U.S. President Barack Obama gestures while addressing his first news conference since his reelection, at the White House in Washington November 14, 2012.

WASHINGTON | Sun Dec 30, 2012 4:30pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama is pledging to focus in his second term on immigration reform, boosting economic growth through infrastructure repair and energy policies that nod to environmental protection.

The president is mired in a difficult fight with congressional Republicans to avoid sharp spending cuts and steep tax increases collectively referred to as the "fiscal cliff." However, he still has a longer-term to-do list for his remaining four years in office, he said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" that was broadcast on Sunday.

Obama, who won re-election in November after a campaign in which he succeeded in painting himself as a strong advocate for the middle class and those aspiring to join it, also promised in the interview to make a run at passing gun control legislation in the first year of his second term.

"Fixing our broken immigration system is a top priority," he said. He renewed a pledge to introduce legislation in the first year of his second term to get it done.

Immigration reform is a sensitive subject for the president, who failed to fulfill his promise to revamp the system during his first term. Latino voters were a critical part of the coalition that helped get him re-elected, a fact that may soften political opposition from Republicans, who are eager to bolster their support with that demographic group.

Immigration reform supporters on the left believe that the 11 million undocumented foreigners in the United States should be allowed a path to work toward citizenship. But opponents believe that this approach would reward people who broke the law by coming to the United States illegally.

Republicans have sought stronger measures to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States from Mexico. Advocates on both sides of the debate want to more effectively verify legal workers in an economy in which businesses want to hire non-U.S. workers ranging from low-paid farm hands to technology-savvy professionals.

While negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff have hogged the spotlight in the first weeks after the election, Obama said he wants to take steps to ensure the sluggish recovery gains steam.

Many observers had believed a persistently high level of unemployment would thwart Obama's chances of winning a second term. The U.S. jobless rate peaked at 10 percent in 2009 after the harshest recession since the Great Depression but has been falling and dipped to 7.7 percent in November.

The president said rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges and schools could put people back to work and put the economy on a sounder footing. He said he would pair those steps - which would likely involve government spending - with deficit reduction measures to tame the nation's budget deficit.

The president also said energy policy would be a leading emphasis. He said he would focus on how the country can produce more energy and export energy, while also dealing with environmental challenges. He did not specify how he would do that. The president's effort to fight climate change with a broad emissions trading system failed during his first term.

When pressed, Obama added gun control to his list of priorities, reiterating his support for a ban on assault rifles and high capacity clips, as well as background checks.

(Reporting By Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Four thousand U.S. dollars are counted out by a banker counting currency at a bank in Westminster, Colorado November 3, 2009.

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1 of 10. International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor and Director of Research Department Olivier Blanchard (2nd R), Deputy Director Jorg Decressin (2nd L), Division Chief Thomas Heibling (R) and Senior Press Officer Gita Bhatt hold a news briefing on the World Economic Outlook (WEO), at the Tokyo International Forum in Tokyo October 9, 2012. The IMF said the global economic slowdown is worsening as it cut its growth forecasts for the second time since April and warned U.S. and European policymakers that failure to fix their economic ills would prolong the slump.

TOKYO | Tue Oct 9, 2012 9:02am EDT

TOKYO (Reuters) - The IMF said the global economic slowdown is worsening as it cut its growth forecasts for the second time since April and warned U.S. and European policymakers that failure to fix their economic ills would prolong the slump.

Global growth in advanced economies is too weak to bring down unemployment and what little momentum exists is coming primarily from central banks, the International Monetary Fund said in its World Economic Outlook, released ahead of its twice-yearly meeting, which will be held in Tokyo later this week.

"A key issue is whether the global economy is just hitting another bout of turbulence in what was always expected to be a slow and bumpy recovery or whether the current slowdown has a more lasting component," it said.

"The answer depends on whether European and U.S. policymakers deal proactively with their major short-term economic challenges."

Ahead of the Tokyo meeting, policymakers have flagged the U.S. "fiscal cliff" -- government spending cuts and tax raises due to take affect early in 2013 -- and resolving the euro area's debt crisis as the top issues facing the global economy.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Tuesday that reforms in Europe "could take years to bear fruit".

