(Reuters) – Facebook Inc is expected to price its initial public offering to raise more than $16 billion on Thursday, as strong demand, particularly from retail investors, fuels anticipation for a big pop in the stock when it begins trading on the Nasdaq.

Predictions on how much the stock will rise on Friday vary greatly, with some experts saying anything short of a 50 percent jump will be disappointing given the hype over what would be the third-largest initial share sale in U.S. history, after Visa Inc and General Motors Co. Other IPO watchers say the large size of the float, coupled with a raised price range, could curb first-day gains to as little as 10 percent.

“I think anything over 50 percent will be considered a successful offering — anything under that would be underwhelming,” said Jim Krapfel, analyst at Morningstar. “A lot of retail investors are not concerned about valuation. That’s what is going to drive the first day pop.”

Lee Simmons, industry specialist at Dun & Bradstreet, had a more modest forecast.

“You’ve got a large offering at an increased price — so a huge pop may be difficult to achieve. I’d think a 10 to 20 percent pop over the offer price is expected,” Simmons said. “When you’re talking about doubling or a pop the size of LinkedIn, it’s more difficult to achieve because Facebook is just offering more shares … The others were smaller floats – under 10 percent – so you had this artificial feeding frenzy.”

Professional networking company LinkedIn Corp’s shares doubled on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Another social media company, online games developer Zynga Inc which makes lots of games for Facebook users, fizzled on debut and ended down 5 percent on its first day of trading on Nasdaq. No one Reuters spoke with said they were expecting a fall in Facebook’s stock on Friday.

The No. 1 social network, with some 900 million users, on Tuesday raised the target IPO price range to between $34 and $38 per share, from between $28 and $35.

That would value Facebook at $93 billion to $104 billion, rivaling the market value of Internet powerhouse Amazon.com Inc, and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

On Wednesday, Facebook increased the size of the IPO by almost 25 percent to 421 million shares, a 15 percent float. If it prices at the top of the range, as expected, Facebook would raise at least $16 billion – including a greenshoe option for underwriters, it would raise north of $18.4 billion.

Despite the high expectations, the social network started eight years ago in Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room does face challenges maintaining its growth momentum.

Some investors worry the company has not yet figured out a way to make money from the growing number of users who access Facebook on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, revenue growth from Facebook’s online advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, has slowed in recent months.

Sports betting firms had varying estimates of where Facebook would end up at the close of its first day of trading. Spreadex Limited in Hertfordshire, UK, said clients are speculating shares could end up trading above $56 a share in the first day, having come down a bit in price since the amount of shares slated for sale were increased.

Betting on Intrade, a popular online betting site for political events, was limited, with only about 750 shares changing hands in contracts that bet on a closing price anywhere from $25 to $60. By contrast, more than 200,000 trades have been made on President Barack Obama’s chances for re-election.

Some financial advisers have warned their clients against jumping into Facebook right away, but the well-known brand could still attract enough interest to exceed the 458 million shares traded the day General Motors went public after emerging from bankruptcy in 2010.

One UBS adviser initially received calls from 12 clients clamoring to buy shares of Facebook, but over the past couple of weeks, two have changed their minds.

“A lot of people are thrown off by the recent negative stories in the press,” the adviser said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “One guy was worried about General Motors stopping its advertising on Facebook.”

GM said on Tuesday it would stop placing ads on Facebook, raising questions about whether the display ads on the site are as effective in reaching consumers as traditional media.

Overall financial advisers are struggling to manage clients’ expectations about what the stock will do and in some cases, if they will be able to get any stock for them.

“People want to just own it because they think it’s the next Google and they missed out on that,” said a financial adviser from Wells Fargo Advisors, the brokerage division of Wells Fargo & Co, which is part of the syndicate underwriting the deal.

Facebook has 33 underwriters for the IPO, led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

(Reporting by Olivia Oran, Jessica Toonkel and David Gaffen in New York, and Edwin Chan in San Francisco; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Phil Berlowitz)

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc has increased the price range in Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever initial public offering to raise more than $12 billion, giving the No.1 social network a valuation potentially exceeding $100 billion.

