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Two ranking JPMorgan Chase & Co ( id="symbol_JPM.N_0"> JPM.N ) directors issued a letter to shareholders on Friday arguing against recommendations by proxy advisory firms to split the duties of Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon and vote against some directors. The board is unanimous in its view that it is best for Dimon to hold both roles and the current governance structure "is working effectively," according to the letter signed by presiding director Lee Raymond and William Weldon, who is chairman of the corporate governance and nominating committee. The letter warned that a vote against current directors or to split the CEO and chairman roles "could be disruptive to the company and is not in shareholders' best interests." The letter is a direct response to reports in the past seven days from advisory firms Institutional Investors Services and Glass Lewis & Co. The firms concluded that investigations of the bank's $6.2 billion loss on

With the Dow and the S&P 500 setting another string of record closing highs this week, the old Wall Street adage "Sell in May and Go Away" is starting to look weak. Closing out the second week of May, the Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 2.3 percent for the month. For the year, the benchmark S&P 500 is up a stunning 14.6 percent. Some analysts say that when the market starts off this strong, it tends to keep the upward momentum going until the end of the year. "Instead of 'Sell in May and Go Away,' we may be setting up for a surprise May rally," said Ryan Detrick, senior technical analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati, Ohio. "What's encouraging is that small-cap stocks have been outperforming the market recently. It's a sign that the market is going for even the riskiest sectors." Both the Dow industrials and the S&P 500 topped major milestones for the first time in early May, with the D

The Obama administration is unlikely to make a decision on the Canada-to-Nebraska Keystone XL pipeline until late this year as it painstakingly weighs the project's impact on the environment and on energy security, a U.S. official and analysts said on Friday. The decision may not be made until November, December or even early 2014, said a U.S. official, as President Barack Obama will not rush the process, which still has a number of stages to work through. One of those stages has not even begun yet and will run for months. "The president has to be able to show that the administration looked under every stone to ensure it knew as much as it possibly could about the impact of Keystone," said the official, who did not want to be named given the sensitive nature of the project. Analysts agreed that a decision would not be made by this summer as the State Department had suggested when it issued an environmental review on the pipeline on March 1. The State Department is

SoftBank Corp is playing it rough in its attempt to keep Dish Network Corp from breaking up its $20.1 billion deal to take control of Sprint Nextel Corp. The Japanese telecom company, which owns 33 percent of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, has told banks that their financing of Dish's $25.5 billion rival offer for Sprint could hurt their chances of landing a role in a highly anticipated public offering of the Chinese e-commerce giant, two sources familiar with the situation said. SoftBank, Dish and Sprint declined to comment. A source close to Alibaba said on Friday that while SoftBank is a major investor, it does not make decisions for Alibaba's management. Alibaba has no timetable for an IPO yet and has not hired underwriters. Softbank's unusual move is the latest sign that the battle for the control of Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. wireless carrier, is fast turning into a no-holds-barred brawl between Softbank founder Masayoshi Son and Dish's Charlie Ergen. SoftBank agre

China's foreign exchange regulator will this month simplify the rules governing foreign direct investment (FDI), the latest step towards deregulation and market reform under China's new leadership. _0"> The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) will abolish 24 regulations regarding foreign exchange registration, account openings, remittance, and conversions, the agency said in an announcement posted to its website on Saturday. The move inches China closer to making its currency, the yuan, convertible under the capital account, and follows a previous round of FDI-related deregulation by SAFE in November last year. The new rules take effect on May 13. Premier Li Keqiang told a meeting of the State Council, China's cabinet, that the government would produce a detailed "operational plan" to achieve capital account convertibility this year, though he did not offer a timeline for convertibility. Li also called on agencies across the government

