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Passengers stepping out of London Bridge tube station cannot help but crane their necks to gaze at the jagged tower under construction: The Shard is the tallest building in the European Union and looks like a slice of glass balanced on the edge of the financial district.

When the tower opens next year, visitors to the observation deck will see helicopters fly by at eye level and take in the metropolis all the way to the distant north Downs Hills. The structure designed by renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano dwarfs nearby landmarks like Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral across the Thames.

The ambitious project speaks of now faded boom times: 1.5 billion pound ($2.34 billion) price tag, fancy restaurants, corporate office space, posh hotel. But it is being completed as Britain and Europe totter on the brink of recession _ and the Shard will loom over a city in decline.

Neighbors are hoping the dramatic tower, visible from most parts of London, will bring big spenders to its south-of-the-river location, for centuries the less prosperous side of the Thames.

“I like the design, I like the promise. I think it’s going to blast this neighborhood out of the water,” said Cherille McNeil-Halward, 71, who runs a picture framing shop a few minutes away from the Shard. “This tower will bring people with money to spend here, and that’s got to be a good thing.”

There is no question that the Shard is a riveting addition to the traditionally low-rise London skyline. But some complain it dominates the view, obscuring sights such as St. Paul’s impressive dome.

The developer Irvine Sellar sees the project as a symbol of London’s status as a world city. The 72-floor, 310 meter- (1,016 foot-) tall building is designed by an Italian, financed by the Qatar government, and the Chinese hotel group Shangri-La were the first tenants to sign up.

“We want this building to be a building Londoners will feel ownership of,” said Sellar. “You can eat there, you can work there, you can sleep there. And you can see the view from there.”

The building’s exterior will be finished in June but it is unlikely to open until early next year. It will open in a truly historic neighborhood, close to the Tower of London, Shakespeare’s Globe, and Borough Market.

In fact, the ultra-modern Shard sits at the edge of ancient London. The first Roman settlement Londinium was nearby on the banks of the Thames. Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” was set in the streets behind the Shard.

The developers conceived the project more than 11 years ago when there was a financial appetite for building tall low interest rate personal loans. But it generated almost immediate opposition from conservation groups who didn’t want the fabric of the city changed.

English Heritage and other groups complained that the design did not fit in with the surrounding architecture, but were overruled.

Prince Charles, who has waged a passionate campaign against modern architecture, wryly referred to the Shard as “an enormous salt cellar” shortly after it won planning permission but has not formally tried to block the project.

Last year UNESCO said it is reviewing the status of the Tower of London as a World Heritage Site, partly because of the way the Shard and other buildings loom over its courtyard.

The future of the building is still not secure. Along with Shangri-La, some restaurants have signed leases, Sellar said, but most of the office space has not yet been rented at a time when many London-based businesses are striving to reduce costs.

A report by Barclays Capital published this month finds a correlation between the construction of skyscrapers and financial crises, concluding that ambitious building projects often open just as the economy declines.

It cites the economic and oil crises of the early 1970s, which coincided with the completion of the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago. In Malaysia the building of the Petronas Towers coincided with the Asian economic crisis on 1997. And in Dubai the Burj Khalifa _ the world’s tallest building _ went up as the emirate almost went bust.

The Shard itself was hit by the credit crunch. Sellar secured funding from investment bank Credit Suisse in 2008, but the bank pulled out after Lehman Brothers crashed in September of that year. Eventually the central bank of Qatar stepped in to finance the project.

Other tall buildings have been built in recent years as London has become a more vertical city _ including Norman Foster’s famous “Gherkin.” But the Shard dominates them all, and is likely to become a prominent symbol of London.

“You are going to see this building from everywhere in the city,” said Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic at The Guardian newspaper. “It is going be the building that says `this is London,’ and the message it is going to send is that London is brash, shiny and pretty bling.”

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BlackBerry maker Research in Motion’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, announced they have stepped down as co-CEOs and co-chairmen of the once-iconic company that has struggled to compete in recent years.

The RIM founders have been replaced by Thorsten Heins, a chief operating officer who joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG, RIM said Sunday.

