SARS hits credit card spending by 20 per cent in Malaysia: HSBC Bank
Kuala Lumpur: HSBC Bank Malaysia said on Friday that spending on credit cards has dropped 20 per cent since mid-March and warned consumer defaults could rise if the SARS epidemic was prolonged. One of Malaysia's top foreign banks and a unit of Britain's HSBC, it said the industry-wide credit card delinquency ratio in Malaysia so far has remained below that in Hong Kong and other countries badly hit by the deadly virus. HSBC Malaysia chief executive officer Zamir Cama said except for the credit card business, the bank's other operations were largely spared by the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). "Clearly the one thing that it has done is that credit card spending has gone down. The spend has fallen by about 20 per cent in one-and-a-half months. If it continues too long, I suspect that consumer delinquencies, consumer defaults will rise," he said.
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Wall Street to ship research jobs to India
New York: Wall Street research analysts have suffered rounds of layoffs, big pay cuts, and accusations that they routinely lied to the investing public. Now there's a new worry -- that their jobs are being shipped overseas.Investment banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup are mulling the benefits of shipping research jobs to countries like India, where salaries for business graduates are as little as 10 per cent of those in New York and London, according to financial consultants and Wall Street sources.

Morgan Stanley plans to experiment by hiring stock analysts in India to support its US and European analysts, while Deutsche Bank AG has contracted Irevna Limited, a London-based consultancy that specializes in outsourcing research to India, according to sources familiar with the situation.
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Former Enron execs charged in new indictments
Houston: The US government brought new charges against former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow on Thursday and for the first time accused his wife and seven other executives of fraud and other crimes in the bankrupt energy giant's failure.Seven former Enron executives, including Lea Fastow, surrendered to federal authorities in Houston as the US Justice Department's sprawling probe into the landmark 2001 corporate scandal bore its newest fruit. An eighth defendant was to surrender later.
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Wall St firms face lawsuits as investors burn fingers
New York: Wall Street securities firms' practice of paying one another to produce positive research reports on their own clients should trigger lawsuits by investors who claim they were misled, lawyers said. Federal regulators implicated Bear Stearns Cos, Morgan Stanley and the securities units of JP Morgan Chase & Co, UBS and US Bancorp in various payment schemes from 1999 to 2001. These might have helped insure that companies for which they did business would be hyped in research available to unsuspecting investors. "There is no legal presumption a research report is false, but if I were a juror and I heard that someone paid money for a report, I might be more skeptical of claims the report was justified," said Marcel Kahan, a professor at New York University School of Law.
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Euro scales 4-year high on bleak US outlook
Singapore: The euro hit a fresh four-year high against the dollar on Thursday as doubts lingered over the US economic outlook, while oil prices rose after OPEC said it might intervene to stop a steep slide. Shares gained in Japan and held steady in Australia as most Asian markets stayed shut for the Labour Day holiday. Gold climbed to a six-week high on the weaker dollar. Currency dealers said the murky US economic outlook was prompting investors to diversify their assets and seek higher yields, such as euro deposits. That drove the euro to a four-year high of $1.1198, dealers said. Global investors were hesitant about putting funds into US markets because of mixed economic indicators and the possibility of further Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.
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