Airlines started charging for a first checked suitcase in 2008 and the fees have climbed since. Airlines typically charge $25 each way for the first checked bag, $35 for the second bag and then various extra amounts for overweight or oversized bags.

The nation’s 15 largest carriers collected a combined $3.5 billion in bag fees in 2012, up 3.8% from 2011, according to the report. Fees for changing a reservation totalled $2.6 billion, up 7.3%.

Collectively, airlines received $159.5 billion in revenue last year and had expenses of $153.6 billion. The 3.7% profit margin comes almost entirely from add-on fees.

The Paris-based IEA said Canadian oilsands oil and conventional crude from other sources across the U.S. are having a “transformative” effect on the price of oil across the globe.

The impact on oil prices of those new sources of crude will be as significant over the next five years as China’s booming demand was over the past 15, the IEA said.

“North America has set off a supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world,” the group’s executive director Maria van der Hoeven said.

The IEA expects the flow of crude oil out of North America to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day between 2012 and 2018. That’s almost half as much as the total amount the agency expects global output to expand by, 8.4 million barrels per day.

In New York, the price of the dominant crude oil contract lost 45 cents to trade at $94.72 US on Tuesday.

The reduced deficit comes mostly on higher-than-expected revenues and an increase in payments to the Treasury by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The CBO said the debt-to-GDP ratio will fall from around 76% of GDP in 2014 to slightly below 71% in 2018, but then start rising again.

By 2023, the CBO says debt will equal 74% of GDP and continue to be on an upward path.

The announcement was made at the company’s annual BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, Florida where CEO Thorsten Heins said “it’s time to bring BBM to a greater audience,” touting the strength of the company’s new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system.

The BBM application will be available for free to iPhone users running on iOS 6 and Android users on the Ice Cream Sandwich version and higher beginning this summer.

Disclosure: I own shares in BlackBerry.

Loeb, the founder of hedge fund Third Point, is pressing Sony to spin off its entertainment arm, which includes one of Hollywood’s biggest film studios and one of the world’s largest music labels.

Loeb reportedly flew to Tokyo over the weekend for three days of meetings with government officials, regulators and senior Sony executives.

He hand-delivered a letter on Tuesday to Sony’s Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai, which reportedly praises the company’s turnaround effort but asks for more.

Sony shares ended 1.2% higher in Tokyo on Tuesday amid modest trading volumes.

The Common Retirement Fund’s estimated value was $160.4 billion at the end of March, an all-time high for the fund that pays benefits to more than 413,000 retirees and beneficiaries, said Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, its trustee. It has now restored all $44 billion lost during the recession starting in 2008 and added $6 billion more, largely from rebounding stock prices.

The fund had 36% of its assets in domestic stocks, returning 14.5% last year, and nearly 14% in international equities, returning 9.5%, according to the comptroller’s office.

Its fixed-income investments, 28% of the portfolio, returned 4.9%. Real estate, accounting for 7% of the investments, returned 11%.

Private equity, composing almost 9% of the portfolio, returned almost 12%.

The remainder included global equities, returning 13.9%, and hedge funds returning nearly 8%.

Source: Yahoo Finance

The moves come after the shekel rose 2.4% in the past month and 5.4% over the last three months, the central bank said, with the rise fueled by the launch of natural gas production from Israel’s Tamar gas field; interest-rate cuts by central banks around the world, particularly the European Central Bank; and continued quantitative easing programs in several major economies around the world.

The shekel fell 0.9% versus the U.S. currency to trade at 3.5930 per dollar in recent action. It traded at 4.6660 per euro, a fall of 0.7%.

Retail sales edged up 0.1% in April from March – a major improvement from the 0.5% decline in March, which was the largest drop in nine months.

The April gain was even stronger when taking out lower gas prices, which reduced sales at gas stations by 4.7%.

When excluding gas station sales, retail spending rose 0.7%. And core retail sales, which strip out the volatile categories of gas, autos and building supplies, increased 0.5%.

Economists had predicted a gain of about 15,000 jobs in April, following a dismal drop the month before. The country had unexpectedly lost 54,500 jobs in March, making it the worst month for Canadian employment since before the last recession, in February 2009.

April job gains were attributed to an increase in full-time employment across the country. Full-time jobs grew by 36,000, while part-time positions fell by 23,000.

About 34,200 public sector jobs were created last month, despite government cutbacks. The public sector has been a jobs generator since April 2012, adding about 93,500 new jobs, compared to just 10,000 in private industries.

Manufacturing work increased by 21,000 last month, the first time the sector has added jobs since last June, Statistics Canada said.

“The debt limit will be reached in just a few days when it expires on May 18, but because of the cash flows we can predict that we will be okay until Labor Day,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

Ahead of a meeting in London of Group of Seven central bank governors and finance ministers, Lew said the U.S. economy is growing, and while this is encouraging, it was still “not sufficient. We have a particular concern that there is a disparity between long and short-term unemployment.”

He said the U.S. needs to give this a lot of attention and encourage overall growth and job creation.

Source: MW

Attorney General Kamala Harris said the bank used robo-signing and other illegal practices against 100,000 credit card holders over at least a three-year period.

The attorney general alleges J.P. Morgan cut corners in filing thousands of debt-collection lawsuits a month in order to get default judgments and garnish wages.

The report said due diligence is underway, after the two companies signed a term sheet.