The Canadian company turned the email smartphone into a ubiquitous device that many could not live without, but U.S. users have moved on to flashier touch-screen phones such as Apple’s iPhone and various competing models that run Google’s Android software. RIM has suffered a series of setbacks and has lost tens of billions in market value.

RIM said last month that new phones deemed critical to the company’s future would be delayed until late this year. And its PlayBook tablet, RIM’s answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support, forcing the company to deeply discount it to move the devices off store shelves.

Many shareholders and analysts have said a change or sale of the company has been needed, but the sudden departure of the two founders from their top jobs wasn’t expected despite their promises that they would examine the co-CEO and co-chairmen structure.

Balsillie and Lazaridis have long been celebrated as Canadian heroes, even appearing in the country’s citizenship guide for new immigrants as models of success. They headed Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM together for the past two decades.

“There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now,” Lazaridis said in a statement.

Lazaridis will take on a new role as vice chairman of RIM’s board and chairman of the board’s new innovation committee. Balsillie remains a member of the board.

The two remain two of RIM’s biggest shareholders.

“I agree this is the right time to pass the baton to new leadership, and I have complete confidence in Thorsten, the management team and the company,” Balsillie said in the statement. “I remain a significant shareholder and a director and, of course, they will have my full support.”

Analysts have said RIM’s future depends on its much-delayed new software platform as RIM has tried and failed to reinvigorate the BlackBerry. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said in late 2010 that RIM would have a hard time catching up to Apple because RIM has been forced to move beyond its area of strength and into unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.

Heins, 54, said Lazaridis and Balsillie took RIM in the right direction and said he’s committed to the new software.

“We are more confident than ever that was the right path. It is Mike and Jim’s continued unwillingness to sacrifice long-term value for short-term gain which has made RIM the great company that it is today. I share that philosophy and am very excited about the company’s future,” Heins said.

Barbara Stymiest, a former chief operating officer of the Royal Bank of Canada who has been a member of RIM’s board since 2007, has named chair of the board of directors. RIM also announced that Prem Watsa, the chief executive of Fairfax Financial Holdings, is a new board member. Watsa has become a significant shareholder.

Lazaridis said he was so confident in the future direction of the company that he intends to purchase an additional $50 million of the company’s shares on the open market.

RIM was worth more than $70 billion a few years ago but now has a market value of $8.9 billion.

The company still has 75 million active subscribers, but many analysts believe RIM will lose market share internationally as it has in the U.S. Market researcher NPD Group said RIM’s market share of smartphones in the U.S. declined from 44 percent in 2009 to 10 percent in 2011.

Balsillie acknowledged in December that the last few quarters have been among the most challenging times in the company’s history.

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The cruise ship grounded off Tuscany shifted again on its rocky perch Friday, forcing the suspension of diving search operations for the 21 people still missing and raising concerns about the stability of the ship’s resting place.

However, crews began combing the area above the waterline in the evening after officials determined the ship had stabilized enough, and they will evaluate the situation Saturday morning to see if the diving operation can resume, said Coast Guard spokesman Cmdr. Cosimo Nicastro.

The diving operation focuses on an area where passengers would have sought lifeboats, Nicastro said.

“We are ready to go for the morning,” he said, as long as the partially submerged ship is not shifting.

The $450 million Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew when it slammed into well-charted rocks off the island of Giglio a week ago. Eleven people have been confirmed dead.

It was not clear if the slight movements registered by sensors placed on board the Costa Concordia were just vibrations as the ship settles on the rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio or if the massive ocean liner is slowly slipping off the reef.

The sensors detected that the ship’s bow was moving about 15 millimeters (half an inch) an hour and the stern about 7 millimeters (one-quarter inch) an hour, said Nicola Casagli of the University of Florence, who was called in by Italian authorities to monitor the ship’s stability.

The Concordia’s movements are being watched since any significant shift could be dangerous for divers trying to locate those missing since the Concordia ran aground Jan. 13. An additional fear is that movement could damage tanks holding a half-million gallons of fuel oil and lead to leaks.

