Business news with words administration+department. 45 news.

Two of the state's key economic research functions are being consolidated into a new Research Administration under the Arizona Department of Commerce, Gov. Janet Napolitano announced Friday.

OIL prices drifted higher in light holiday trading yesterday after predictions of a drop in crude inventories raised new supply concerns. With little other news to motivate buying or selling, investors focused on forecasts by analysts including Addison Armstrong, director of exchange traded markets at TFS Energy Futures LLC, who predicted crude inventories fell by 1.5 million barrels last week. Tim Evans, an analyst at Citigroup Inc, predicted that crude stocks fell by 2 million to 3 million barrels. The Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reports oil inventories on Thursday this week, a day late due to Christmas. Light, sweet crude for February delivery rose 82 cents to settle at US$94.13 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after falling as low as US$92.50 earlier. Prices rose more than US$2 on Friday after the government reported consumer spending jumped more than expected in November, raising hopes that the economy will weather the crisis roiling

A PUBLISHING group listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange yesterday became the country's first media company to issue shares in all its operations, including editorial units. Liaoning Publishing and Media Company Limited's shares opened at 16.63 yuan, 258 percent higher than its initial public offering price of 4.64 yuan. Its shares closed at 19.93 yuan yesterday. The listing "is an important achievement in the systematic reform. It marks new success while deepening reform in the publishing and distribution industry," said Ouyang Jian, deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in a congratulatory letter. Ouyang hoped that Liaoning Publishing would provide further experience for the reform of the publishing and distribution system. The department, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the Liaoning provincial government all approved the commercialization of Liaoning Publishing. Observers

Philadelphia Mayor-elect Michael Nutter said Friday that a U.S. Department of Commerce official would be his administration's budget director, according to news reports.

Officials skeptical of any action in '08 The Treasury Department released a long-awaited study Thursday on overhauling the corporate tax code that detailed several options but made no recommendations, possibly signaling the Bush administration's intention to not push for changes in the president's final year.

CRUDE oil futures rose yesterday after the government said stocks of crude and heating oil fell sharply last week while gasoline inventories jumped. In its weekly inventory snapshot, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported crude stocks dropped by 7.6 million barrels last week, much more than the 1.5 million barrel decline analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, on average, had expected. Much of the decline was due to a sharp drop in imports, almost a million barrels a day, because fog closed the Houston Ship Channel last week, said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Illinois. "That's basically what drew crude supplies lower," Ritterbusch said. Traders expect crude supplies will rebound in next week's report, which will reflect deliveries that were delayed by the fog, Ritterbusch said. Meanwhile, investors were focusing on other aspects of the report, which were mixed. For instance, heating oil

Energy futures rose Wednesday after the government said supplies of crude and heating oil fell sharply last week while gasoline inventories jumped. The Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported crude supplies dropped by 7.6 million barrels last week, much more than analysts had expected.

CHINA International Capital Corp, the country's first joint-venture investment bank, has acquired a US$5 billion quota under the qualified domestic institutional investor scheme, a senior foreign exchange management official said. Sun Lujun, deputy head of the capital project department under the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said by early December, the forex market regulator had verified a total of US$23 billion as QDII quotas for China Southern Fund, Huaxia Fund, Harvest Fund and China International Fund. Sun said that through the end of October, 16 QDIIs had put on the market 154 QDII products. Sun added that US$28.6 billion were actually remitted abroad for QDII operations by the end of the month. The total indicates that capital flows accelerated sharply over the past few months as only US$4 billion or so were remitted between April 2006 and March 2007. In May, QDII banks were approved to invest in Hong Kong stocks.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The Social Security Administration and a slew of health-related Web sites earned top rankings this year, while the Department of Homeland Security hit bottom in a survey of customer satisfaction with federal government Web sites.

OIL futures rose sharply yesterday after the government reported unexpected declines in stocks of crude and heating oil last week and the Federal Reserve announced a plan to help banks weather the credit crisis. Crude supplies fell 700,000 barrels during the week ended December 7, according to a weekly inventory report from the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration. Analysts had expected a 100,000 barrel increase. And supplies of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, fell 800,000 barrels; analysts had expected inventories to rise by 300,000 barrels. "Traders are concerned about that drop in distillate supplies," said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp., in Chicago. Earlier, the Fed said it was working with other central banks to try to counter the credit crisis. That alleviated some of investors' disappointment that the Fed on Tuesday cut interest rates by just a quarter percentage point. Many investors had hoped for a

US President George W. Bush announced a plan yesterday aimed at slowing a wave of home loan foreclosures that has threatened to knock the US economy into recession and rattled investors worldwide. Bush said the plan, hammered out by the US Treasury Department in talks with mortgage industry leaders, was not intended to "bail out" lenders, speculators or those who knew they could not afford the homes they bought. Instead, the Bush administration hopes that it can help more than half of the two million homeowners who took out adjustable-rate subprime loans with payments due to move sharply higher soon by offering some of them a five-year mortgage-rate freeze. Officials have said 500,000 Americans are at risk of losing their homes as $367 billion worth of mortgages reset to higher interest rates over the next two years. Expensive subprime loans traditionally are aimed at borrowers with weak credit, but increasing numbers of buyers took the loans as an easy way to hop

The Bush administration reached an agreement with the mortgage industry on Wednesday on a plan to freeze interest rates for up to five years for a portion of the two million homeowners who bought houses in the last few years with subprime loans. The plan, hammered out after weeks of talks among Treasury Department officials, mortgage [...]

