Obama and Senate Democrats agreed to break the president’s plan into pieces last week after Republicans blocked the overall bill with a procedural tactic.Democrats initially planned to wait until November to bring individual sections of the bill to the Senate for consideration but changed plans and decided to start the process this week, the aide said.Obama wants to build pressure on Republicans to back at least portions of the bill or explain to voters in advance of next year’s elections why they oppose it. On Monday Obama began a bus tour of North Carolina and Virginia to promote his jobs plan.A Wall Street-NBC poll last week showed that Americans support the president’s jobs bill by a 2-1 ratio.Obama’s proposal is designed to create jobs with a mixture of stimulus spending and tax cuts for the middle-class and small businesses. The plan would be financed by a 5.7 percent surtax on millionaires.Republicans opposed the bill, saying a tax increase would hurt rather than spur economic growth. Two Senate Democrats facing tough re-elections in largely conservative states also opposed the bill.Democrats have painted Republicans as obstructionists who care more about defeating Obama than boosting the economy. Republicans counter that the president would rather campaign on the issue of jobs than find a bipartisan solution.

By Rob Cox The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Imagine if Merrill Lynch had been smarter, like Goldman Sachs, a few years ago. The investment bank would have realized it was holding too many dodgy mortgage securities and sold them off to buyers who didn’t yet think the market would blow. Those clients might have then landed in trouble. But Merrill would have avoided a fire sale to Bank of America. That’s the basic premise behind the latest film to emerge in the financial crisis genre, “Margin Call.” The movie, which premiered at Sundance and is slated to open in U.S. theaters next week, presents, however clumsily, a fictional morality tale with real parallels in the Wall Street banking panic that began in 2007. The plot is simple. Indeed, for anyone with a modicum of understanding of financial business it is downright simplistic. Kevin Spacey stars as Sam Rogers, the head of a big trading desk at an investment bank located, in the first of a handful of incongruities, in One Penn Plaza. The bank has just fired Eric Dale, one of its key risk management executives. But before disappearing to his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, Dale, played by Stanley Tucci, hands a hotshot associate a memory stick with a file, cautioning him that its contents could be dangerous. In fine clichéd fashion, the whiz-kid, Peter Sullivan, holds a PhD in rocket propulsion. And cast in the role is Zachary Quinto, reprising his role as Star Trek’s Spock, but this time in pinstripes and human ears. After much cogitation and scribbling of numbers, Sullivan discovers that the firm is sitting on a time bomb of mortgage-backed securities whose implied losses are greater than the entire market value of the company. No numbers are provided. But we know it’s bad because grown men are gasping at Bloomberg terminals and saying really profane things. And so the action begins — insofar as eight hours of conference room meetings constitute action. Tense discussions ensue between a risk manager played by Demi Moore and a senior executive, with an uncanny resemblance to JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon, who ignored her warnings. Jeremy Irons hovers above in his usual role as a morally-challenged and ruthless leader, in this case CEO John Tuld, who somehow gets to fly a helicopter onto the roof in apparent defiance of New York City laws. Of course, all this sounds a bit like the story of Merrill Lynch. The firm found itself with tens of billions of dollars of similarly dodgy mortgage securities it couldn’t sell and whose losses threatened to overwhelm its capital. As Lehman Brothers was going under, Merrill had to sell itself to BofA in a hurry three years ago in September. But “Margin Call” posits a different end for its fictional firm. Over the course of a few hours, Chief Executive Tuld, whose name rather obviously rhymes with that of Lehman’s disgraced ex-boss, convinces his troops that they must sell every lick of MBS on the balance sheet, knowing full well that the assets are essentially worthless. Though Spacey objects on principle, by morning, and before the market opens, he rallies his sales team with a rousing, twisted Wall Street version of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech. A crowded conference room stands in for Agincourt. The tradeoff is made plain: sell this dodgy stuff and you save the firm. But know that your clients will never talk to you again. In the moralizing tone that has become a hallmark of all financial crisis genre films, particularly the polemic “Inside Job” that won the Oscar for best documentary, everyone does what they’re told because they are paid handsome bonuses. They can then blow it all on “hookers and booze,” as Paul Bettany’s character Will Emerson did with some $76,500 of his earnings. The firm lives to fight another day in the markets, and its executives must live with the consequences, though it’s not clear what these may be apart from some burnt relations with other people who would probably have done the same. But J.C. Chandor, who wrote the screenplay and directed “Margin Call,” suggests this is just how Wall Street works. And there is ample evidence from the crisis to lend credence to much of his oversimplified finger-pointing. In reality, dumping massive amounts of mortgage bonds in a heartbeat before everyone else had worked out they were toxic would have been nearly impossible. But the fictional dilemma is one worth considering — at least for the director it was. His father was a senior executive at Merrill.

