Finance and Economic

China may report tomorrow the slowest inflation in 19 months and industrial-production growth near a two-year low, increasing odds the government will step up efforts to stimulate the economy.

Consumer prices probably rose 3.4 percent in February from a year before, after a 4.5 percent increase in January, while output growth eased to 12.5 percent, Bloomberg News surveys of economists indicate. Commerce Minister Chen Deming yesterday signaled that export gains were less than analysts forecast.

Premier Wen Jiabao

MONTREAL

Italy

Copper traders are the most bullish in two months on speculation that demand will strengthen from the U.S. to China at a time when stockpiles monitored by the world

Centene Corp. has won a major contract to manage the health care and behavioral health services of as many as 427,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in the state of Missouri, the Clayton-based company announced today.

Missouri’s Medicaid program is considered a $1.3 billion market in terms of total Medicaid-related expenditures. But Centene did not release an actual contract value, and company officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Centene is one of the nation’s fourth-largest Medicaid contractors, and among the most successful companies in the region, with about 5,300 employees nationwide, including more than 900 in the St. Louis area. With the award of the Missouri contract, those numbers are expected to grow.

The managed care company’s subsidiary, Home State Health Plan, was chosen by Missouri officials after submitting a competitive bid to provide services in the state’s 54 counties.

“We expect to commence operations in the third quarter of this year,” Centene said in a news release.

Centene will provide coordinated healthcare and behavioral health services to Medicaid enrollees including those receiving benefits under categories of aid for parents and caretakers, children, newborns, pregnant women and refugees. It will also provide services for children in the care and custody of the state pending adoption, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

“We are honored to be awarded a Medicaid managed care contract to begin serving managed care members here in Missouri,” said Jesse Hunter, who earlier this week was named Centene’s executive vice president of operations of Centene. “We believe our strategic provider partnerships in Missouri will help us deliver improved health outcomes for our members at a lower cost for the state payday loans lenders.”

“For more than 15 years, we have called Missouri home to our corporate headquarters. We have added hundreds of jobs and made significant investments into the region,” said Michael F. Neidorff, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Centene, in the release. “We embrace the opportunity to bring our award-winning quality programs and healthcare services to our most vulnerable neighbors across the state.”

Centene lobbied hard for the Missouri Medicaid contract. It has fielded a dozen registered lobbyists, including attorney Chuck Hatfield, one of Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s closest advisers, according to Missouri Ethics Commission records. Since January 2006, Centene and its executives have given more than $400,000 in campaign contributions to dozens of Missouri politicians.

A growing number of states have privatized their Medicaid programs, paying fixed per-patient rates and letting contractors assume the risk of rising health care costs.

Centene’s network of providers tries to reduce costly use of emergency rooms by encouraging patients to see primary care physicians, take the medications, and pursue healthy lifestyles.

But Centene came under scrutiny last year because one of its affiliated businesses, the embattled Missouri contractor SynCare LLC, was ousted as a state contractor after high-profile failures in delivering eligibility assessments of homebound Medicaid patients. Centene provided nearly $2 million in business loans to SynCare and its owner.

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Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is wrapping up a four-day visit to the United States with events in Los Angeles.

Xi arrived Friday at a trade conference where he’ll be joined later by American counterpart Joe Biden. Scheduled events also include a luncheon and school visit to meet children learning Mandarin.

They’ll end the day with a governor’s forum at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

China’s soon-to-be leader met with California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday and toured a terminal at the giant Port of Los Angeles.

The harbor visit was a reminder of China’s huge footprint at the busiest port in the United States. Nearly 60 percent of the imports moving through the Port of Los Angeles come from China.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is wrapping up a pivotal four-day visit to the United State with a daylong series of events in Los Angeles with his American counterpart Joe Biden.

China’s soon-to-be leader met with Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday and toured a shipping terminal at the giant Port of Los Angeles.

The visit was a reminder of China’s huge footprint at the busiest port in the United States. Nearly 60 percent of the imports moving through the Port of Los Angeles come from China, including $120 billion worth of computers, TVs, sneakers and other goods last year

On Friday, Biden and Xi start with a China trade forum in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a luncheon and school visit to meet children learning Mandarin. They’ll end the day with a governor’s forum at Disney Hall.

Xi’s U.S. tour comes at a politically challenging time in U.S.-China relations, with the White House sending stern messages on currency and trade policies and Republican presidential candidates claiming President Barack Obama isn’t doing enough to keep America competitive with the Chinese economy.

The Asian power sells four times as many goods to the U.S. as the United States sends in return to China. The U.S. shipped $13.5 billion in exports to China through the Los Angeles port last year.

In a carefully scripted event, Xi took a short walking tour through the China Shipping terminal with Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The facility sprawls over nearly 100 acres.

“We’re not just growing our ports, but we’re greening our ports,” Villaraigosa told Xi.

