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The market jitters afflicting countries along the euro-zone’s fringe appear to be starting to rattle even so-called “core” countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands.On Friday, rumors about losses at French banks and comparisons of Hungary to Greece hammered stock markets after early gains. A worse-than-expected picture of U.S. job growth didn’t help. The derivatives market, however, gave off some worrying signals. While the cost of insuring against Greek, Portuguese, Hungarian, Irish, Italian and Spanish defaults jumped, similar costs for France and even Germany – an economy likely to expand 3% to 4% this quarter – also jumped.
    
A strike that crippled production at Honda Motor’s factories in China has come as a wake-up call to Japan’s flagship exporters as they seek to remain competitive and push into China’s burgeoning market with the help of low-wage workers. The strike by Chinese workers to protest pay and working conditions has cost Honda, Japan’s second largest carmaker after Toyota, thousands of units in lost production in the world’s biggest auto market. The walkout began on May 17 at a Honda transmission factory in Foshan, in the southeast, and has shut down all four of Honda’s factories on the mainland.
     
Next week, in a bid to prevent a repeat of May’s “flash crash”, new rules for US equities are being introduced in the most dramatic attempt to curb volatile trading since market-wide price limits were introduced after the 1987 stock market crash. The changes represent the first policy response from the Securities and Exchange Commission since the turmoil on May 6 and will, in effect, subject all stocks in the S&P 500 to new speed limits.
      
New York state delayed paying $2.5 billion of bills as a short-term way of staying solvent but its cash crunch could get even worse in August and September, Budget Director Robert Megna said on Tuesday. "Had we not done that, I think we would have been close to broke," Megna told reporters in Albany. This is the third time since December the cash-poor state has withheld funds. This time, the state's general fund, which counts everything but federal aid and some specific revenues, ran in the red by about $500 million to $600 million, Megna told reporters.