The sea floor drops off sharply a few meters (yards) from where the ship is resting, and Italy’s environment minister has warned it risks sinking.

Capt. Francesco Schettino, who was jailed after he left the ship before everyone was safely evacuated, is under house arrest, facing possible charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship.

On Friday, relatives of some of the 21 missing were at Giglio’s port getting briefings from rescue teams.

Casagli told Sky TG24 that some movement in the Concordia was only natural given the immense weight of the steel-hulled ship, which is being held in place by two huge rocks at bow and stern.

But the latest movements indicate it isn’t stable, he said. “These are small, regular movements that are being monitored because they’re going in the same direction,” he told Sky.

Late Thursday, Costa-owner Carnival Corp. announced it was conducting a comprehensive audit of all 10 of its cruise lines to review safety and emergency response procedures in the wake of the Costa disaster. The evacuation was chaotic and the alarm to abandon the ship was sounded after the Concordia had capsized too much to get many life boats down.

____

Andrea Foa contributed from Giglio, Italy.

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A young Moldovan woman who says she was called to the bridge of the stricken Costa Concordia to help evacuate Russian passengers defended the embattled captain on Thursday, saying he worked tirelessly and “saved over 3,000 lives.”

Domnica Cemortan, who says she was translating Capt. Francesco Schettino’s orders during the frenzied evacuation, has emerged as a potential new witness in the investigation into the officer’s actions the night the ship ran aground.

Schettino is under house arrest, facing possible charges of manslaughter, abandoning ship and causing a shipwreck after he made an unauthorized detour from the programmed route that caused the vessel to slam into a reef and capsize off the Tuscan island of Giglio. At least 11 people were killed and 21 are missing.

Meanwhile, a new audiotape of the doomed vessel’s first communications with maritime authorities showed the ship’s officers continued to report only an electrical problem for more than 30 minutes after hitting the reef.

Attention has focused on Cemortan amid reports by crew and passengers that Schettino was seen eating dinner with a Russian-speaking woman at the time of the impact. The 25-year-old Cemortan speaks Russian and had worked as a hostess for the Italian cruise operator, although her contract had expired and she was vacationing with friends when she boarded the luxury liner hours before the Jan. 13 disaster.

“I saw him at the restaurant. He was with a blonde woman. He did not look drunk. They were just eating,” a Filipino cocktail waitress, Gladly Balderama, said of Schettino.

Another Filipino crew member, Roger Barsita, said he served Schettino and a woman dinner.

“I have no idea who she is,” he told The Associated Press in Manila. “Some of the waiters said she’s Russian.”

In interviews with Moldovan media, Cemortan said she was dining with “colleagues, so to speak” in the ship’s restaurant when the ship struck the reef. She said she was summoned to the bridge to translate instructions for passengers, particularly Russians, since she speaks several languages. Moldova is a former Soviet republic.

“All our colleagues made announcements in different languages because there was a problem with the electricity. It was very dark on the ship,” she told the Moldovan daily Adevarul. “I stayed on the bridge in case the captain needed me to make an announcement. There were about 20 more officers, cruise directors and the captain.”

She defended Schettino and crew members against criticism of a chaotic evacuation, saying they saved thousands of lives.

“He did a great thing. He saved over 3,000 lives,” she told Moldova’s Jurnal TV.

Prosecutor Francesco Verusio declined to comment on Italian media reports that Cemortan was being sought as a witness, citing the ongoing investigation.

Divers, meanwhile, were focusing on an evacuation route on the ship’s fourth level, now about 60 feet (18 meters) below the surface, where five bodies were found earlier this week, Navy spokesman Alessandro Busonero told Sky TG 24. Crews set off small explosions to blow holes into hard-to-reach areas for easier access by divers.

Seven of the dead were identified Thursday by authorities _ four French passengers, one Spanish and one Italian passenger and one Peruvian crew member. Italian passenger Giovanni Masia, who would have turned 86 next week, was buried in Sardinia.

Italian authorities have identified 32 people who have either died or are missing: two Americans, 12 Germans, seven Italians, six French, two Peruvians and one person each from Hungary, India and Spain.

