World important news by Katrice

* New co to focus on exploration in Yukon, British Columbia* New Gold to also buy Geo Minerals for C$0.16 a share* Shares of Geo, Silver Quest up 29 pctBy Gowri JayakumarOct 17 (Reuters) - Silver Quest shareholders will get C$131 million from a sale of the company to New Gold , and C$35 million from their stake in McIntyre Minerals, the precious metals company New Gold will create to ramp up exploration in Yukon and British Columbia.Vancouver-based New Gold, which holds a majority stake in Blackwater, a bulk-tonnage gold project in British Columbia, will also acquire Silver Quest’s portion in the project to become its sole owner.The company also offered to buy Geo Minerals for about 16 Canadian cents a share, and plans to retain Geo’s Blackwater assets. New Gold will transfer Geo’s remaining assets to the new company, it said in a separate statement.”The acquisition of Silver Quest’s Davidson interest and the Capoose Property consolidates our ownership of the Blackwater project and expands our presence significantly in the area,” said Randall Oliphant, New Gold’s executive chairman.New Gold, which has a capital budget of C$300 million for the year, does not expect the Blackwater consolidation to hike its expenditures significantly, Hannes Portmann, the company’s vice president, corporate development, told Reuters.”We need to get an understanding of how large this resource could become before we have any formal studies done on potential economics. Blackwater is still a few years away from production.”Under the deal, Silver Quest shareholders will receive 0.09 New Gold shares and 1 common share of McIntyre for every 4 Silver Quest shares held. Geo shareholders will get 1 common share of McIntyre for every 15 Geo common shares held.McIntyre will be led by the management and board of Silver Quest, and will have about C$15 million in cash to fund its exploration activities this year and the next, New Gold said.The offer price of C$1.06 a share is at a 22 percent premium to Silver Quest’s Friday close. The deal is expected to close in December.Shares of both Silver Quest and Geo were up over 29 percent on Monday on the Toronto Venture Exchange, while New Gold shares were down 3 percent at C$11.43 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

* China September inflation dips* S&P cuts Spain credit rating* Futures up: Dow 82 pts, S&P 9.2 pts, Nasdaq 15.25 ptsBy Chuck MikolajczakNEW YORK, Oct 14 (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures rose on Friday, shrugging off a credit rating downgrade of Spain, propelled by strong earnings from Google Inc and hopes the euro zone will continue progress toward a solution to its debt crisis.Google’s shares jumped 7.7 percent to $601.75 after its results late on Thursday trounced Wall Street expectations, helped by strong advertising sales and deft cost controls.Standard and Poor’s cut Spain’s credit rating on Friday, underlining the challenges facing Europe’s finance ministers as they prepare to meet counterparts from the Group of 20 nations over the euro zone debt crisis.French and German officials, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are trying to put flesh on the bones of a crisis resolution plan in time for a European Union summit on Oct. 23.”That is going to be an important event because you are going to have rumors floating out of there, and that is really where the plan is being put together, I suspect — Merkel and Sarkozy aren’t sitting down doing it, they are having their finance ministers do it,” said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont.”As we begin to see what this plan looks like, so that is a positive for the market today.”Investors will look for clues into the health of the U.S. consumer on Friday with data on retail sales and consumer confidence. The Commerce Department releases September retail sales at 8:30 a.m. (1230 GMT), and economists in a Thomson Reuters survey expect a 0.7 percent rise from a flat reading in August. Excluding automobiles, sales are seen up 0.3 percent compared with a 0.1 percent rise in the prior month.Also at 8:30 a.m. (1230 GMT), the Labor Department releases import-export prices for September. Economists expect a 0.3 percent drop in imports and a 0.2 percent rise in exports. In the prior month, import prices fell 0.4 percent and export prices rose 0.5 percent.At 9:55 a.m. (1355 GMT) the Thomson Michigan Surveys of Consumers releases its preliminary October consumer sentiment index. Economists expect the reading to rise to 60.2 from 59.4 in the final September report.S&P 500 futures rose 9.2 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures gained 82 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures rose 15.25 points.China’s consumer inflation dipped to 6.1 percent in September, retreating further from three-year highs and easing some concerns about demand in the region a day after data showed the country’s trade surplus narrowed.Mattel Inc edged up 0.4 percent to $27.90 after the world’s largest toy company reported higher-than-expected quarterly sales, helped by favorable exchange rates and strong sales of its Barbie dolls.Aside from Google, technology stocks may also get a boost after Germany’s SAP , the world’s biggest maker of business software, reported a jump in its third quarter sales and profits.European shares were higher, as Google’s earnings and forecast-beating earnings from Syngenta offset weakness in banks as ratings agency actions weighed on the sector.Asian equity markets were lower on concerns about sluggish global growth after weaker-than-expected China trade data on Thursday.The Dow and S&P 500 slipped on Thursday after JPMorgan’s earnings and China’s soft trade data revived worries about the impact of slower growth on profits.