The company founded in a Harvard dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg raised the price target range to between $34 and $38 per share in response to strong demand, from $28 to $35, the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.

That would value Facebook at roughly $93 billion to $104 billion, rivaling the market capitalization of Internet powerhouses like Amazon.com Inc and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

At the mid-point of $36, Facebook would raise $12.1 billion, eclipsing Google Inc’s debut in 2004.

Wall Street had expected the company to increase the price range, with investors keen to get a slice of a strong consumer brand. The IPO roadshow began last week and has drawn crowds of investors from coast to coast.

Facebook plans to close the books on its IPO later on Tuesday, two days ahead of schedule, and in a signal that the landmark initial share sale is drumming up strong demand, a source familiar with the deal told Reuters on Monday.

The social network is scheduled to price its shares on Thursday and begin trading on Friday.

The IPO is already “well oversubscribed,” which is why the company is closing its books earlier than anticipated, the source said.

WHAT NEXT?

Facebook plans to sell 337.4 million shares, or 12.3 percent of the company. The capital-raising target far outstrips other big Internet IPOs. Google raised just shy of $2 billion in 2004, while last year Groupon Inc tapped investors for $700 million and Zynga Inc raked in $1 billion.

The higher price range marks an increase of 21 percent on the lower end.

The IPO comes amid concerns from some investors that Facebook hasn’t yet figured out a way to make money from an increasing number of users who access the social network on mobile devices such as smartphones.

Company executives met with prospective investors in Chicago on Monday and are slated to travel to Kansas City and Denver, before returning to Menlo Park, California, where Facebook is headquartered.

A host of Wall Street banks are underwriting Facebook’s offering, with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs serving as leads. Facebook will trade on Nasdaq under the symbol FB.

(Reporting By Olivia Oran and Tanya Agrawal; Editing by Edwin Chan, Bernard Orr, Ryan Woo and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

(Technology Review Magazine) – Retinal implants powered by light could reverse some vision loss with simple surgery.

The new implant, which works like a combination digital imaging chip and photovoltaic array, requires much less bulky hardware than previous designs. The devices have yet to be tested in live animals or human patients, but the implants are creating excitement among researchers because they have greater pixel densities and may restore more vision than other retinal prosthetics being worked on.

People suffering from macular degeneration (the most common cause of blindness among older people) and some other forms of blindness have lost the light-sensing cells in the retina but still have the underlying nerve cells that convey visual information to the brain. Retinal implants use electrodes to stimulate those nerves. Typically, the prosthetics require bulky electronics that sit on the eye to supply power, image data, or both to a chip inside the retina. The more hardware that’s installed in the body, the greater the risk to the patient. And the complexities of the electronics have typically limited the pixel counts of these systems.

The new design, described today in the journal Nature Photonics, gets around these problems by using light as both image and power source. The device, designed by researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, combines infrared video-projection goggles with a small, wire-free chip implanted inside the retina.

A camera on the goggles transmits video to an image processor, which sends a signal back to infrared projection screens inside the goggles. Other researchers have tried to develop photovoltaic retinal implants in the past, but it didn’t work. “The light that you get into the back of the retina at the equator on a sunny day is not enough to power a retinal implant,” says James Loudin, a researcher at Stanford. So the Stanford system doesn’t rely on the light that comes into the eye; it uses a projection system to make much more intense signals. The researchers selected infrared light because it won’t damage or heat up any of the eye tissues and will not be picked up by any remaining light-sensitive cells and confuse the image, says Loudin.

The infrared image is picked up by a compact array of photovoltaic pixels implanted right where the light-sensing cells would be in a healthy eye. Each pixel contains three infrared-sensitive diodes facing the inside of the eye. The diodes convert light into electricity that’s pulsed out to the nerve cells by electrodes facing the back of the eye.

The Stanford scientists have mapped the resulting nerve activity in mice. Now they’re experimenting with various designs, including a flexible silicon array that can bend to the curvature of the eye. The most pixel-dense so far has 178 pixels per square millimeter. By comparison, the first retinal prosthesis to go to market (in Europe last March), made by Second Sight of Sylmar, California, has 60 pixels in total and requires bulkier hardware.

