Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Limited today published its Interim report for the 6-month period to March 31, 2009. It reported a loss before taxation of €4.1bn for the period, primarily driven by specific and collective lending impairment charges of €3.7bn and €0.4bn respectively. The Government is to seek EU approval to inject up to €4bn of capital into the nationalised bank, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan said today. The bank has total impairment provisions on its balance sheet of €4.9bn and it disclosed its losses for the three year period to the end of September 2011“are likely to reach €7.5bn.”

The US economy didn’t contract as much last winter as first thought, according to a report that showed rising corporate profits and suggested the recession hit bottom at the end of 2008.  Less inventory liquidation and a smaller drop in exports were factors in the adjustment up from the originally estimated 6.1 percent GDP drop.

The Central Bank said today that Irish residential mortgage lending fell more €100m in April - — the first monthly fall since the series began in 1990. The annual growth rate was down to 3.4 per cent in April , from 4.2 per cent in March.3 This was the lowest annual rate of increase since 1986.

Eurozone annual inflation is expected to be 0.0% in May 2009 according to a flash estimate issued by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union was 0.6% in April.

Markets news on stocks, currencies and commodities.

Principal news stories from the Irish Independent, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Financial Times and New York Times.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, TD on Thursday confirmed that she has commenced work within her Department on a project aimed at improving opportunities for small and medium enterprise (SME) access to public procurement business. Coughlan was speaking in Brussels at a meeting of the EU’s Competitiveness Council, where she claimed she had emphasised to colleagues, that EU procurement rules must also reflect the Union’s “think small first” approach to entrepreneurship. To coincide with the lecture in Brussels, there is at last an effort starting in Dublin to match lip service on policy towards encouraging start-ups and developing SMEs, with procurement by the biggest purchaser of goods and services in the State. Change comes at glacial speed in the sclerotic Irish political system and changes in rules for procurement are likely to help but endemic cronyism will not change while the overall governance system remains in an archaic timewarp.

Dell on Thursday said the slump in demand for its personal computers has yet to reach a bottom, as the PC maker reported a 63% drop in quarterly profit and a 23% dip in revenue.

The Eurozone’s biggest economies  - - Germany and France  - - this week signalled that consumers are continuing to spend during the severest recession since 1945. France reported that consumer spending on manufactured goods rose a more-than-expected 0.7% in April, compared with March while Germany’s GfK market research organisation said its “consumer climate” indicator was expected to hold steady in June for a fourth consecutive month. However, the situation is fragile and the Bloomberg Eurozone Retail Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), based on a mid-month survey of more than 1,000 executives in the region’s retail sector and published on Thursday, pointed to a slightly faster rate of decline in May, compared with April (see links in Related below).

International Energy Outlook 2009: World marketed energy consumption is projected to rise by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 73 percent, compared with an increase of 15 percent in the OECD* countries. Unconventional sources including biofuels could provide nearly half of the growth in global liquid fuel supplies during 2006-30 and global emissions of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide will jump more than 39 percent by 2030, without new policies and binding pacts to cut global warming pollution.