Meanwhile, a new audiotape of the Concordia’s first contact with maritime authorities appeared to support allegations that the captain and other senior officers were slow to recognize the seriousness of the accident.

In the tape, which begins at 10:12 p.m., the port authority asks if everything is OK. A Concordia officer replies that the ship had experienced a blackout, even though it had hit the reef more than half an hour earlier.

Italian media reported the officer on the call was Schettino, but that could not be independently confirmed.

The port official tells the officer that a relative of a crew member had reported to police on the mainland that “during the dinner everything fell on his head” _ a reference to flying plates and glasses in the ship’s restaurant after the impact.

“No, negative, we have a blackout and we are verifying the conditions on board,” the response came. The port official then asked if passengers had suited up in life vests.

“I repeat, we are verifying the conditions of the blackout,” the officer said.

Passengers and crew members have faulted Schettino and other senior officers for failing to act quickly, delaying evacuation until the ship was listing too severely to lower many of the lifeboats.

“They asked us to make announcements to say that it was electrical problems and that our technicians were working on it and not to panic,” a French steward, Thibault Francois, told France-2 television. “I told myself, ‘This doesn’t sound good.’”

He said he eventually started escorting passengers to lifeboats on orders from his boss, not the captain. “No, there were no orders from the management,” he said.

An Indian waiter agreed.

“The emergency alarm was sounded very late,” only after the ship “started tilting and water started seeping in,” said Mukesh Kumar, who arrived home in New Delhi on Thursday.

Cemortan, however, defended the captain and crew.

“How dare they accuse us that we were incompetent when we saved 3,000 lives,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Incompetent are the ones who have a poisonous tongue.”

Cemortan described heroic efforts by crew members to help passengers in a dark and listing ship.

“We were looking for them, searching for them,” she told Jurnal. “We heard them all crying, shouting in all languages.”

“I couldn’t see a thing, I could just hear how the ship was creaking and how heavy things were coming from above down to where the ship was leaning,” she wrote on Facebook.

She said Schettino stayed on deck at least until 11:50 p.m., when he ordered her into a lifeboat.

Late Thursday, Carnival Corp., which owns Italian operator Costa Crociere SpA, announced it was conducting a comprehensive audit of all 10 of its cruise lines to review safety and emergency response procedures in the wake of the Costa disaster.

In addition, the Miami-based company, the world’s largest cruise line, said it was conducting an outside review of the Concordia grounding itself.

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Markets advanced further Wednesday on hopes the International Monetary Fund would get more money and as Greece resumes discussions with private creditors to get them to agree to reduce the value of their holdings of Greek debt.

Following a breakdown of talks last Friday, investors remain nervous about what may happen, though sentiment has been shored up somewhat by comments made late Tuesday from Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, that the Washington D.C.-based institution was looking at ways to increase its financial firepower, partly to deal with Europe’s debt crisis.

If the IMF were to have its resources ramped up by governments raising their contributions, then it would have more money available to potentially help Europe in dealing with its debt woes.

“More resources means more liquidity which I guess is good for asset prices in the short term, or at least reduces threat of systemic risk in the interim,” said Neil MacKinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital.

Europe’s debt crisis started in Greece over two years ago and investors will be looking to see if the country can negotiate a deal with its creditors that will ease the burden of its crushing debts.

Last October, Greece’s partners in the eurozone sanctioned a deal whereby Greece’s creditors agree to take a cut in the value of their Greek bond holdings to help lighten the country’s debt burden. The deal with private investors, known as the Private Sector Involvement, or PSI, aims to reduce Greece’s debt by euro100 billion ($127.9 billion) by swapping private creditors’ bonds for new ones with a lower value. It is a key part of a euro130 billion international bailout, the second one for Greece.

Without a deal with its private creditors, Greece has been told it won’t get the next installment of money due from its first bailout. Without that money, Greece would be unable to pay a big bond redemption in March, potentially triggering a chain of events that could derail the global economic recovery and cause financial mayhem in Europe.

“All eyes will once again be on Greece today as talks restart with the IIF today on the voluntary restructuring of the debt with private creditors,” said Michael Hewson, markets analyst at CMC Markets.