Two companies with major operations in India were the weak links that opened the door to a $45 million global cyber heist brought to light by U.S. authorities this week. EnStage Inc, which operates from Bangalore, and ElectraCard Services, which is based in Pune, processed card payments for the two Middle Eastern banks that were hit in the theft, according to several people familiar with the situation. U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday that hackers broke into two card processing companies, raising the balances and withdrawal limits on accounts that were then exploited in coordinated ATM withdrawals around the world. The prosecutors did not name the two companies but said one was based in India and the other in the United States. According to a U.S. official and a bank employee, who both spoke on condition of anonymity, ElectraCard Services was the company that processed prepaid travel cards for National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah PSC (RAKBANK). RAKBANK suffered a $5 million coordina

Major central banks did not face calls to do more to boost the world economy when Group of Seven finance officials met on Saturday, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said. Before the meeting Britain's finance minister, George Osborne, said ministers would "consider what more monetary activism can do to support the recovery" - something that he is keen for the Bank of England to do. But Draghi said the ECB, which cut interest rates to a record low last week, did not come under pressure to take further steps. "There wasn't any call to do more," he told reporters after the meeting. "It is quite clear that all central banks have done a lot, each one within its own mandate. So (the meeting) was just taking note of this ... All of us have really been active." The ECB is also looking at whether it can do more to promote small business lending in the euro zone via asset-backed securities (ABS), but Draghi said the central bank was bette

Japanese long-term interest rates should not shoot higher as a result of money flowing out of government bonds, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said on Saturday. _0"> Kuroda added, however, that it would be natural for long-term rates to rise over time if Japan meets its goal of pushing inflation up towards two percent. He said a shift in funds from Japanese government bonds to stocks and into lending was already taking place but that the BOJ was increasing its balance of JGB holdings at an annual pace of 50 trillion yen. "The BOJ dealt with short-term volatility in bond prices by adjusting its market operations," Kuroda told reporters after a two-day meeting of G7 finance officials. "I do not expect a sudden spike in long-term bond yields. In the long-run, if the economy recovers and inflation heads towards two percent, we might see nominal interest rates rise but that's natural." Finance Minister Taro Aso said the G7 had leveled no cri

Group of Seven finance officials agreed on Saturday to redouble efforts to deal with failing banks and gave a green light to Japan's drive to galvanize its economy. British finance minister George Osborne said the finance ministers and central bankers meeting 40 miles outside London focused on unfinished bank reforms, with signs that plans for a euro zone banking union are fraying. "It is important to complete swiftly our work to ensure that no banks are too big to fail," Osborne told reporters after hosting a two-day meeting in a stately home set in rolling countryside. "We must put regimes in place ... to deal with failing banks and to protect taxpayers and to do so in a globally consistent manner," he said. The emergency rescue of Cyprus after a near meltdown in March served as a reminder of the need to finish an overhaul of the banking sector, five years after the world financial crisis began. Germany has come under pressure to give more support t

Chrysler Group LLC is recalling about 469,000 SUVs worldwide to update software after some vehicles' circuit boards were found to be transmitting signals that trigger inadvertent gear shifts to neutral, the No. 3 U.S. automaker said Saturday. _0"> Included are 2006- to 2010-model-year Jeep Commanders and 2005 to 2010 Jeep Grand Cherokees, of which about 295,000 are in the United States, 28,500 are in Canada and 4,200 are in Mexico. The remaining 141,000 are outside of North America. Chrysler was aware of 26 accidents and 2 injuries related to the gearshift problem but no fatalities, a company spokesman said. It was Chrysler's largest recall since more than 900,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Liberty SUVs were recalled worldwide in November to fix a part that could cause airbags to deploy inadvertently. Chrysler, an affiliate of Italy's Fiat SpA ( id="symbol_FIA.MI_0"> FIA.MI ), also said it is recalling 532 2013-model-year Ram 1500 pickup trucks in t