"In these periods of time, where people were very worried about the risk of collapse in Europe, you saw an impact on financial markets and confidence that was very, very substantial," he told a meeting of Indian and U.S. business leaders in New Delhi. "Europe still has a very hard road ahead of them."

His comments echoed those of Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who last week said Europe's debt crisis was "a clear and present danger".

The IMF forecast in its latest health check on the world economy that global output in 2012 would grow just 3.3 percent, down from a July estimate of 3.5 percent.

That would make this the slowest year of growth since 2009 when the world was struggling to pull out of the global financial crisis. It predicted only a modest pickup next year to 3.6 percent, below its July estimate of 3.9 percent.

It projected U.S. growth would be a little more than 2 percent this year and next, but forecast a contraction in the euro area this year by 0.4 percent and modest growth in 2013 of 0.2 percent.

Emerging markets are still expected to grow four times as fast as advanced economies, but the IMF took a sharp knife to its estimates for India and Brazil, with the latter now seen growing slower than the United States this year.

It also cut its expectations for China in 2012 and 2013 but warned against being overly pessimistic about the prospects of these economies, which were major engines of growth in the global financial crisis.

"Let me be clear. We do not see these developments as signs of a hard landing in any of these countries," IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said at a briefing, referring to China, India and Brazil.

MORE AT WORK

The IMF said "familiar" forces were dragging down advanced economy growth: fiscal consolidation and a still-weak financial system, the same problems that have plagued the world since the global financial crisis exploded in 2008.

"More seems to be at work, however, than these mechanical forces - namely, a general feeling of uncertainty," Blanchard said in a commentary on the forecasts.

Measures of risk and uncertainty, such as the VIX volatility gauge in the United States, remain at low levels, Blanchard pointed out, which makes it difficult to assess the nature of the uncertainty.

"Worries about the ability of European policymakers to control the euro crisis and worries about the failure to date of U.S. policymakers to agree on a fiscal plan surely play an important role, but one that is hard to nail down," Blanchard said.

Geithner, who was speaking at an India-U.S. business forum in New Delhi, said he was "relatively confident" that Washington can manage its fiscal challenges.

"Now we're growing close to potential but if you look through those factors, it's a little more encouraging than you might think," he said. "We are now in a much stronger position than what is true for any other major developed economy."

Concerns about the health of the global economy and corporate earnings prospects have weighed on financial markets. World shares as measured by the MSCI world equity index .MIWD00000PUS fell 0.7 percent on Monday. The index was flat in Asia on Tuesday.

S&P 500 earnings for the third quarter are forecast to have fallen more than 2 percent from the year-earlier period, which would be the first decline in three years, Thomson Reuters data shows.

The IMF said financial conditions are likely to remain "very fragile" over the near term because repairing euro zone problems will take time and there are concerns about how the U.S. economy will cope with the expected spending cuts and tax increases.

The "urgent policy priorities" for the United States should include avoiding the fiscal cliff, which the IMF said at the extreme would amount to a fiscal withdrawal of more than 4 percent of GDP in 2013, and economic growth would stall.

"Both sides of the political isle (should) signal that they are willing to compromise and that they're willing to get this done ... that could help lower the level of uncertainty that is affecting U.S. investors and consumers," IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Resolving the euro area crisis would require progress in adopting and implementing the various measures discussed, including banking and fiscal union, the IMF report said.

"If the complex puzzle can be rapidly completed, one can reasonably hope that the worst might be behind us," Blanchard said.

Euro zone finance ministers on Monday unveiled the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a 500 billion euro rescue mechanism for lending to distressed economies in the 17-country bloc.

But perhaps the biggest contagion risk for the region is Spain, which a British finance ministry source suggested will be the top issue for finance ministers in Tokyo.

"We have always been very clear that the euro zone needs to take significant action," the source said.

The euro zone has already set aside 100 billion euros for Spain to recapitalize its banks but financial markets believe a government bailout will follow in coming weeks or months.

