BUSINESS

By Greg PeelThe Dow closed down 11 points or 0.1% while the S&P was flat at 1316 and the Nasdaq lost 0.

Three large Japanese banks are reportedly eyeing a share of the Australian home loan market by offering lower interest rates while Aussie lenders refuse to pass to borrowers made by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

PayPal and Office Depot are reportedly testing the former's new payment method, called by experts as 'wallet in the cloud', that allows consumers with PayPal account to actually make in-store purchases, reports said.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has issued advisories to a number of airlines around the world to immediately implement check ups on their Airbus A380 fleets after the reported detection of cracks on the wings of some of the passenger plane.

An analysis by CommSec of Australia's states and territories' performance for the fourth quarter of 2011 showed that Western Australia is the strongest state in terms of economic performance.

American household name Kraft Foods said it would cut off 1600 jobs in the U.S. and Canada this year before it moves forward to splitting its giant business into two separate entities, the company announced in a statement.

A survey made by Balance Recruitment in December showed that 30 per cent of workers in Australia's IT and finance sectors experienced racism. The discrimination was particularly felt by migrant workers from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China.

FNArena is surveying investor sentiment in Australia in an effort to generate, over time, a similarly leading gauge as the AAII Investor Sentiment Survey in the US.

The New Zealand dollar is performing well while investors are strategizing and leaving the euro, with Greek and European Union officials meeting to study the decisions made between private bondholders on how to lower Greece's borrowing costs.

Deloitte Access Economics has upgraded its 2012 gross domestic product outlook for Australia on Monday. The research firm projected that the country would expand by 3.6 per cent this year, up from 2 per cent in 2011.

Most brokers would assume new clients who walk through the door are coming to them purely to service their finance needs - but not so Nicole Seagren of Vision Finance, based in Melbourne.

Sydney has been unseated as the second costliest city in the world in a new survey of housing affordability.

Consolidation of mortgage aggregators is expected to continue apace in 2012, forcing the industry to assess the future viability of aggregation models.

Australia's multi-speed economy has again been highlighted in a report showing Western Australia far ahead of the pack in output.

Brokers are being warned they may lose business amid the growing number of online white label products - so how can mortgage advisers keep pace with changing consumer trends?

Samsung has denied rumors about a potential buyout of Blackberry maker, Research in Motion after a technology blog reported the South Korean firm was interested in buying RIM.

By Greg PeelAluminium is the costliest of the standard base metals to produce, with final smelting requiring significant inputs of water and power.

By Christopher Vecchio, Currency Analyst FXCMFundamental Forecast for Gold: NeutralGold posted a modest 1.

A significant increase in first homebuyers may have been inflated by a last-minute rush to beat stamp duty changes.

So where will markets head now after the post Christmas rebound continued last week, defying the gloomy forecasts from the World Bank and other gloomy prognosticators?

Australian inflation data for the December quarter dominates the coming week.

Fears about a surge in prices of beef and orange juice in the US, plus rising fears about the health of soybean corn crops on Brazil and Argentina, are starting to dominate commodity markets.

Strong earnings from International Business Machines (IBM) powered blue-chip stocks higher for the fourth-straight session, even as discouraging quarterly reports from other bellwethers kept the broader market flat.

By Marc Lichtenfeld, Investment U Senior AnalystWednesday, January 18, 2012: Issue #1689The workers at the restaurants and bars around Union Square in San Francisco have likely just about caught their breath.

Australian shares ended Friday on a strong note for their third successive week higher. Easing concerns about Europe's debt and more upbeat earnings from Wall Street boosted local optimism. At the close on Friday, the benchmark S&P/ASX200 index was up 24.8 points, or 0.6 per cent, at 4,239.6, while the broader All Ordinaries index was up 24.4 points, or 0.6 per cent, at 4,303.

New Zealand's State-owned Meridian Energy has shelved its plan to build a $2 billion wind farm in central Otago following a bad review.With up to 176 wind turbines, the $2- billion project on the Lammermoor Range would have been the biggest power project in the South Island since the 1980s, and it would have generated enough electricity for Christchurch and Dunedin combined and eventually the whole of the island, said reports.

Rolls Royce said on Thursday that it has implemented measures to correct the manufacturing errors seen on its engine components that nearly caused a Qantas Airways flight to explode while in mid-air in November 2010.

British actor Jude Law is among the individuals who received just compensation from the media empire of Rupert Murdoch's News Group as part of the settlement in the case involving email and phone hacking instigated by the editors and reporters of the now-defunct News of the World, lawyers and reports have confirmed.

Thousands of Australians lost their jobs in December, underscoring what experts said could be the biggest loss the local economy had seen in the past 20 years.