Bloomberg LP customers, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, were examining on Saturday whether there could have been leaks of confidential information, even as the media company restricted its reporters' access to client data and created a position to oversee compliance in a bid to assuage privacy concerns. The financial data and news company, whose computer terminals are widely used on Wall Street, had allowed journalists to see some information about terminal usage, including when customers had last logged in, and how often they used messaging or looked up data on broad categories, such as equities or bonds. Bloomberg CEO Daniel Doctoroff said in a statement on Friday that the firm restricted reporters' access last month after a client complained. The client, Goldman Sachs Group Inc ( id="symbol_GS.N_0"> GS.N ), flagged the matter to Bloomberg after a news service reporter in Hong Kong asked the bank about a partner's employment st

In a closely watched case in the art world, American artist Richard Prince won a federal appeals court order Thursday holding that he did not infringe the copyrights of a photographer by incorporating his images into 25 paintings and collages. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York reversed a lower court's finding that Prince must hand over artwork using the photos to Patrick Cariou, whose pictures of Rastafarians in Jamaica were incorporated into art, exhibited in 2007 and 2008.   "These twenty-five of Prince's artworks manifest an entirely different aesthetic from Cariou's photographs," U.S. Circuit Judge Barrington Parker wrote. The court battle has been considered a test to what extent the appropriation of artists' works is protected from claims of copyright infringement. The appeal drew friend-of-the-court briefs from a wide range of parties, from the Whitney Museum of American Art to Google Inc, which warned the lower court's ruling

Modernist painter Mark Rothko's hometown in Latvia devoted a new centre to the late artist's work on Wednesday. _0"> The Mark Rothko Arts Centre opened in the eastern town of Daugavpils, the Baltic country's second biggest city, with six paintings from the private collection of the artist's daughter and son, who were present at the launch. The exhibition is the first permanent Rothko installation in eastern Europe. "This centre, I think, is going to become an important archive, an important resource for Rothko scholars to draw on, and also for Rothko's public," son Christopher Rothko told a news conference. Rothko was born in 1903 in Daugavpils, when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire and the town was known as Dvinsk. His parents emigrated to the United states when he was 10 and he later became one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. He killed himself in 1970. The new centre is located in the historic premises of Dauga

Enlisting the drama of Prokofiev and the elegance of Tchaikovsky, St Petersburg's new Mariinsky theatre staged a gala opening on Thursday designed to silence critics of the starkly modernist building erected in the heart of Russia's imperial capital. The $700-million glass and limestone building, which critics have dubbed the "Mariinsky mall", glowed in the night sky, its glass and metal walkways humming with excited voices as the select crowd of 2,000 found their seats. Just opposite, across a canal, the 19th century original opera house, one of the great showcases of Russian culture which became home to the Kirov opera and ballet companies in Soviet times, stood silent for the evening. "We need breathe life into the theatre. We want it to live, so that people are attracted and can feel the charm of modern technology. Then it will shine in all its glory," President Vladimir Putin told the guests, who included leading Russian businessmen. Calling the

With a billion dollars worth of art on offer at their spring auctions in New York, Christie's and Sotheby's are looking to the post-war and contemporary works to drive the market this month. The sales of the newer works are expected to exceed those of the once-dominant Impressionist and modern field by anywhere from 50 to 100 percent, according to estimates.   While both Christie's and Sotheby's have a pair of Impressionist or modern paintings valued at $20 million or $30 million-range, both houses' contemporary sales feature at least three works that are expected to fetch $30 million to $40 million, and possibly more. Records are likely to fall for artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gerhard Richter, who already holds the record price for a work by any living artist at auction. "The supply of $30-million-plus paintings and high-quality material is far greater than what you can find in the Impressionist and modern field," said Brett Gorvy, Chri

With their black leather, studded jackets, ripped jeans, bondage trousers and messages of rebellion and anarchy, punks from the 1970s probably never envisioned that a major museum would be celebrating their influence on fashion 40 years later. But the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing just that with a new exhibition, "Punk: Chaos to Couture," that opens on May 9 and runs through August 14. It includes 100 punk styles and ranges from the mid-70s at Vivienne Westwood's and Malcolm McLaren's London boutique and images of The Sex Pistols to examples of punk's impact on haute couture and designers such as Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada and John Galliano. Films and music from the era and a re-creation of the graffiti-covered toilet at New York's CBGB punk rock club, where Blondie, the Ramones and Talking Heads played, add to the gritty authenticity of the exhibit. "Punk was all about celebrating the individual, c