“When I heard that this is an environmentally friendly green port, I felt that this was a major achievement,” Xi later told a crowd in a brief statement after his stroll with Villaraigosa no fax cash advances.

“This is a solid foundation for future U.S.-China trade and economic cooperation,” he said.

As with his previous travels, Xi was focusing on forging relationships.

Xi spent the morning Thursday in Iowa, where officials from the U.S. and China signed a five-year deal to guide discussions on food security, food safety and sustainable agriculture.

China became the top market for U.S. agricultural goods last year, purchasing $20 billion in U.S. agricultural exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Much of Xi’s visit, which began earlier this week in Washington, D.C., has been focused on agriculture. The strategic cooperation agreement signed Thursday outlines mutual goals and responsibilities of each nation.

“It charts the course and gives us a guiding document that we can reference and, over time, refine and improve,” said Scott Sindelar, the agricultural minister counselor at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, who attended the Des Moines conference.

According to the USDA, the value of U.S. farm exports to China supported more than 160,000 American jobs last year across a variety of business sectors.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the two nations will have to work together to help feed a growing global population.

“We have the responsibility and opportunity to work together to address the causes of global hunger that effect more than 925 million people. Current populations trends mean that we must increase agricultural production by 70 percent in the year 2050 to feed nearly 9 billion people,” he said.

Not everyone celebrated the vice president’s arrival. The California Fair Trade Coalition, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that supports expanding trade while promoting economic justice, issued a statement calling on Brown to “address China’s predatory trade practices.”

“The economic potential for trade with China is massive, but if they aren’t forced to level the playing field, this can only be a losing proposition for U.S. workers,” said coalition director Tim Robertson.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers are two leading candidates to succeed World Bank President Robert Zoellick when he leaves in June, said two people familiar with Obama administration discussions.

The U.S. promised a candidate

ATHENS, GREECE

Not long after Greece made the politically unpopular decision to slash government spending as a way to ease its debt crisis, Germany’s finance minister questioned whether the deal goes far enough to earn a crucial euro130 billion bailout.

Greece’s new austerity plan would make deep cuts to jobs and wages and it ignited fresh criticism from unions and the country’s labor minister, who resigned in protest. Finance ministers from the 17 countries that use the euro are meeting in Brussels to scrutinize the plan.

Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos earlier Thursday said that all major party leaders in the country’s coalition government had given their backing to a new round of painful spending cuts he had worked out with the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund and that the talks “were successfully concluded”.

However Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Thursday warned that on the new round of spending cuts appears to not yet fulfill all the conditions for a euro130 billion bailout.

Germany is a leading force in the group of 17 countries that use the euro as their currency _ the so-called “eurozone” _ using its considerable economic clout to influence decision-making and policy.

“The agreement, as far as I understand, is not at a stage where it can be signed off,” Schaeuble said as he arrived at a meeting with his eurozone counterparts as well as the heads of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Brussels. “It’s a stance in the negotiations that was agreed on but no one expects that this negotiation stance can get support.”

The crucial agreement in Athens came shortly after Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos arrived in Brussels for talks on the new bailout with his colleagues from the 17 euro countries. Although all the other cuts demanded by the troika were approved _ including a 22 percent cut in the minimum wage, firings 15,000 of civil servants and an end to dozens of job guarantee provisions _ party leaders had balked at new pension cuts worth an estimated euro300 million ($400 million), leaving the bailout in limbo and the threat of bankruptcy high.

A spokeswoman for Papademos’ office said earlier Thursday that the deal would allow alternatives to the rejected pension cuts. She did not elaborate on what the alternative proposals were. The spokeswoman spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Greece needs the bailout by March 20 to redeem euro14.5 billion worth of bonds coming due.

A forced bankruptcy then would likely lead to the country’s exit from the euro common currency, a situation that European officials have insisted is impossible because it would hurt other weak countries like Portugal, Ireland and Italy.

But financial analysts fear a chain reaction similar to the financial meltdown triggered by the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008.

When eurozone leaders tentatively agreed on a second bailout for Greece in October, they set several key parameters that would have to be met for country to get more aid.

Those included bringing Greece’s debt level down to 120 percent of economic output by 2020, limiting official rescue loans to euro130 billion and getting firm approval from all Greek political forces that new spending cuts and reforms would actually be implemented.

“Those general requirements are not fulfilled yet,” Schaeuble said, adding that no decision on the new bailout was expected at Thursday’s meeting.

In addition to the new austerity measures, another method to reach the October targets is a deal with banks and other private bondholders to forgive Greece some euro100 billion in debt.

However, last week an EU official said that even taking into account the debt forgiveness and planned austerity measures, a gap of some euro15 billion remained to reach the targets.

The EU hopes that the ECB, which holds a significant amount of Greek bonds will contribute to closing that gap, but the central bank has so far dodged questions on whether it will participate.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who will chair Thursday’s meeting, also said that no decision was expected. “There are still a lot of uncertainties,” he said, referring to the Athens deal.

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Indonesia