World important news by Jerry

SocGen sees 2-year delay for new UK nuclear plant

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:18:31 -0400

* Power demand to rise 0.7 pct yearly on average until 2015* UK to rely less on power imports this winterLONDON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Britain’s first new-generation nuclear power plant is likely to come online in around 2020 at the earliest, two years later than the initial start-up date, after construction risks and costs have risen, French bank Societe Generale said on Tuesday.EDF Energy , owned by French power giant EDF, plans to build Britain’s next nuclear plant at a site in Somerset, but has admitted its schedule to start the plant in 2018 has slipped, without giving a new date.”One of the reasons for these expected delays is the increased degree of security required for construction and during operations (…) All of these will translate in higher risks and costs, and have jeopardized nuclear competitiveness,” analysts at the French bank said in a research note.New nuclear power plants will help supply the British power market in the next decade, but between then and 2016 the market faces a capacity shortage as old thermal plants shut and the start-up of new low-carbon capacity, such as coal plants fitted with carbon-capture technology, will be sluggish, the bank said.Analysts expect baseload power prices for delivery in 2014 to rise 13 percent above current year-ahead levels to 63.50 pounds per megawatt-hour because supply margins are forecast to start tightening as old plant closures will surpass new build capacity.”The UK may face more of a deficit from 2016, because of the long lead times to build new clean generation (namely, planned nuclear and/or coal CCS) and the likely retirement of a sizeable part of the thermal fleet due to the combined effect of plant age, market dynamics, and regulation,” SocGen analysts wrote.Muted power demand growth will help level out the impact of a tighter supply balance as consumption is forecast to rise at an average rate of 0.7 percent per year until 2015 under normal weather conditions, the bank said.In next two years Britain’s power market is well supplied.This winter, it is expected to rely less on power imports from neighbouring markets as the German nuclear shutdown will draw higher imports from markets such as France and the Netherlands, which also export to Britain.”Even in this case, however, the over capacity in the system is such that we do not expect this to translate into any major structural impact,” the bank said.

Exclusive: Spotify now has 250,000 paying U.S. users: sources

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:16:20 -0400

The London-based company, which suffered significant losses in 2010 as it expanded to new markets, has grown rapidly in the United States. Worldwide, it now has “well north” of the 2 million paid subscriber number that Chief Executive Daniel Ek revealed last month, these people said.Digital music subscription services are hoping to pick up the slack of lost CD sales for the music business by offering large libraries of songs for an-all-you-can-eat monthly fee by streaming songs over computers, mobile devices and more recently in cars.To date, digital music has been dominated by Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store which sells songs and albums on a download basis.Also driving momentum for Spotify is its integration with Facebook which launched on September 22 at the social network’s developer conference.Spotify has benefited from effectively being the default music service on Facebook, which has 800 million users.A Spotify spokeswoman declined to comment.Every time a Facebook user clicks on the new “Music” app tab on their home page they are connected to songs shared by their friends through Spotify. While music services including Rdio and MOG have also been integrated into Facebook, they do not have the valuable “default” status.Spotify is partly backed by digital entrepreneur Parker, who made his name as a supporter of the original Napster music service before becoming a backer of Facebook.The key challenge for digital music start-up companies like Spotify has been how to convert users of their free service or free trial to become paying subscribers. The need to ramp up subscriber revenue as quickly as possible is important for these businesses as they have to pay large fixed costs to license music from labels.Spotify previously had indicated a conversion rate of around 10 percent in Europe but has not updated the data recently.The digital music subscription market has been slow to grow so far. Rhapsody, the U.S. market leader, has 800,000 users after 10 years of being in business. But it is expected to grow to around 1.2 million after it snapped up Napster from Best Buy Co for an undisclosed sum earlier this month.