Talks of a takeover began six months, according to the report.

The April CPI showed a gain of 2.4% from a year earlier, led by a 4% rise in food prices, the agency reported. The gain was more than March’s 2.1%, though below February’s spike of 3.2%.

A survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires had yielded a 2.2% forecast, while a Reuters poll had called for a 2.3% advance.

The producer price index, meanwhile, fell by the most since October, dropping 2.6% against a decline of 1.9% in March. Both Reuters and Dow Jones Newswires had forecasted a 2.3% drop.

The increase in hiring last month beat economists’ forecasts who had expected only a 135,000 jobs, with unemployment raining at 7.6%.

Meanwhile, the number of new jobs created in March was revised up to 138,000 from 88,000, the Labor Department said, while February’s figure was revised up to 332,000 from 268,000. The number of jobs created in February was the highest since November 2005 for any month that did not include temporary Census bureau hiring.

In April, professional services added 73,000 workers; bars and restaurants hired 38,000 people; and the retail business generated 29,000 jobs. Manufacturing employment was unchanged and construction shed 6,000 jobs, perhaps due to colder than normal weather in the month.

Average hourly earnings rose 4 cents to $23.87 in April and the average workweek dipped 0.2 hours to 34.4.

Growth fell 0.6% in 2012, which would make for two years of back-to-back contraction for the region after this year.

In its latest forecast, the EU said external demand will be a main driver to help bring the region out of contraction, while domestic investment and consumption will be a driver for 2014 when growth is expected to rebound 1.6%.

But it said the labor market remains a serious concern, forecasting an 11.1% overall unemployment rate for the 17-nation region, and 12.2% in the eurozone.

Statistics Canada reported Thursday that Canada exported $40.5 billion worth of goods and services in March. The trend in exports has been inching higher since July 2012, the data agency said.

The uptick in exports was more than enough to offset an increase in imports, which rose to $40.4 billion, their second highest level on record.

StatsCan credited higher exports of motor vehicles and car parts with the export bump, as well as higher exports of energy products. Canada shipped out 24.8 percent more natural gas in March than the country did in February.

Under the 2008 agreement, Intel gave a Lehman’s derivatives unit $1 billion in exchange for 50.5 million shares, the bank said in a New York bankruptcy court filing cited by Reuters. In return, Lehman put up $1 billion in cash collateral.

Intel seized the collateral two weeks after Lehman filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, and has since refused to return it, the bank said.

Lehman is looking to recover an unspecified amount for the alleged breach of agreement.

The Fed also said the economy is expanding at a “moderate” pace with inflation running “somewhat below” the desired longer-run objective.

In an 11-to-1 vote, the Fed kept its Fed fund target rate between 0% and 0.25%, its program of buying $40 billion per month of mortgage-backed securities and $45 billion of Treasury securities, and its plan to keep rates low at least so long as unemployment is above 6.5%.

Kansas City Fed President Esther George again was the sole dissent, on concerns over the risks to future imbalances.

The ratings firm cited three factors: the health of the country’s banking sector, the marked deterioration of the government’s finances, and uncertain funding prospects that heighten the probability that external assistance will be needed.

The government had been seeking to raise cash through a bond sale, but called it off earlier Tuesday ahead of the ratings announcement.

In the 27-country European Union, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.9% in March versus the prior month, but against a year ago, that level was a 10.3%.

Germany and Austria had the lowest rates, of 7.6%, while the highest levels of joblessness were in Greece, at 27.2%, Spain, 26.7% and Portugal 17.5%.

Meanwhile, a flash estimate showed eurozone inflation dropping to 1.2% in April from 1.7% in March.

The layoffs are part of a new set of measures that the country must undertake in order to get secure aid from the troika of international lenders.

Euro-zone officials will meet in Brussels on Monday and are expected to grant their approval to the release of €2.8 billion ($3.65 billion in loans). The money was originally due in March, but stalled negotiations over civil servant cuts kept it from going through.

The layoffs will come in two stages, with 4,000 to go by the end of 2013 and 11,000 more by the end of next year.

The government of Belgium, one of the vehicle’s shareholders, will get 1 billion euros in cash from the sale, reducing government debt by more than 0.2 percent of gross domestic product, Finance Minister Koen Geens said in a statement. Ageas, the insurer formerly known as Fortis, will receive 1.04 billion euros, it said in a separate statement.

Royal Park Investments was set up in May 2009 by Fortis, the Belgian government and French bank BNP Paribas SA as a special purpose vehicle to manage a pool of distressed debt securities. The shareholders contributed 1.7 billion euros in equity at the time. That amount had increased to a net asset value of 2.3 billion euros, Royal Park Investments said today.

Fortis, once Belgium’s biggest financial-services company, became a casualty of the 2008 financial turmoil after pouring 24.2 billion euros into purchasing the assets of ABN Amro Holding NV a year earlier, just as the U.S. subprime-mortgage market collapsed and lending dried up.

Source: Bloomberg

In a statement, the Japanese central bank said only that it “will conduct money-market operations so that the monetary base will increase at an annual pace of about 60 [trillion]-70 trillion yen,” or roughly $610 billion to $710 billion, unchanged from its previous target.

The yen rose modestly after the announcement, with the U.S. dollar slipping to ¥98.78 from ¥99.06 just ahead of the statement.