“It is incredibly worrying to us that in a wave of deleveraging which is calculated to be in excess of 2 trillion euros ($2.7 trillion) in the next couple of years that this wall of deleveraging will continue to add additional pressure onto the European economy,” John Moran told a banking conference in Dublin.”We really need to avoid a situation where we are dumping assets at any cost,” he said. “In order to do that Europe needs to work hard to find a stable mechanism to fund this type of deleveraging.”European banks are looking to shed loans and beef up their balance sheets to protect themselves against a deepening sovereign debt crisis which has frozen normal funding channels.Moran said all but the most highly rated European banks will find it difficult to access unsecured funding.”It is going to be a challenge for a long time with the exception of the very highly rated banks,” he said.No European bank has done a senior unsecured bond deal since early July despite about 150 billion euros of issuance in the first half.Ireland’s banks were at the heart of its financial crisis and subsequent 85 billion euros EU-IMF bailout and as part of that rescue package its three main lenders have agreed to shrink their balance sheets by 70 billion euros by 2013.Some 13 billion euros in core and non-core assets have been offloaded to date and Moran said Ireland’s banks had an important head-start on their European counterparts in shedding assets.”We are in a fortunate position, frankly, because we have core banks set up, we have deleveraging committees, we have management focus on that. They have got advisers,” he said.”Realistically I think it will be a while before the other banks can go through that initial cycle that we went through.”Dublin is targeting nearly 16 billion euros of asset sales this year as part of an overall asset sale target of 34 billion euros.Ireland’s banks have overhauled their boards after years of reckless property lending precipitated the sector’s near-collapse and Moran said he expected Allied Irish Banks to submit a salary proposal for a new chief executive to the department this week.AIB, effectively nationalised late last year, wants to break a government-imposed salary ceiling of 500,000 euros ($682,000) in order to attract a new CEO.Brendan McDonagh, a former head of HSBC’s North American operations and David Duffy, who has held international roles with ING Barings and South Africa’s Standard Bank are among the contenders for the AIB job.

The offer price of C$2.50 a share, which is at a premium of nearly 88 percent to the company’s close on Friday, is an “extremely low-ball bid”, Western Wind said in a statement.”A large U.S.-based corporation, with a substantial U.S. tax appetite, is the only entity that can offer the full value to the Western Wind shareholders,” the company said. “There is over $300 million of tax shield available to a large taxable, U.S. entity.”Western Wind, which signed a 20-year contract in December to supply electricity to Southern California Edison from its flagship Windstar project, is on the verge of going on-line with the project in three months, it said.The company expects returns from the project to be above Algonquin’s offer, it added.Algonquin could not be reached immediately for comments. The company owns and operates $1.1 billion of clean renewable electric generation and sustainable utility distribution businesses in North America, according to Algonquin’s website.Western Wind shares rose over 68 percent to trade at C$2.24 on Tuesday on the Toronto Venture Exchange.