The next step for the Stanford device is a few more years of safety testing before clinical trials.

BY KATHERINE BOURZAC

(Reuters) – U.S. consumer sentiment rose to its highest level in more than four years in early May as Americans were upbeat about the job market and buying plans improved, a survey showed on Friday, offering an encouraging sign for the economic recovery.

Separate data earlier in the day showed U.S. producer prices unexpectedly fell in April as energy costs dropped the most in six months, a sign of easing inflation pressures that could give the Federal Reserve more room to help the economy should growth weaken.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary May reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment improved to 77.8 from 76.4 in April, topping forecasts for a small decline to 76.2.

It was the highest level since January 2008.

Despite the recent slowdown in job growth, nearly twice as many consumers reported hearing about new job gains than said they had heard about recent job losses, the survey said.

Even so, consumers were only slightly more optimistic about declines in the unemployment rate than they were a year ago, with only one in four expecting it to fall in the year ahead.

Employers cut back on hiring in April and March after an acceleration at the start of the year. April’s unemployment rate eased to 8.1 percent as more people dropped out of the work force.

In a potential harbinger of increased spending, consumers’ buying plans for vehicles and durable goods improved at the beginning of the month, with 65 percent saying buying conditions were favorable, the highest level in more than a year.

“Households are feeling more comfortable. It’s pretty good news for consumer spending,” said Gus Faucher, senior macroeconomist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.

U.S. stocks crept higher in midday trading as the data helped offset the revelation of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss.

After a run-up at the start of the year, gasoline prices have pulled back in recent weeks, providing more breathing room for stretched consumers, and the survey found no further gains in prices were expected in the year ahead.

Survey director Richard Curtin said that while the lower gasoline prices are good news for consumers, he expects the sentiment index will likely be stuck around current levels until the U.S. presidential election in November.

Also on Friday, the Labor Department said its seasonally adjusted producer price index dropped 0.2 percent last month. That was the first drop this year and the biggest decline since October.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected prices at farms, factories and refineries to be flat last month.

“The good news is that there are no signs that inflation could threaten the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy any time soon,” Eugenio Aleman, senior economist at Wells Fargo, wrote in a note.

“The bad news is that if inflation continues to decelerate, then the Fed will probably start getting concerned that economic activity is weakening once again.”

A number of Fed officials appear loath to take further action to help the economy, with some arguing the central bank needs to get ready to begin withdrawing its extraordinary stimulus. The Fed has maintained since January that it expects economic conditions to warrant holding interest rates near zero through at least late 2014.

Still, the annual inflation rate targeted by the Fed continues to hover around the central bank’s 2 percent goal, and Friday’s price data did not appear to change investors’ views on the outlook for monetary policy.

A report on consumer prices due next week is expected to give further signs that inflation is ebbing.

The consumer sentiment report showed Americans’ inflation expectations continued to ease after a run-up in March. The one-year inflation expectation fell to 3.1 percent from 3.2 percent, though the five-to-10-year outlook edged up to 3.0 percent from 2.9 percent.

“This is good news for the Fed. It gives them still room (to) maneuver in the year ahead,” Richard Curtin told Reuters Insider.

That was in contrast to a separate survey that showed economists ratcheted up their inflation forecasts to an average 2.3 percent for the year, from earlier expectations of 2.0 percent.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s second-quarter survey of forecasters also showed economists see the unemployment rate averaging 8.1 percent this year and falling to 7.7 percent in 2013.

The New York Federal Reserve’s staff forecast, released on Friday, also expects the unemployment rate to continue to fall over the next two years before averaging about 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013.

The report on April producer prices showed wholesale prices 1.9 percent higher in April than a year earlier, the weakest reading since October 2009.

The drop in PPI was due to a 1.4 percent decline in energy prices, the biggest since October. Gasoline costs slumped 1.7 percent, while prices also fell for residential natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas.

Wholesale prices excluding volatile food and energy costs rose in line with economist’ expectations, up 0.2 percent after March’s 0.3 percent gain.

