Japan’s Nikkei 225 plummeted 2.4 percent to 8,660.23, as a strengthening yen battered the country’s behemoth export sector.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 2.1 percent to 18,802.45 and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 dropped 2.2 percent to 4,064.40.

South Korea’s Kospi fell 2.5 percent to 1,798.36. Benchmarks in Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China and New Zealand also fell no fax cash advances.

U.S. stocks closed lower Thursday after a report showed manufacturing slowed in the mid-Atlantic region for the first time in eight months, to minus 5.8 from 8.5 in April.

Readings below zero indicates contraction.

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The Missouri Development Finance Board gave preliminary approval to the bonds, part of $15.5 million that the carbon-fiber-maker is cobbling together to buy and renovate a 130,000 square-foot building on Geunther Blvd. Other incentives include $1.7 million in Missouri Quality Jobs tax credits and tax breaks from St free credit score. Peters.

Zoltek moved into the facility late last year and hopes to employ 155 people there by 2014. The Bridgeton-based company expanding to meet growing demand for its products from wind turbine manufacturers.

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The Business Journal says Desloge died Monday, about a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was 63.

Desloge began at the Business Journal in 1984 and continued working until recently. He was well-known for his “St. Louis Character” feature. He provided twice-daily Business Journal reports on KMOX Radio until about a month ago.

Desloge was a graduate of the University of Missouri and received numerous journalism awards from the Missouri Press Association and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and sons Rick and Nick.

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The bank will accept the resignation of Ina Drew, its chief investment officer, the person told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the decision publicly.

Drew, 55, one of the highest-paid officials at JPMorgan Chase, had offered to resign several times since CEO Jamie Dimon disclosed the trading loss on Thursday, the person said. Pressure built on the bank over the weekend to accept.

At least two other executives at the bank will be held accountable for the mistake, the person said.

The casualties come as JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, seeks to minimize the damage caused by the $2 billion loss. Investors shaved almost 10 percent off JPMorgan’s stock price on Friday.

Dimon has said the mistake will complicate the efforts of banks to fight certain regulatory changes three years after the financial crisis.

JPMorgan’s disclosure has led lawmakers and critics of the banking industry to call for stricter regulation of Wall Street. Many post-crisis rules governing risk-taking by banks are still being written.

Drew oversaw the division of the bank responsible for the loss. She was paid $15.5 million last year and almost $16 million in 2010, making her one of the highest-paid officials at JPMorgan, according to a regulatory filing.

Drew declined comment through a bank spokeswoman. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan Chase, also declined comment. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Sunday that Drew and two other executives were expected to resign soon.

The Journal also reported that Bruno Iksil, the JPMorgan trader identified as the “London whale” because of the giant bets he placed, was also likely to leave, but the paper reported that it was not clear when that would happen.

The surprise loss has been a black eye for the bank and for Dimon, who is known in the industry both as a master of risk management and as an outspoken opponent of some proposed regulation since the crisis.

Dimon said in a TV interview aired Sunday that he was “dead wrong” when he dismissed concerns about the bank’s trading last month.

“We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon said in an interview that was taped Friday and aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There’s almost no excuse for it.”

Dimon said he did not know the extent of the problem when he said in April that the concerns were a “tempest in a teapot.”

The loss came in the past six weeks. Dimon has said it came from trading in so-called credit derivatives and was designed to hedge against financial risk, not to make a profit for the bank.

A piece of financial regulation known as the Volcker rule would prevent banks from certain kinds of trading for their own profit. Dimon has said the trading involved in the $2 billion loss would not have fallen under the rule.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., told ABC’s “This Week” that he hopes the final version of the Volcker rule will prevent the type of trading that led to the massive loss at JPMorgan.

Dimon conceded to NBC that the bank “hurt ourselves and our credibility” and expects to “pay the price for that.” Asked what the price should be, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that banks will lose their fight to weaken the rule.

“This was not a risk-reducing activity that they engaged in. This increased their risk,” Levin told NBC.

“So we’ve got to be very, very careful that the regulators here are not undermined by this huge effort to weaken the rule by putting in a huge loophole” that includes the trading involved in the JPMorgan loss, he said.

Dimon said the bank is open to inquiries from regulators. He has also promised, in an email to the bank’s employees and in a conference call with stock analysts, to get to the bottom of what happened and learn from the mistake.

Dimon told NBC that he supported giving the government the authority to dismantle a failing big bank and wipe out shareholder equity. But he stressed that JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, is “very strong.”

Addressing public anger toward Wall Street, Dimon said he wants a more equitable society and does not mind paying higher taxes. But he said attacking all of business is “very counterproductive.”

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After markets closed on Wednesday, MEMC reported reported a $92 million net loss for the first quarter on continued erosion of demand and pricing in semiconductor and solar industries.

As of 1:35 p.m., MEMC shares were trading at $2.44, down 81 cents from Wednesday’s close.

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The comments by Alexis Tsipras flew in the face of EU leaders’ insistence on fiscal discipline and sent the Greek stock market tumbling just two days after Greek voters rejected mainstream pro-austerity politicians. Instead, the people backed a hodgepodge of parties from the Stalinist left to the neo-Nazi right but produced no clear winner in parliament.

Tsipras also demanded an examination of Greece’s still-massive debt and a moratorium on repayment of the part of it that is “onerous,” statements that rattled investors and drove Greek shares down another 3.6 percent on top of Monday’s nearly 7-percent loss. Markets in France, Italy, Germany and the U.S. also fell.

