* Shares slip 0.3 pct, in line with sectorBy Ransdell PiersonOct 18 (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson’s third-quarter earnings fell on lower U.S. sales, but the weaker dollar and strong demand overseas helped the company beat Wall Street forecasts.J&J said on Tuesday that it had earned $3.2 billion, or $1.15 per share, compared with $3.42 billion or $1.23 per share a year earlier.Excluding special items, J&J earned $1.24 per share. Analysts on average had expected $1.21, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.Revenue rose 6.8 percent to $16 billion, just shy of Wall Street estimates of $16.02 billion. It would have risen just 2.6 percent if not for the weaker dollar, which boosts the value of sales in overseas markets.Atlantic Equities analyst Richard Purkiss said the results were not as impressive as they might appear because J&J’s profit beat was due largely to income from divestitures and the company’s profit margins slipped during the quarter.”Results were in line, but not the sort of quality that people would have wanted,” Purkiss said.J&J shares were down 0.3 percent at $63.63 in morning trading, in line with the drug sector.The company’s U.S. sales slipped 3.7 percent, hurt by declines in all three product segments: prescription drugs, consumer products and medical devices.But overseas, where the company generates most of its sales, revenue jumped 16.4 percent, with half of the gain attributable to foreign exchange factors.Johnson & Johnson forecast a full-year profit of $4.95 to $5.00 per share, lifting the low end of its forecast by 5 cents. The drugmaker slightly lowered its 2011 sales forecast to $65 billion, due to an expected smaller benefit from foreign exchange fluctuations.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, 240 kilometers (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, was damaged in March by a devastating earthquake and tsunami in the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago.”Our latest measurements show that radiation from the damaged reactors is 100 million becquerels per hour, which is one eight-millionth of the amount measured soon after the accident,” Tokyo Electric Power’s (Tepco) vice president Zengo Aizawa told reporters during a monthly review.Aizawa said that this translates to about 0.2 millisievert per year of radiation measured at the fringes of the plant, below the 1 millisievert safety limit according to government guidelines.The amount is half of what Tepco announced at its review a month ago.In light of the progress being made in cooling its damaged reactors, which suffered nuclear fuel meltdowns in the first days of the crisis, Tepco formally brought forward its plan to bring the plant to a state of “cold shutdown” within this year, instead of by January as initially planned.It had said last month it was hoping to achieve a cold shutdown within the year but had not made a formal declaration.Technically, a cold shutdown is a state in which water used to cool nuclear fuel rods remains below 100 degrees Celsius, preventing the fuel from reheating.With the help of newly built cooling systems, Tepco’s efforts to cool the reactors have progressed steadily, with temperatures at all three of the damaged reactors falling below 100 degrees late in September.But despite this development, Tepco and the government have been cautious about immediately declaring a cold shutdown.”We still need to proceed with care. We need to continue monitoring whether the temperatures of the reactors and radiation levels being emitted remain stable going forward,” Yoshinori Moriyama, deputy director-general of the government watchdog Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency, told the same news conference.Declaring a cold shutdown will have repercussions well beyond the plant as it is one of the criteria the government said must be met before it begins allowing about 80,000 residents evacuated from within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant to go home.Japan faces a massive cleanup task if these residents are to be returned home — the environmental ministry says about 2,400 square km (930 square miles) of land surrounding Daiichi may need decontamination, an area roughly the size of Luxembourg.Even if a cold shutdown is declared Tepco has acknowledged that it may not be able to remove the fuel from the reactors for another 10 years and that the cleanup at the plant could take several decades.It also has to decontaminate tens of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water pooled at the plant, a result of its efforts to cool the reactors early in the crisis by pumping in vast amounts of water, much of it from the ocean.

By Edward Hadas The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. LONDON — In the strange world of academic economics, where people are always selfish and markets are close to perfect, “rational expectations” sounds plausible. Thomas Sargent, one of the two recipients of the Swedish central bank’s Nobel prize for economics, is a leading proponent of the approach, which holds that the aggregate of expectations of economic actors provide the best information available. Christopher Sims, the other winner, is less dogmatic. He has tried to use sophisticated maths to analyse cause and effect in macroeconomic policy. For the Nobel committee, the common theme which merited the prize was the statistical study of “how systemic changes in economic policy affect the economy over time”. For outsiders to the profession, this looks like yet another award for research which provides little insight into four years of dysfunctions in the financial world. Sargent and Sims do not live in an ivory tower. Both have views on current issues. Sargent was against the U.S. fiscal stimulus because people supposedly see through temporary increases in income, a core belief among enthusiasts for rational expectations. He has recently written a balanced article about the risks and rewards of deposit insurance. Sims has interesting things to say about the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy. Still, the winners suffer from academic economists’ usual imbalance: simplistic assumptions and complicated equations. The conclusions — for example Sargent’s thesis that rising inflation in the 1970s was caused by a poor understanding of the relationship between unemployment and interest rates — are often plausible. But the blizzard of formulae and statistical techniques used in the arguments generally hide questionable assumptions about behaviour and causality. It is not fair to ask the Nobel committees that award the prizes for real sciences such as physics to consider the headlines. But economics is different. In this supposed science, for every professional who predicted a global crisis there were probably dozens who thought the Great Moderation, steady growth with low inflation and financial stability, would continue into the indefinite future. It would be nice if the prestigious prize recognised some members of the unconventional minority.