An index of American depositary receipts of Latin American companies jumped 2.6 percent, with Brazil’s Vale up 2.6 percent at $25.22, and Petrobras also up 2.6 percent at $24.50.Mexico’s America Movil gained 2.7 percent to $23.43.European ADRs rallied in sync with the FTSEurofirst-300 index closing at a nine-week high, lifted by stronger euro-zone economic data and news that Slovakia struck a deal to sign off on a plan to expand the region’s sovereign bailout fund.Slovakia is the last country in the 17-member currency zone left to approve the revamped fund.The BNY Mellon index of European ADRs advanced 1.91 percent.The euro rallied to almost a one-month high against the U.S. dollar on hopes that approval of the expansion of the euro zone’s rescue fund would help contain the region’s debt crisis.A weaker U.S. dollar makes greenback-denominated assets, like ADRs, cheaper for foreign investors.Barclays jumped 7 percent to $11.72 in New York, while HSBC gained 2.9 percent to $41.61.Commodity-related ADRs also jumped, including global miner BHP Billiton , up 2.9 percent at $76.19. Italian energy company Eni SpA rose 2.6 percent to $41.50.The BNY Mellon index of leading ADRs gained 1.94 percent, while the U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index rose 1 percent.

* Ares teaming up with Schiffer/Gold and CPPIB* Offer tops earlier bid by Leonard Green* Deal to close during Q1 2012By Meenakshi Iyer and Mihir DalalOct 11 (Reuters) - The family that runs 99 Cents Only Stores changed buyout partners to take the retailer private at a higher price than an earlier proposal in March, marking the latest private equity backed deal in discount retail.The Schiffer/Gold family, who run the company and control roughly a third of its stock, are now teaming up with Ares Management and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a $1.6 billion deal for the retailer.The latest $22-a-share offer is 32 percent more than the stock’s trading levels before private equity firm Leonard Green and the family joined hands for a $1.34 billion bid in March.”The (latest) offer still undervalues the company a little bit … I would have liked to see it at $23 -$24,” Crowell, Weedon & Co analyst James Ragan told Reuters.Shares of 99 Cents were trading at $21.40 — 60 cents off the deal price.”Investors are probably just cautious after a long drawn merger process … The stock price will move higher as people become convinced that the bid will go through,” Ragan said.The analyst does not believe a higher offer is likely.The Leonard Green bid had been deemed too low by many analysts and 99 Cents later formed a special committee of independent directors to consider that offer and other possible proposals.There had been media reports of possible interest by private equity firm Apollo Management as well, but the New York Post reported last week that Apollo dropped out of the race for the dollar chain.Discount retail has seen a rush of M&A activity, especially from private equity, this year on cheap valuations, respectable free cash flow and expansive real estate assets.Leonard Green took BJ’s Wholesale private earlier this year, while Family Dollar Stores snubbed a bid from billionaire investor Nelson Peltz’s Trian Group.A recession and persistently high unemployment rates have trained U.S. consumers to shop at discount retailers that sell low-priced and close-out goods .99 Cents, which mostly sells products for under a dollar, was founded by David Gold in 1982, and it is run by his son-in-law Eric Schiffer.CEO Schiffer and Jeff Gold, the president and operation head, will both retain their positions after the deal closes in the first quarter of next year. The Schiffer/Gold family will continue to hold a minority stake in the company.99 Cents was advised by Lazard Freres & Co, and Guggenheim Securities advised the Schiffer/Gold family on the deal.

For an Indian man, the entire country is one easy-access urinal. Be it mustard fields, the national highway or the Himalayan foothills — unzipping, unleashing and relieving comes naturally to them. Indian women, unfortunately, do not enjoy the same privilege. For them, infinite patience is a survival skill and a big bladder a necessity. Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan seems to empathise with the pain of the Indian woman. He wants to “dedicate” his life to building public utilities for women across India. “I want dignity and respect to be brought to women,” he said at an event in Mumbai. It is a shame that the government has still not woken up to this disparity in India’s infrastructure. Be it urban areas or villages, clean public toilets for women remain an alien concept in India. A not-for-profit organisation, Sulabh International, has tried to address this gap by “providing affordable sanitary facilities to masses throughout the country”. But more needs to be done. Suitable toilets is not just a matter of convenience, but also integral to the economic growth of the country. A World Bank report last year estimated that poor toilets and lack of hygiene cost India, Asia’s third-largest economy, nearly $54 billion every year. A further $10.7 million is lost in “access time,” the report said — time spent looking to access a shared toilet or open defecation site compared to having a toilet in one’s own home. Nearly 36 percent of schools in Maharashtra do not have separate toilets for girl students — forcing them to drop out of the education system early in life. Perhaps it is time that the powers that be follow in Shah Rukh Khan’s footsteps.