“The pro-bailout parties no longer have a majority in parliament to vote in destructive measures for the Greek people,” said the 38-year-old Tsipras, whose anti-austerity Radical Left Coalition party came second in Sunday’s vote. “The popular mandate clearly renders the bailout agreement invalid.”

Tsipras is the second Greek party leader in as many days to try to form a government. If no coalition can be found, elections will be held in a month, with the political instability boding ill for Greece’s hopes of staying solvent and within the 17-nation eurozone.

Moving to stomp out signs of increasing discontent in crisis-stricken countries, the European Union and Germany _ the biggest contributor to the EU’s crisis fund _ urged members Tuesday to stick to their agreed budget cuts.

“The end of the debt policy has been agreed in Europe. It has to stay that way,” said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso stressed that member states must implement their promised spending cuts and tax increases.

Both offered the consolation of new efforts to revive struggling economies. EU President Herman Van Rompuy called for an informal summit of the EU’s 27 leaders on May 23 to discuss economic growth and to prepare for a summit in June focused on job creation.

Tsipras’s party came in second Sunday, winning 52 of parliament’s 300 seats with 16.8 percent of the vote. He has the presidential mandate to end the political impasse by forming a governing coalition by Thursday.

Antonis Samaras, head of the winning conservative party that has 108 seats, gave up on the same task after just a few hours Monday when Tsipras spurned his advances.

Tsipras said his government-building drive would focus on ending “the loan agreements of subservience” with Greece’s international bailout creditors.

Greece has depended on rescue loans from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund since May 2010, after decades of profligate state spending and poor financial management priced it out of money-lending markets.

To secure the bailouts, Athens took a hatchet to pensions, salaries, health care and pretty much everything else, while repeatedly raising taxes quick payday loan. But more than two years of austerity have left the economy deep in recession and unemployment at a record high 21 percent.

Tsipras urged Samaras and third-placed Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos to renege on their support for the bailout commitments, asking them to “honestly repent for their disastrous choices that tore our society apart.”

Greece has promised to pass new austerity measures worth (EURO)14.5 billion ($18.9 billion) next month and to implement other swift reforms. These will promptly be reviewed by its creditors, who will then decide whether to release or withhold the next batch of bailout funds.

But Samaras quickly blasted Tsipras’ proposal as “unbelievably arrogant,” warning it would “drag the country into chaos” and see it expelled from the eurozone.

“Mr. Tsipras is doing everything to prevent a government being formed,” Samaras said. “Nothing can be done if we leave the euro, because the country’s catastrophe would be certain and unprecedented.”

He added: “He is asking me to place my signature on the destruction of Greece. And that I will not do.”

Analysts agreed that Tsipras was wading into dangerous waters.

Athanasios Vamvakidis, a strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said Greece’s rescue creditors are unlikely to agree easily to a renegotiation of the two bailout programs worth (EURO)240 billion ($312 billion).

Just two months ago, banks and other private creditors wrote off over (EURO)100 billion ($130 billion) in Greek debt _ the largest debt writedown in history.

However, other analysts suggested that the eurozone and IMF could give Athens a minimal lifeline of credit while Greece sorts out its political impasse or holds new elections.

But even then, there is little reason to believe that angry Greek voters would change their minds in a second ballot and give a comfortable majority to the pro-austerity parties New Democracy and PASOK, said Neil Mellor, an analyst at the Bank of New York Mellon.

Even if the two eked out a slim majority in the next election, they could not enforce the current bailout terms, he added.

Dimitris Mardas, an associate professor of economics at Thessaloniki University, said he believed there was room to negotiate a coalition government.

“They are professionals, not children,” he said.

But it would be mathematically impossible for Tsipras to govern without the support of Samaras’ conservatives, because the isolationist Communists have ruled out any participation in government and no party will work with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.

If Tsipras fails, the mandate would then pass to Venizelos. If he is also unsuccessful, party leaders will hold a final effort to reach consensus. And if nothing comes from that, elections will take place within a month.

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The Saturday blaze forced an evacuation of workers and more than 1,000 residents near the Map Ta Phut industrial estate, Thailand’s largest industrial park, in Rayong province, 180 kilometers (110 miles) southeast of Bangkok.

Rayong governor Seni Jittakasem said Sunday authorities were investigating the cause of the explosions that occurred when workers were cleaning a chemical tank at Bangkok Synthetics plant, a synthetic rubber manufacturer business cards.

He said all evacuees have returned home.

The fire was put under control after four hours of chemical burning that sent plumes of thick smoke over a wide area.

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Just ask the folks at Aegion. The pipe repair company, based in Chesterfield, got 99 percent shareholder approval for its pay practices last year. This year, ISS, a leading governance advisory firm, has advised shareholders to vote “no” on a proposed pay package for chief executive Joseph Burgess.

Two other local companies, Monsanto and small personal loans.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/belden-can-t-explain-negative-pay-vote/article_3559086a-85b9-11e1-b281-001a4bcf6878.html” target=”_self”>Belden, learned the result of an ISS “no” recommendation last year. At each company, more than 30 percent of shareholder votes were cast in opposition to the executives’ pay package, a level of dissent that governance experts say is embarrassingly high.

Both companies devoted space in this year’s documents to discussing how they had tried to improve communications with shareholders. Monsanto succeeded in raising its approval rate to 87 percent this year; Belden’s vote is May 30.

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