UPDATE 1-Europe highlights urgency for new U.S. swaps rules

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:02:22 -0400

* Delay stokes anxiety about vulnerability to Europe* Investors embrace clearing in boon for CME, LCH, ICE* CFTC inundated with thousands of industry lettersBy Jonathan Spicer and Ann SaphirCHICAGO, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Europe’s debt problems are increasing anxiety about the vulnerability of global markets as too many new U.S. derivatives rules intended to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis have yet to be defined.Investors have responded in recent months by embracing the clearing of swaps, essentially beating regulators to the punch, to protect themselves in volatile markets.Clearing allows investors to avoid the credit risk of trading with banks that appear newly vulnerable amid Europe’s debt crisis. In 2008-2009 banks’ worries about the health of their trading partners resulted in a widespread freezing of credit, which nearly sank the global economy.Executives at a futures industry conference here urged regulators to speedily adopt rules for trading and clearing in the over-the-counter swaps market. The longer we wait, they said, the more dangerous it becomes.”If we were the five senior staff on the Titanic, I’d like to think we wouldn’t be standing back, looking at the safety boats and thinking about whether we can design them better,” CME Group Inc chief executive Craig Donohue said at the Futures Industry Association.”We’d be thinking about how to get people on the boats and get them to safety, and maybe we can improve on that in the future,” he said.It has been three years since a U.S. financial crisis sent the global economy into a tailspin, and more than a year since lawmakers passed a bill designed to prevent a new crisis from taking down the financial system in similar fashion. Regulators are scrambling to finish writing the rules.Now, with Europe’s debt crisis showing some of the same signs as the United States’ meltdown, investors have rushed into clearing credit and interest rate swaps, a boon in volatile markets for companies like CME and Europe’s LCH.Clearnet.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which must make final about 50 new rules under the Dodd-Frank law, has struggled to keep up with the rule-making process, having finished only about a dozen of the rules.Several key rules, including capital and margin requirements, will be pushed into the first quarter of 2012, putting the agency well behind a July 2011 deadline Congress had set.Regulators have benefited from public meetings that provided input for the rules-writing, said CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler. “But the American public needs us to move forward and get the job done and finish these rules,” he told reporters.”The crisis emanating from Europe reminds us that the public is still unprotected.“‘FISH OR CUT BAIT’Investor appetite for CME’s cleared swaps soared last month, with trading in credit default and interest rate swaps rising to $42 billion in September, from less than $1 billion about a month earlier.CME’s futures business has also benefited, as swaps users seek safer alternatives to their bilateral dealings with banks. Asset managers are increasingly shifting their trades to CME, doubling their use of CME’s short-term interest rate futures in the past year for instance. Trading in currency futures rose to records in September as investors sought safety through clearing.”The trend is there,” said Jeffrey Sprecher, chief executive of IntercontinentalExchange Inc , which began clearing CDS in early 2009 and saw an 11 percent jump in credit-related revenues from the second to the third quarter of this year.”It’s obviously a very complicated global environment right now for global exchange risk, and you are seeing a migration towards futures more than the OTC market.”Despite delays by the CFTC and other agencies in defining the Dodd-Frank rules, the expectation that they will eventually come into force has allowed investors to begin clearing products they never had before.In a global market of some $480 trillion in clearable interest rate swaps, an estimated $180 trillion has yet to be cleared.Yet some, including Donohue and Sprecher, cautioned in interviews that it was important the CFTC takes the time to sift through the thousands of comment letters and get the rules right. “I think it’s well intentioned,” Sprecher said.There is also the real threat of lawsuits from the industry once the rules — from limits on excessive speculation to real-time reporting of trades to end-user exemptions — are formally adopted.”You don’t have to read too closely between the lines to see that people are laying the groundwork for legal challenges,” said former CFTC chief economist James Overdahl, who is now vice president at consulting firm Nera.But based on interviews with several traders and industry executives, the euro zone crisis is giving a new urgency to the need to define how exactly regulators want to safeguard the market.”Let’s fish or cut bait,” said Chris Hehmeyer, chief executive of Chicago-based proprietary trading firm HTG Capital Partners. “It’s time for them to go ahead and get the definitions out there so that we can get on with it.”

UPDATE 1-Pacific Rubiales, Maurel & Prom sign JV for Peru block

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:47:07 -0400

Block 116 (or Lote 116) is spread over 6,600 square kilometres in the Santiago sub-basin located in the Peruvian Andean Foothills.The Canadian oil and gas producer, which has properties in South America, said it will drill two wells at the block and will assume costs of up to $75 million.Maurel & Prom has operations mainly in Africa and Latin America.Shares of Pacific Rubiales closed at C$22.60 on Tuesday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.