(Additional reporting by Anna Yukhananov in TOKYO, David Milliken in LONDON and Manoj Kumar and Rajesh Kumar Singh in NEW DELHI; Editing by Neil Fullick, Alex Richardson and Ron Popeski)

(This story corrects quote by Geithner in 7th paragraph)

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BRUSSELS | Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:27pm EDT

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The outlook for Europe's economy darkened on Thursday with euro zone business confidence falling to a three-year low and a range of economic indicators across the continent pointing towards recession.

Shrinking lending and rising unemployment in Germany, until now a mainstay for growth in the euro zone, added to the gloom, with economists saying there was now no hope of growth for the region in the third quarter of the year.

"It is bad. Everything is down, we are heading towards another quarterly economic contraction," said Carsten Brzeski, economist at ING bank in Brussels.

The euro zone economy stagnated in the first three months of the year and contracted 0.2 percent in the April-June period. Economists expect another contraction in the third quarter.

Two consecutive quarters of contraction is considered to mark recession.

"While the (European Central Bank's) promise of bond buying and the German court ruling (endorsing the euro zone's permanent bailout fund) did a lot to calm financial markets, there is still the big issue of non-existent growth," Brzeski said.

The European Commission's monthly economic sentiment survey showed the index for the 17 countries sharing the euro falling to 85 points this month from 86.1 in August. Economists polled by Reuters had expected no change.

"It's yet another blow to euro zone growth hopes, especially as it follows on from the purchasing managers' surveys indicating that services and manufacturing output contracted at the fastest rate for 39 months in September," said Howard Archer, economist at IHS Global Insight.

"Consequently, it appears that the euro zone has suffered further, appreciable GDP contraction in the third quarter. This would put the euro zone officially into recession."

The European Commission's business climate indicator for the euro area, which points to the phase of the economic cycle, fell to -1.34 points in September from -1.18 in August, against market expectations of -1.19 points. The September reading was the lowest since October 2009.

GLOOM

More evidence of economic gloom in the third quarter came from European Central Bank data on lending to households and companies, which showed credit to the economy fell more than expected in August.

Loans to the private sector fell 0.6 percent from the same month a year ago, data released by the European Central Bank showed on Thursday, coming in below the expectations of economists polled by Reuters for no change.

The flow of loans to non-financial firms fell 10 billion euros after rising by 8 billion euros in July. The monthly flow of loans to households showed a gain of 7 billion euros after a drop of 1 billion euros in the previous month.

The Commission sentiment survey showed euro zone sentiment in industry declined to -16.1 in September from -15.4 in August, and to -12 in the services sector from -10.8.

"The country breakdown signals a sharper deterioration in the core than in the peripheries, the latter, however, remained at extremely low levels," said Evelyn Herrmann, European economist at BNP Paribas.

Germany, long the main engine of the euro zone economy, was suffering too.

"German economic sentiment posted another deterioration to an index level of 94.7 from 95.8, which, again, was mostly driven by the manufacturing sector, but also by the services sector," she said.

German unemployment rose for a sixth month running in September, suggesting domestic demand might not be able to compensate for weakening exports amid the euro zone crisis and power growth in the bloc's number one economy.

Joblessness remains near to its lowest level since German reunification more than two decades ago, and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.8 percent, contrasting starkly with the sickly labor market in many peers, including France and Spain.

But it rose by 9,000 in September, as the global slowdown and the euro zone's three-year-old crisis weigh on exports and prompt companies to hold back on investment, and economists said they saw it rising more in the months ahead.

The Commission data showed sentiment among euro zone consumers - the buying public - fell to -25.9 from -24.6 and to -18.6 from -17.2 in retail trade. Construction was the only sector where confidence improved marginally, to -31.9 from -33.1 in August.

The data also showed that inflation expectations rose among producers, the services sector and households alike, potentially complicating any possible decision by the European Central Bank to cut interest rates and help the economy.

But ING's Brzeski said the results of the Commission survey on inflation expectations were more closely correlated to ongoing price developments, with opinions strongly influenced by the spike in fuel prices.

"It does not make life easier for the ECB, but, under (President Mario) Draghi, the ECB has become more growth oriented with inflation more a derivative of growth, so with this drop in growth, the window for another rate cut this year is still open," he added.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; editing by Rex Merrifield/Jeremy Gaunt)

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A man grabs his briefcase as he waits in line to speak with employers at the UJA-Federation Connect to Care job fair in New York, March 21, 2012.

