightly Below Estimates.

CNBC: 

• 'Cliff' Talks at Standstill: 'It's Getting Worse, Not Better'. Talks to avoid the "fiscal cliff" showed little progress on Wednesday, with Republicans publicly rebuking the Obama administration and one House member saying "it's getting worse, not better." At a morning briefing, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lashed out at President Barack Obama, saying "let's stop playing games" and present a proposal to cut entitlement spending. But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi warned Republicans against raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. "Don't go there," she said. 
• Italy’s Clown Prince: Monti ‘Needs to Disappear’. The anarchic comedian and blogger who leads one of Italy's most rapidly-growing political parties has told CNBC that Prime Minister Mario Monti is a mere "bankruptcy curator" who "needs to disappear."

Zero Hedge: 

• Baltic Dry Plunges By Over 8% Overnight, Most Since 2008. (graph)
• How A Handful Of Unsupervised MIT Economists Run The World.
• Berkshire Seeks To Avoid 2013 Tax Hike, Buys Back BRK Shares. 
• Chart Of The Day: The Collapsing Half-Life Of Unsterilized Central Bank Intervention. 
• QE4EVA Expands Fed-Eligible Treasury Purchases To All Risky Paper.

Business Insider:

• RAY DALIO: The US Economy Is Facing A Rare Set Of Circumstances That Will Be Bad For Markets.
• The 50 Coolest New Businesses In America. 
• BLANKFEIN: Any Fiscal Cliff Deal Is Going To Hurt The Economy. 
• The Scariest Chart At The Dealbook Conference. 
• London's Rare Burger Ban Could 'Open Pandora's Box'.  
• Apparently Google(GOOG) Is Just Getting Started With Its Plan To Kill The Cable Companies.

Reuters:

• North Korea's new leader burnishes credentials with rocket. North Korea successfully launched a rocket on Wednesday, boosting the credentials of its new leader and stepping up the threat the isolated and impoverished state poses to opponents. 
• US CEOs' view of economy slips a tad amid cliff debate. U.S. chief executives' view of the domestic economy drifted down to a three-year low in the fourth quarter, with concerns about the fiscal cliff undermining their confidence, a Business Roundtable survey found. The group's CEO Economic Outlook Index , released on Wednesday, fell to 65.6 in the fourth quarter following a sharp drop to 66 in the third quarter. Any reading above 50 indicates forecast growth.
• U.S. governors plead for urgent online sales tax authority. U.S. governors are urgently pressing Congress to pass Internet sales tax legislation in the coming weeks, saying states cannot afford to wait to collect billions of dollars from online retailers. Washington state Governor Chris Gregoire, a Democrat, and Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican, wrote to Senate leaders on Tuesday urging them to pass legislation granting states the authority to collect sales taxes from online businesses. The letter was released on Wednesday.

Telegraph:

• Debt Crisis: Ministers gather in Brussels to thrash out bank supervision deal - live. European finance ministers have gathered in Brussels to thrash out the details of the ECB's bank supervision mechanism after a meeting on December 4 ended in deadlock. 

BBC:

• Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson said UK voters need to be asked in a referendum whether they want to stay part of the European Union or not. 

Times:

• German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the UK is leaving itself with "no voice in Europe," citing comments the minister made at a private dinner.