OIL futures fell yesterday to their lowest level in six weeks after a mixed government inventory report failed to offset a belief that supplies are growing faster than demand. Investors shrugged off OPEC's decision to keep production levels steady, a possible sign prices have peaked for the year, analysts said. In its weekly inventory report, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said crude supplies plunged by 8 million barrels last week, much more than the expected 700,000 barrel decline. That caused oil prices to jump briefly above US$90 a barrel. But other aspects of the report weighed on prices as the day wore on. Crude supplies grew at the closely-watching Nymex delivery terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma. Inventories of heating oil rose when analysts had expected a decline, and gasoline supplies rose more than expected. "Overall, this is a mixed report," said Tim Evans, an analyst at Citigroup Inc, in a research note. Earlier yesterday,

Bush administration is defending as perfectly constitutional the $222,000 in penalties she must pay for sharing 24 songs.

A FIGHT is on in Congress over whether to assess fees on dairy imports to help pay for promoting homegrown dairy products in the United States. It pits dairy farmers against big-name US food companies, cheese importers, foreign countries - and even the outlying US areas of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The Bush administration never implemented a dairy-import assessment approved by Congress in 2002 because the Agriculture Department concluded the fees could create the appearance of favorable treatment. The fees on domestic producers are levied only on dairy farmers in the 48 contiguous states, which exclude the states of Hawaii and Alaska as well as US territories. This year, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Democratic Representative Collin Peterson, inserted a measure into the 2007 farm bill that would extend the mandatory fee to dairy farmers in Hawaii and Alaska (ranked 48th and 50th in dairy production, respectively) and Puerto Rico, a Caribbean US

The deteriorating housing market forced the White House to lower its projection for economic growth next year and raise its forecast for unemployment. The new forecast came as the Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy barreled ahead in the summer at a 4.9 percent growth rate, the strongest showing in four years. That impressive performance, however, wasn't expected to last through the current quarter, given the strains of the housing slump and credit crunch -- problems likely to weigh on individuals and businesses alike. Under the administration's new forecast, the gross domestic product will grow by 2.7 percent next year. Its old projection called for a stronger, 3.1 percent increase. "The housing market decline has been more significant than we expected," said Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The more pronounced housing slump -- along with the expectation that problems will persist into next year -- was a big factor in the administration's downgrade of its economic growth forecast for 2008.

CRUDE oil futures closed down in choppy trading yesterday, failing to breach US$100 a barrel after the government reported that crude oil inventories at a key Midwest oil terminal rose for the first time in weeks. The news helped offset the market impact of an overall drop in crude oil stocks. Light, sweet crude for January delivery fell 74 cents to settle at US$97.29 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Stocks of distillates, including heating oil, also dropped more than expected last week, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported. That could mean more bad news for heating oil customers already expecting costs to rise 22 percent this winter. Heating oil futures fell 0.27 cent to settle at US$2.6874 a gallon on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier hitting US$2.7154, a new record. Crude prices -- which rose as high as US$99.29 on the New York Mercantile Exchange earlier Wednesday and broke the previous intraday record of US$98.62

A $1.2 billion plan by the Department of Homeland Security to buy a new kind of radiation-detection machine for the nation's borders has been put on hold again, a blow to one of the Bush administration's top security goals.

Crude oil futures rose yesterday as traders closed out December contracts and also on investors' belief that supplies are not as plentiful as a government report at first suggested. Light, sweet crude for December delivery rose $1.67 to settle at $95.10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But January crude, which now becomes the front-month contract, closed $1.26 below that, settling up $1.77 at $93.84 a barrel. December crude had lost 66 cents in the previous session after the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reported an unexpected 2.8 million barrel increase in inventories last week. But much of that supply build occurred on the West Coast, where the energy infrastructure is largely isolated from the rest of the U.S., analysts said. "I think the market may have realized overnight that that EIA report wasn't that bearish," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Illinois. Reports that ministers from

ENERGY futures fell yesterday after the government reported unexpected increases in crude oil and gasoline inventories last week and OPEC forecast fourth-quarter demand for oil would be less than expected. In its weekly inventory report, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said oil inventories rose by 2.8 million barrels during the week ended November 9. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, on average, had expected a decline of 300,000 barrels. That helped send light, sweet crude for December delivery falling 66 US cents to settle at US$93.43 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after trading off more than US$2 a barrel earlier. Crude prices have been volatile this week, falling more than US$3 on Tuesday and rising more than US$2 on Wednesday after hitting a record of US$98.62 one week ago. The drop in crude was limited, however, by an unexpectedly large drop in heating oil supplies, a mixed report on Iran's compliance with UN demands over