WASHINGTON | Thu Aug 9, 2012 4:52pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly fell last week, offering hope that some of last month's improvement in job growth could be sustained and give the U.S. economy a lift.

Other data on Thursday was also positive with the international trade deficit in June the smallest in 1-1/2 years as the petroleum import bill dropped sharply.

While the smaller trade gap implied upward revisions to the government's estimate of second-quarter gross domestic product published last month, the impact was blunted somewhat by an unexpected drop in wholesale stocks in June.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 361,000, the Labor Department said. Economists had expected claims to rise to 370,000 last week.

The data came after a Labor Department report last week showed that in July employers hired the most workers in five months.

"The fact that initial jobless claims have fallen back to their March lows suggests faster employment gains will continue to support consumer spending in the coming months," said Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Research in New York.

U.S. nonfarm payrolls increased 163,000 in July after three months of gains below 100,000. But the unemployment rate rose by a tenth of a percentage point to 8.3 percent.

Last week's jobless benefit claims report was the first in several weeks not affected by auto plant shutdowns, which caused wide swings in claims in July, making it difficult to get a clean reading on the jobs market.

A second report from the Commerce Department on Thursday showed the shortfall on the trade balance narrowed 10.7 percent to $42.9 billion, the smallest since December 2010, as low oil prices curbed imports.

That was below economists' expectations for a $47.5 billion deficit. The oil import bill fell $2.2 billion to 32.9 billion, the lowest since February. That was as the average price per barrel of crude oil dropped by the most since January 2009.

The reports helped the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index eke out a small gain and extend its rally for a fifth day on the New York stock market. Prices for U.S. government debt edged down, while the dollar rose broadly.

EXPORTS HIT RECORD HIGH

Immediately after the trade report, economists forecast the initial second-quarter U.S. GDP growth estimate would be revised to as high as 2.2 percent, but tempered those predictions after a later report showed a decline in wholesale inventories in June.

Second-quarter growth is now seen revised up to an annual pace of at least 1.8 percent from 1.5 percent. The government will publish its second GDP estimate later this month.

Total wholesale inventories slipped 0.2 percent, the largest fall since September, after being flat in May, as the value of petroleum stocks tumbled 8.7 percent - the largest drop since October 2008.

Inventory changes are a key component of GDP and contributed about a third of a percentage point to growth in the second quarter. Trade cut almost a third of a percentage point from GDP growth.

Exports in June increased 0.9 percent to a record $185.0 billion, with consumer goods such as pharmaceuticals posting strong gains. Motor vehicle exports increased 5.7 percent.

Overall imports of goods and services declined 1.5 percent to $227.9 billion. Outside petroleum, there were decreases in consumer goods imports, underscoring the weak domestic demand. The country imported less food and capital goods in June.

However, industrial supplies and motor vehicle imports rose.

"As long as we can keep selling more of our goods across the world, the economy can grow at a moderate pace," said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania.

"Despite all the craziness in Europe and the slowdowns in Asia, our exports managed to increase. We shipped more of just about everything except food."

While exports showed strength in June, anecdotal evidence suggests a slowdown because of weak global demand. The Institute for Supply Management's export index declined in July for a third straight month.

There also are concerns that the worst U.S. drought since 1956, which has ravaged half of the country, could hit agricultural exports.

U.S. exports to the 27-nation European Union, in the grip of a continuing debt crisis that has slowed growth on the continent, increased 1.7 percent in June to $23.3 billion.

Exports to China, which is also growing more slowly than in recent years, fell 4.3 percent in June. Economists believed the drop in imports would be temporary, especially with the labor market improvement expected to lift consumer spending.

"A stronger labor market implies better consumer spending ahead, which will certainly lead to more robust trade figures," said Omair Sharif, an economist at RBS in Stamford, Connecticut.

"We will end up importing more and get the deficit widening. But that's not necessarily a bad thing."

(Lucia.Mutikani@thomsonreuters.com)

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