(Additional reporting by Richard Leong in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, a string of technological advances have made it faster and cheaper to sequence a human genome. But there’s still a big problem: what do you do with all that data once you’ve unraveled it?

For Andreas Sundquist, the answer is to send it to the cloud. Sundquist is the CEO and cofounder of DNAnexus, a software startup that positions itself between DNA sequencing facilities and those who need to manage, and glean information from, sequenced genomes—including academic researchers, doctors, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

“The more and more data you produce faster and cheaper, the more the bottleneck—which used to be the DNA sequencing itself—is actually now the data management,” he says.

Sundquist sees his company as an instant online genomics center, offering clients immediate access to vast stores of DNA data and to analysis tools so they can make sense of it all—and potentially come up with better treatments for cancer and genetic diseases, as well as identify genetic links to diseases like autism and alcoholism.

Eventually, Sundquist hopes DNAnexus will bring together lots of different genetic databases (which for now tend to exist on their own, without being linked to others), aiding research efforts, drug discoveries, and the creation of drug-targeting diagnostic tests.

And Sundquist expects the market for Mountain View, California-based DNAnexus’s services will grow dramatically. He estimates that about 20,000 full genomes have already been sequenced worldwide, and predicts this will rise to a million in several years as the price and time required continue to fall (right now, he estimates the process takes about a day and costs roughly $4,000). All that data will amount to more than an exabyte of data—one billion gigabytes—and hundreds of thousands of central processing units will be needed to analyze it all, he estimates.

DNAnexus isn’t the only company betting on this growth. David Dooling, assistant director of the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, points out that several other companies are offering cloud-based DNA analysis services, too, including Illumina.

“I think it’s certainly good that there are people that are trying to make analysis more accessible to a wider community,” Dooling says. “I think it’s a difficult value proposition in that a lot of people are trying to do it now.”

If Sundquist’s expectations pan out, there will be plenty of work to go around. He expects that in the next three years millions of genomes will be sequenced. In 10 years, he believes, everyone in the developed world will have their genome sequenced as part of their medical records, and that many children will have their genome sequenced when they’re born.

One day soon, “when you go to the lab and get a test done, some of those tests are basically going to be software that runs on the genome that’s already part of your record,” he says.

This doesn’t mean we’ll all soon be plucking a hair or swabbing a cheek and sending it off to a lab to get our genomes sequenced. In Sundquist’s view of the future, it will be even easier than that. “I think probably you’ll stick your thumb in your cell phone and it will be built-in,” he says, grinning. “I’m sure the iPhone 10 will have a DNA-sequencing module.”

BY RACHEL METZ

Worryingly for European policymakers, a downturn that is hitting Italy and Spain hard, now appears to be taking root among core members France and Germany.

The data hit the euro and dented optimism following a similar survey on Tuesday that showed the pace of growth in U.S. manufacturing picked up much more than expected.

“The numbers coming out of the euro zone give no cause for comfort. The China economy is holding up, but the debt crisis in Europe is weighing on growth and its rippling across the world,” said Peter Dixon at Commerzbank.

“Global concerns on growth are there, despite stellar numbers from the United States.”

Markit’s Eurozone Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) dropped to 45.9 last month from 47.7 in March, slightly below a preliminary reading and marking its lowest reading since June 2009.

It has languished the 50 mark that divides growth from contraction for nine months.

The outlook for manufacturing, which drove a large part of the bloc’s escape from recession, is far from bright, and a fresh economic downturn looms.

Firms cut workers at the fastest pace in over two years after new orders fell for the 11th straight month.

Data from Germany, Europe’s largest economy, showed its manufacturing sector contracted for the second month running in April and it was a similar picture in neighboring France.

Only a handful of the 17-nation bloc’s economies are still growing and the euro zone as a whole is expected to suffer a mild recession until the third quarter of this year, a Reuters poll showed last month.

Manufacturing in Spain, now at the centre of the euro zone storm, shrank at its fastest pace in nearly three years and Italy – also under pressure over its towering debts – saw new orders evaporating more quickly than at any time since March 2009.

The downturn is taking a toll on jobs. Unemployment in the euro zone rose to 10.9 percent in March, equaling the record high of 15 years ago, separate data showed on Wednesday, driven by rises in Italy and Spain.