The spring auctions got off to a strong start on Tuesday with Sotheby's solid sale of Impressionist and modern art which took in $230 million, led by a $42 million Cezanne still life and a $26 million Modigliani portrait. A year after Sotheby's set the world auction record for any work of art with its sale of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for $120 million, it managed a sale of works by Picasso, Rodin and Monet that saw 85 percent of 71 lots on offer finding buyers and came in just under its high pre-sale estimate of $235 million.   Calling its offerings "an extraordinary group of material," Simon Shaw, New York head of Impressionist and modern art for Sotheby's, said "it's very satisfying to see that the market agreed with us." "If anyone needed a signal that the Impressionist market is not just alive but thriving, this sale provided the evidence," Shaw added. The once-dominant Impressionist market has been eclipsed in re

A record was set for French artist Chaim Soutine on Wednesday at Christie's auction of Impressionist and modern art, which met expectations with a total of just under $160 million. The tightly edited sale of 47 works exceeded Christie's auction a year ago by more than $40 million, but the earlier evening featured only 31 lots. Still, an impressive 94 percent of the works on offer found buyers which officials said was its best sell-through rate since 2006. "We saw high demand for blue-chip names such as Picasso and Monet," said Brooke Lampley, Christie's New York head of Impressionist and modern art.   "But we also saw an educated marketplace for rarities like the Soutine and Chagall," she added, referring to the evening's two top-priced works. Officials also pointed to global presence, saying more than 30 countries participated in the auction which totaled $158.5 million, near the middle of expectations of about $130 million to $190 million.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of the new film "The Great Gatsby," and his foundation have teamed up with Christie's for a charity auction next week to benefit environmental causes. Thirty-three works, many created for and donated to the auction by some of the world's top artists, will go under the hammer on Monday in New York at The 11th Hour Auction, which aims to raise as much as $18 million to protect the last wild places on Earth and their endangered species.   "A lot of the works of this quality have never been at auction. We have what we believe are conservative estimates," Loic Gouzer, international specialist at Christie's and the head of the sale, said in an interview. "It is going to be the biggest one-time environmental fundraiser ever," he added. Zeng Fanzhi's "The Tiger," an oil on canvas, Bharti Kher's "The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own," a work on fiberglass, and Mark Grotjahn's &qu

More than 30 years ago in the south of France , the camera switched its focus to the celebrity-obsessed artist Andy Warhol, who became the reluctant subject of a photo study that was then relegated to a storage cabinet filed under "W." _0"> Sometime last year, a friend of photographer Steve Wood happened upon the trove of 35mm slides and persuaded wood that the "lost" images deserved their Warhol-allotted 15 minutes of fame. The resulting exhibition, "Lost Then Found," opens on May 3 for 10 days in New York, and features unusual shots such as Warhol posing with a giant sunflower and backpack, or shown winking, with eyes closed and in close-up head shots. "These photographs reveal a different Warhol than most of us have ever witnessed," said Christopher Bollen, editor of Interview magazine, which Warhol founded in 1969 and which is supporting the exhibition.   "It's a testament to the photographer and an opportunity to re-a

An artist who paints portraits of imaginary people joined a French-born filmmaker, a British-German performance artist and a British multimedia artist on the shortlist for modern art's most prestigious and controversial award on Thursday. _0"> The portraits of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the first black woman to be named a finalist for the annual 25,000-pound ($38,200) Turner Prize, appear traditional but are of imaginary people with invented histories, the Tate Britain museum said. Laure Prouvost's films employ quick cuts, montage and deliberate misuse of language to create "surprising and unpredictable work", said the Tate, which chairs the prize. British-German Tino Sehgal's "intimate works" consist purely of live encounters between people, and David Shrigley's "macabre" multimedia works dwell on black humor, it said. The Turner Prize rewards British artists aged under 50 for an "outstanding exhibition or other presentatio