In Europe, the CAC-40 in France was up 0.4 percent at 3,284 while Germany’s DAX rose 0.5 percent to 6,365. The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was steady at 5,695.

In the currency markets, the euro remained well-supported as it rebounded off 17-month dollar lows payday loan lenders. It was trading 0.7 percent higher at $1.2832.

Wall Street was poised for a steady open later though a run of economic data may well alter expectations _ Dow futures were up 0.4 percent at 12,469 while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 futures rose 0.5 percent to 1,295.

Earlier Asian stock markets largely continued their recent advance. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 1 percent to close at 8,550.58 while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.3 percent to 19,686.92.

However, mainland Chinese shares fell on profit-taking after a brisk day of trade Tuesday that saw the biggest gains in 27 months. The Shanghai Composite Index lost 1.4 percent to 2,266.38, while the Shenzhen Composite Index dropped 2.7 percent to 837.40.

Investors cheered Tuesday’s news out of China that the world’s second-largest economy slowed less dramatically in the fourth quarter than feared _ but still enough of a slowdown to persuade investors that Beijing will pursue a pro-growth monetary policy.

“People have been buying stocks in anticipation of a relaxation in monetary policy by the Chinese government,” said Derek Cheung, chief investment officer at Neutron INV Partners Ltd. in Hong Kong. “The market expects this around Chinese New Year. If China doesn’t loosen around the new year, the market may come under pressure.” The holiday begins Jan. 23.

With Europe seemingly sliding back toward recession and the U.S. recovery still fairly moderate by historical standards, China’s performance is important to shore up the global economy and market sentiment, especially when investors are fretting about a potential Greek default that could further roil financial markets.

The World Bank was the latest organization to issue a warning about the global economy. In an economic update, the Washington D.C.-based international organization cut its growth forecast for developing countries this year to 5.4 percent from 6.2 percent and for developed countries to 1.4 percent from 2.7 percent. For the 17 countries that use the euro currency, it forecast a 0.3 percent from the previous estimate of 1.8 percent growth.

Despite the World Bank’s warning, oil prices remain supported on China’s positive growth news _ benchmark crude for February delivery was up 57 cents at $101.28 a barrel.

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Face recognition and detection technology is becoming cheaper, faster, and much more commonplace, raising the question of whether people will be able to remain anonymous in the near future.

Digital signs and sensors that detect and recognize faces are no longer a matter of science fiction. They are real and are popping up everywhere from malls to bars to smartphones.

So what’s protecting you from Big Brother tracking your movements and invading your privacy? As of right now, technology is the only significant barrier.

Today, the technology is not quite robust enough to snap a photo of someone on the street and instantly know who they are. Computer processors aren’t fast enough to scan across billions of images in real time to match an offline face to an online photograph. But that’s coming soon.

"To match two photos of people in the United States in real time would take four hours," said Alessandro Acquisti, professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. "That’s too long to do in real time. But assuming a steady improvement in cloud computing time, we can soon get much closer to that reality than many of us believed."

Acquisti and his research team at Carnegie Mellon have already developed a proof-of-concept iPhone application that can snap a photo of a person and within seconds display their name, date of birth and social security number.

Currently, the reference photos have to be uploaded to a database, but Acquisti said that processing speeds will soon become fast enough to do the whole process online and in an instant.

Since 1993, the false positive rate for identifying faces has been halved every two years, reaching 0.003% by the end of last year, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Though computers still have difficulty identifying faces in low light or poor photo quality, programs are now able to capture a profile of a face, build a 3D model of it, rotate the photo and identify the person the face belongs to.

If a future in which you can always be identified really is around the corner, what will stop advertisers or even the government from putting names to previously anonymous faces of people walking into a store, strolling down the street or protesting a convention? That’s what the Federal Trade Commission sought to find out at a facial recognition policy conference in Washington last month payday loans guaranteed no fax.

The answer as of now: industry self-regulation. The Digital Signage Federation, a consortium of companies operating digital signs that detect or recognize faces, developed privacy guidelines that require consumers to "opt-in" to being detected or recognized. But that "opt-in" can be made as simply as walking into a store that posts on its window that it detects faces.