ASIA PRODUCES THE GOODS

A gauge of China’s manufacturing offered more evidence that the world’s second-biggest economy bottomed out in the first quarter of the year. And factory growth in emerging rival India ticked up.

The HSBC China PMI, which concentrates mainly on privately-owned firms, remained below the 50 threshold for the sixth month running. But it rose to 49.3 in April from 48.3, hinting that the rate of deterioration had slowed, and was stronger than last week’s “flash” estimate.

“The pace of China’s slowdown has stabilized,” said Hongbin Qu, chief economist for China & co-Head of Asian economic research at HSBC.

HSBC’s indicator was weaker than China’s official PMI, which soared to a 13-month high of 53.3 in April, highlighting an ongoing divergence between China’s larger, predominantly state-owned enterprises that dominate the official data and the smaller, private firms that struggle to get credit.

Bulging order books helped nudge India’s factory activity up even as slower output growth and increasing price pressures dampened sentiment, its business survey showed.

Similar data released on Wednesday showed manufacturing activity in Asia’s key exporters South Korea and Taiwan grew but at a slower pace.

The uneven performance in China, taken together with data on Tuesday showing U.S. factory growth accelerating but barely any growth in British manufacturing, underscores a bumpy and still-fragile global economy.

“The effect of the solid U.S. manufacturing activity will be felt in Asia in about six months, supporting my view that Asian exporters will gradually recover towards the end of the year,” said Hirokazu Yuihama, a senior strategist at Daiwa Securities in Tokyo.

(Additional reporting by Yati Himatsingka in Bangalore, Lucy Hornby in Beijing, Leah Schnurr in Washington and Olesya Dmitracova in London; Editing by Mike Peacock)

(Reuters) – MasterCard Inc (MA.N), the world’s second-largest credit and debit card network, reported a 21 percent rise in quarterly profit as consumers spent more with their cards and revenue rose faster than expenses.

Executives cautioned, however, that such gains are less likely over the rest of the year because of the strength of the business in the latter parts of 2011, and given doubts about consumer confidence in the United States and in Europe.

MasterCard shares fell 2.6 percent to $445.59 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks fell broadly after disappointing news on manufacturing in Europe and private-sector job growth in the United States.

CEO Ajay Banga said that while U.S. consumer confidence has been roughly flat for two months, it is still higher than a year ago. Consumer spending in the United States, MasterCard’s home market, was up in all 11 categories the company tracks in the first quarter and was strongest at restaurants and at apparel, hardware and electronics stores, Banga said in a conference call.

Cardholders made $629 billion of purchases worldwide during the first quarter, up 17 percent from a year earlier, MasterCard said.

Card payments outside the United States grew 20.6 percent, based on local currencies, compared with 14 percent growth in the United States.

The number of transactions processed increased 29 percent to 7.7 billion, the fastest rate of growth since MasterCard went public in 2006. The increase reflects, in part, the increasing movement of consumers globally to making payments electronically instead of with paper currency.

Net income was $682 million, or $5.36 a share, compared with $562 million, or $4.29 a share, a year earlier, the Purchase, New York-based company reported on Wednesday.

Analysts on average had expected $5.30 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

MasterCard net revenue, adjusted for an acquisition, grew faster than expenses, rising 16 percent while operating expenses increased 9 percent.

Visa Inc (V.N), MasterCard’s larger rival in card payment processing networks, is scheduled to report its quarterly results following the close of New York Stock Exchange trading.

(Reporting by David Henry in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and John Wallace)

(Reuters) – Stocks were lower on Wednesday as a weaker euro zone report heightened concerns about the region’s fiscal health and domestic data casts doubt on the strength of the economic recovery.

A report by payrolls processor Automatic Data Processing showed U.S. private employers added 119,000 jobs in April, well short of expectations, ahead of Friday’s key payrolls report.

Euro zone factories sank further into decline last month, with the downturn hitting Italy and Spain hard and appearing to take root in France and Germany. European shares erased earlier gains, with the FTSEurofirst 300 .FTEU3 down 0.7 percent.