In a closely watched case in the art world, American artist Richard Prince won a federal appeals court order Thursday holding that he did not infringe the copyrights of a photographer by incorporating his images into 25 paintings and collages. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York reversed a lower court's finding that Prince must hand over artwork using the photos to Patrick Cariou, whose pictures of Rastafarians in Jamaica were incorporated into art, exhibited in 2007 and 2008.   "These twenty-five of Prince's artworks manifest an entirely different aesthetic from Cariou's photographs," U.S. Circuit Judge Barrington Parker wrote. The court battle has been considered a test to what extent the appropriation of artists' works is protected from claims of copyright infringement. The appeal drew friend-of-the-court briefs from a wide range of parties, from the Whitney Museum of American Art to Google Inc, which warned the lower court's ruling

Modernist painter Mark Rothko's hometown in Latvia devoted a new centre to the late artist's work on Wednesday. _0"> The Mark Rothko Arts Centre opened in the eastern town of Daugavpils, the Baltic country's second biggest city, with six paintings from the private collection of the artist's daughter and son, who were present at the launch. The exhibition is the first permanent Rothko installation in eastern Europe. "This centre, I think, is going to become an important archive, an important resource for Rothko scholars to draw on, and also for Rothko's public," son Christopher Rothko told a news conference.   Rothko was born in 1903 in Daugavpils, when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire and the town was known as Dvinsk. His parents emigrated to the United states when he was 10 and he later became one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. He killed himself in 1970. The new centre is located in the historic premises of Dau

With a billion dollars worth of art on offer at their spring auctions in New York, Christie's and Sotheby's are looking to the post-war and contemporary works to drive the market this month. The sales of the newer works are expected to exceed those of the once-dominant Impressionist and modern field by anywhere from 50 to 100 percent, according to estimates. While both Christie's and Sotheby's have a pair of Impressionist or modern paintings valued at $20 million or $30 million-range, both houses' contemporary sales feature at least three works that are expected to fetch $30 million to $40 million, and possibly more. Records are likely to fall for artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gerhard Richter, who already holds the record price for a work by any living artist at auction. "The supply of $30-million-plus paintings and high-quality material is far greater than what you can find in the Impressionist and modern field," said Brett Gorvy, Christ

With their black leather, studded jackets, ripped jeans, bondage trousers and messages of rebellion and anarchy, punks from the 1970s probably never envisioned that a major museum would be celebrating their influence on fashion 40 years later. But the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing just that with a new exhibition, "Punk: Chaos to Couture," that opens on May 9 and runs through August 14. It includes 100 punk styles and ranges from the mid-70s at Vivienne Westwood's and Malcolm McLaren's London boutique and images of The Sex Pistols to examples of punk's impact on haute couture and designers such as Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada and John Galliano.   Films and music from the era and a re-creation of the graffiti-covered toilet at New York's CBGB punk rock club, where Blondie, the Ramones and Talking Heads played, add to the gritty authenticity of the exhibit. "Punk was all about celebrating the individual,

The spring auctions got off to a strong start on Tuesday with Sotheby's solid sale of Impressionist and modern art which took in $230 million, led by a $42 million Cezanne still life and a $26 million Modigliani portrait. A year after Sotheby's set the world auction record for any work of art with its sale of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for $120 million, it managed a sale of works by Picasso, Rodin and Monet that saw 85 percent of 71 lots on offer finding buyers and came in just under its high pre-sale estimate of $235 million.   Calling its offerings "an extraordinary group of material," Simon Shaw, New York head of Impressionist and modern art for Sotheby's, said "it's very satisfying to see that the market agreed with us." "If anyone needed a signal that the Impressionist market is not just alive but thriving, this sale provided the evidence," Shaw added. The once-dominant Impressionist market has been eclipsed in re