Privacy advocates and lawyers representing face recognition companies agreed that the kinks need to be worked out of the system. As of today, no laws or regulations specifically prevent your face from being detected or recognized without your consent.

"Is U.S. privacy law ready for facial recognition? It’s not even close," said Daniel Solove, professor at the George Washington University Law School.

The solution, however, isn’t easy. Warning people that a particular venue is equipped with face detection technology means the only way for people not to be detected would be to avoid the location. But what if it’s a drug store and someone needs to get a prescription?

What about a "do not track" registry of faces? Even if that technology could be developed, it’s not feasible to ask everyone to submit a photo and unpalatable for many to opt-out of a system that most believe should be opt-in.

Some suggested a red line denoting a face recognition area or even separate entrances. But what about digital signs on the sidewalk?

"Wear a mask," said John Verdi, senior counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Now there’s a thought.  

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Jeff Rose, 33, a financial planner, is trying to improve his credit score — even though it’s 780, which is 69 points above the median score.

Rose, who lives in Carbondale, Ill., said he opened up a second credit card last year to establish another line of credit and help boost his score. He said he doesn’t know exactly what actions will help or hurt his score, but he wants to get it above 800 to ensure he gets the best rate if he refinances his mortgage.

Three years after the credit crisis — when lenders abruptly closed accounts and cut limits — consumers, including those with excellent scores, have become more focused on getting their number above 800. Those efforts may be futile, because once consumers have FICO credit scores of 760, a higher one doesn’t mean they’ll get better interest rates on mortgages and credit cards or more elite card offers, said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

“There’s very little incremental benefit to getting a score above that,” he said. Once consumers are above 760, “it’s a lot more difficult to move the score up in any noticeable way, and little reward.”

The most common scores are based on models established by FICO, formerly known as Fair Isaac Corp., which are used to gauge financial health. The numbers, which range from 300 to 850, affect the ability to get mortgages and credit cards, as well as the rates borrowers pay. The score is used by 90 of the 100 largest U.S. financial institutions, according to FICO’s website. There are other scores used by lenders, such as VantageScore, which has a 501 to 990 range for measuring credit risk.

About 18 percent of 200 million consumers in the U.S. with credit scores, or 36 million Americans, had credit scores of 800 or higher in 2011, according to estimates from FICO. More than 75 million had scores of at least 750; the median score last year was about 711, FICO said.

The percentage of consumers with scores of 750 or more has fluctuated only slightly during the past five years, said Barry Paperno, consumer affairs manager for myFICO.com. That’s because consumers with high credit scores tended to maintain their good behaviors during the credit crisis, such as paying down debt and cutting expenses, Paperno said.

The score that’s considered the cutoff to qualify for the best rates, however, has changed. Before the recession, it was generally 720 instead of at least 750, said Ben Woolsey, director of marketing and consumer research at CreditCards.com.

FICO credit scores rank borrowers according to the likelihood of default, and there’s almost no difference in the probability of default when a consumer has a 780 or an 820, said Ken Lin, chief executive and founder of Credit Karma payday loans. That means lenders won’t price a consumer differently or extend different rates, Lin said. “If you’re at 780 plus, it’s all bragging rights from there,” Lin said.

The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 3.89 percent last week, according to Freddie Mac. The average interest rate charged on credit card balances was 12.8 percent in November, according to Federal Reserve figures released Jan. 9.

A FICO score of 760 or higher on a $300,000 30-year fixed mortgage may qualify a borrower for a 3.62 rate or $1,368 monthly payment, compared with a 3.85 percent rate and monthly payment of $1,406 for those with scores from 700 to 759, according to myFICO.com. Having a credit score of at least 720 means a consumer may get a 3.89 rate on a 36-month auto loan of $25,000 and pay $737 a month, compared with 5.31 percent and a payment of $753 for those with scores from 690 to 719.