The reports came a day after the Dow closed at its highest level in more than four years on strong U.S. manufacturing data.

“These aren’t good numbers this morning, they are certainly on the low end of expectations. However, in the broader theme you can’t look at these numbers alone, you can’t isolate them from the broader picture, which is continuing expansion, continuing improvement in U.S. manufacturing,” said Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital in Jersey City, New Jersey.

“It’s at the low end of the range and I know it’s disappointing, but in the broader context it’s not really a game changer.”

Adding to the negative tone, new orders for U.S. factory goods in March recorded their biggest decline in three years, even as they came in slightly above expectations.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI dropped 63.46 points, or 0.48 percent, to 13,215.86. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index .SPX lost 8.93 points, or 0.64 percent, to 1,396.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC fell 11.09 points, or 0.36 percent, to 3,039.35.

Energy was the worst performer among the 10 major S&P sectors, weighed down by an 13 percent drop Chesapeake Energy Corp (CHK.N) to $17.05. The S&P energy index .GSPE lost 1.4 percent. Chesapeake was the most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange.

Analysts pointed to Chesapeake’s higher-than-expected natural gas output, up quarter on quarter, even as the company sought to cut production.

Also, Reuters reported Chief Executive Aubrey McClendon ran a $200 million hedge fund on the side that traded in the same commodities Chesapeake produces.

MasterCard Inc (MA.N), the big credit and debit card network, reported a 21 percent rise in profit. Shares were off 2.5 percent to $445.

CVS Caremark Corp (CVS.N) were up 1.9 percent to $45.55 after the drugstore operator and pharmacy benefits manager posted a sharp rise in first-quarter sales and raised its profit forecast.

American Eagle Outfitters Inc (AEO.N) jumped 12.5 percent to $20.13 after the teen clothing retailer raised its profit forecast.

Of the 350 S&P 500 companies that have reported results through Wednesday morning, 70 percent have topped analysts’ estimates, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Women’s clothing retailer Ascena Retail Group Inc (ASNA.O) will buy Charming Shoppes Inc (CHRS.O) for $857.2 million in an all-cash deal. Charming surged 23.4 percent to $7.28 as the most actively traded Nasdaq stock and Ascena gained 10 percent to $20.92.

Chipmaker Microchip Technology Inc (MCHP.O) will acquire smaller rival Standard Microsystems Corp (SMSC.O) for $829.2 million. Microchip added 0.3 percent to $35.35 and Standard Micro climbed 38.3 percent to $36.28.

Results are Wednesday from 31 S&P 500 companies, including Visa Inc (V.N), Whole Foods Market Inc (WFM.O) and Symantec Corp (SYMC.O).

(Reporting By Chuck Mikolajczak; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

(Reuters) – The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an informal inquiry into Chesapeake Energy Corp’s controversial program that granted Chief Executive Aubrey McClendon a share in each of the natural gas producer’s wells, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

That investigation, being led by the SEC’s office in Fort Worth, Texas, comes after Reuters reported about loans McClendon had obtained on those wells that raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest by the company’s CEO.Chesapeake said in a statement earlier on Thursday that its directors had never reviewed or approved McClendon’s mortgages on stakes in those wells, reversing its assertions that its board of directors was “fully aware” of McClendon’s financing transactions around the well ownership stakes.

“The Board of Directors did not review, approve or have knowledge of the specific transactions engaged in by Mr. McClendon or the terms of those transactions,” the company said.Reuters reported on April 18 that McClendon, who founded the company, had borrowed as much as $1.1 billion against his 2.5 percent interest in wells that he received under the company’s “Founder Well Participation Program.”

The company also said on Thursday that it would end that program in 2015, when the shareholder approval of the program that started in 2005 expires.

Chesapeake said “the statement last week the that ‘the Board of Directors is fully aware of the existence of Mr. McClendon’s financing transactions’ was intended to convey the fact that the Board of Directors is generally aware” that McClendon had used the well ownership stakes as security for the loans.

One analyst said Chesapeake’s new statement did not provide any reassurance that it was addressing the issues.

“How can this make me more comfortable?” said Phil Weiss, an analyst with Argus Research. “Either you’re fully aware, or you’re not. ‘Fully’ and ‘generally’ are two entirely different words.”

But an investor said the move was a step in the right direction, and that it showed the company was listening to shareholders’ complaints.

“It’s basic due diligence that sadly wasn’t being done before,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which owns Chesapeake shares. “It shows the free reign that McClendon had.”

The company, the second-largest natural gas producer in the United States behind Exxon Mobil Corp, said it would not extend that program for McClendon beyond 2015, when authorization under a 2005 shareholder vote will expire.

Chesapeake said McClendon would disclose additional information about his ownership stakes in the wells, and the board would review the CEO’s financing arrangements.

The loans, taken out over the past three years, were previously undisclosed to shareholders, analysts and academics said, raising concerns that McClendon’s personal financial deals could compromise his fiduciary duty to Chesapeake.

(Reuters) – The housing market is seeing hints of stabilization, with February home prices rising for the first time in 10 months, according to a survey on Tuesday, while a measure of consumer confidence last month fell more than expected.

The S&P/Case-Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas gained 0.2 percent in February from January on a seasonally adjusted basis, matching economists’ forecasts.

It was the first time prices have risen since April 2011. That gain was itself an anomaly in a string of declines stretching back to May 2010.

Still, the report was far from suggesting that problems in the battered sector were over. Average home prices across the country were back to late 2002 levels, the report said, as the non-seasonally adjusted 20-city index fell 0.8 percent to 134.20, the lowest since October 2002.

“Even with today’s data, the broad prospect for home prices is at best flat over the course of the year,” said Tom Porcelli, chief economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York.

“And as much as we have had progress with the supply and demand imbalance, it is still a challenge to gather any momentum here.”

Robert Shiller, co-creator of the home price index, said the housing market is likely to remain weak and may take a generation or more to rebound.

“I worry that we might not see a really major turnaround in our lifetimes,” Shiller said on Reuters Insider, calling the day’s home price data a mixed bag.

Data from the Conference Board showed its index of consumer attitudes edged down to 69.2 from a downwardly revised 69.5 in March.

Expectations for prices in the coming year cooled to 5.8 percent from 6.2 percent. March’s inflation expectation was originally reported as 6.3, the highest level since May 2010.

Wall Street saw little reaction immediately after the data with stocks getting a boost in the late morning from corporate earnings.

Earnings results from a round of large manufacturers on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s expectations, as recovering domestic demand helped offset a weak European economy and slowing growth inChina.

A separate, government report showed new single-family home sales sagged in March to their lowest level in four months, but sales in the prior three months were revised higher.

The Commerce Department said March sales slipped 7.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted 328,000-unit annual rate. February’s sales pace was revised higher to 353,000 units, the fastest pace since November 2009, from the previously reported 313,000 units.

“The conditions in housing are still extremely weak, but there are some very subtle, less negative, signs suggesting stabilization there,” said Sean Incremona, economist at 4Cast Ltd in New York.

Six years after home prices started to crumble, the housing market remains a thorn in the side of the economy. Ongoing foreclosures, tight credit and a dearth of buyers have kept the sector on the ropes.

Economists say a meaningful recovery in housing is still a long way off and will show a regional disparity as some areas improve more quickly than others.

The beleaguered housing market has also been a concern for the Federal Reserve. The central bank begins its two-day meeting on Tuesday, and investors will be keen for any insight on whether the central bank will provide more stimulus for the economy.

The Fed releases its statement on Wednesday. It has held interest rates at near-zero since late 2008 and has purchased more than $2 trillion in long-term securities as part of its efforts to bolster the fragile economic recovery.

The central bank has said it will likely keep rates at ultra-low levels at least through 2014.

ATLANTA, LAS VEGAS PRICES TUMBLE

Prices in the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index fell 3.5 percent year over year, moderating from the previous month’s decline of 3.8 percent.

Prices dropped in seven of the cities on a seasonally adjusted basis, while prices in two cities were unchanged. On an unadjusted basis, 16 of the areas slumped further.

By Leah Schnurr