The decision to offer a mortgage and the size and rate on that loan is based on many factors about a borrower’s financial history, said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets. JPMorgan’s risk management approach is proprietary, and criteria that go into the decisions on credit cards may be based on income and credit history with other Chase products, said Paul Hartwick, a spokesman for the bank.

While the type of mortgage product and region may affect rates, generally FICO scores above 720 receive the lowest rates, Terry Francisco, a spokesman for Bank of America Corp. A FICO score is one of several considerations the bank uses in determining credit card rates, Betty Riess, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. lender.

Elite card offers are more likely to be based on income and assets than high credit scores, Bankrate’s McBride said. When making credit decisions, American Express Co. looks at a cardmember’s credit profile, which includes total debt level, reported income, credit bureau score, credit report and payment history, said Melanie Backs, a spokeswoman for the firm, the biggest credit card issuer by purchases.

Revolving debt, which includes credit cards, climbed in November by $5.6 billion, the biggest advance since March 2008, according to Federal Reserve data.

“There are a lot of companies out there competing for credit,” said Linda Sherry, director of national priorities for Consumer Action in Washington. “Once you’re there, your dance card is going to be full,” she said, referring to a score of about 770.

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The U.S. trade deficit widened in November for the first time in five months, largely because of a spike in the price of imported oil.

Still, exports fell for a second straight month, a sign that Europe’s slowdown has begun to affect the U.S. economy.

The trade gap rose 10.4 percent to $47.8 billion, the Commerce Department said Friday.

Overall exports dropped 0.9 percent to $177.8 billion. But American exports to Europe fell more sharply _ nearly 6 percent.

Many economists say Europe may already be in a recession, which would cut demand for American-made goods. Europe buys roughly one-fifth of U.S. exports.

Falling exports weakens growth because it means less production at factories and weaker revenue for U.S. companies.

“The decline in our sales to Europe was fairly large and may be the start of a longer-term trend in declining exports to the Continent,” said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors.

Higher oil prices were the main reason the deficit widen. Imports rose 1.3 percent to a record $225.6 billion. The price of oil rose above $100 per barrel in November. It had been as low as $75 per barrel in the previous month.

The trade deficit hit a 2011 peak of $52.1 billion before it fell for four straight months. That helped boost economic growth because foreign nations were buying more American goods.

Exports hit an all-time high of $180.6 billion in September, reflecting healthy sales of American-made cars and trucks in foreign markets totally free credit score.

Higher exports lead to more U.S. jobs and higher consumer spending, which boosts economic growth.

A weaker trade deficit will subtract from growth in the final three months of the year. Many economists had expected growth to be strong after seeing more hiring, an increase in inventory growth and faster production at U.S. factories.

“The widening in the U.S. trade deficit in November … is perhaps the first real sign that the crisis in Europe and the more general global slowdown is starting to take its toll on the U.S.,” said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics.

Through 11 months, the 2011 deficit is running at an annual rate of $559.4 billion, 11.9 percent above the 2010 deficit of $500 billion.

For November, the deficit with China dropped 4.3 percent to $26.9 billion. But for the year, the imbalance with China climbed to $272.3 billion. That’s on track to surpass last year’s record of $273.1 billion.

Auto imports rose to $22.3 billion. But consumer goods fell to $42.5 billion, reflecting declines in household goods, clothing and televisions.

The drop in exports covered a number of manufacturing categories. Sales of commercial aircraft, U.S.-made cars and machinery were all down.

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Grocery store operator Supervalu says its fiscal third quarter net loss widened due to costs related to a turnaround plan, continued high food prices and a cautious consumer.

The company is facing high food costs as well as costs related to a restructuring plan which involves closing stores, selling off some businesses and lowering debt.

The company lowered its yearly sales guidance, Its shares fell more than 6 percent in premarket trading.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Supervalu says its net loss totaled $750 million, or $3 guaranteed payday loan.54 per share, in the three months ended Dec. 3. That compares to a loss of $202 million, or 95 cents per share, last year.

Excluding unusual costs, it earned 24 cents per share. That was a penny shy of analysts’ expectations.

Revenue fell 4 percent to $8.33 billion. Analysts expected revenue of $8.22 billion.

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