NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. said Lincare Holdings Inc. would be one of eight new companies whose securities will join the NASDAQ Q-50 IndexSM.
The index is designed to track the performance of the 50 securities that are next in line to replace the securities currently included in the NASDAQ-100 Index(R), a release said. The NASDAQ Q-50 Index is re-ranked on a quarterly basis.
Lincare (NASDAQ: LNCR) provides respiratory therapy and other services to patients in their homes. Based in Clearwater, the company serves patients across the United States.
Other companies joining the NASDAQ Q-50 are Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDQ: AMLN), Gentex Corp. (NASDAQ: GNTX), Micron Technology inc. (NASDAQ: MU), Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ: RMBS), Sirius XM Radio Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI), Vistaprint N.V. (NASDAQ: VPRT) and Windstream Corp. (WIN).
The changes will result in the removal of CTC Media Inc. (NASDAQ: CTCM), Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: ENDP), LM Ericsson Telephone Co. (NASDQ: ERIC), Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: MDRX), Myriad Genetics Inc. (NASDAQ: MYGN), Patterson-UTI Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: PTEN), Strayer Education Inc. (NASDAQ: STRA) and Techne Corp. (NASDAQ: TECH).
The change is effective March 22.
NASDAQ OMX Group (NASDAQ: NDAQ) is the world’s largest exchange company.
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM — The EU on Tuesday warned the United States against protectionism after a European-led consortium pulled out of the bidding for an Air Force contract, saying the terms had been altered to favor a U.S. company.
EADS, the parent company of Airbus, had partnered with Northrop Grumman to vie for the 179 tanker order, but the consortium pulled out on Monday. It said the terms of the deal appeared designed to eliminate its design in favor of a smaller jet offered by rival Boeing Co.
The announcement left Chicago-based Boeing as the only bidder for the project. It is offering a version of the 767 commercial airplane to replace the Air Force’s 1960s-era fleet of KC-135 tankers.
"The European Commission would be extremely concerned if it were to emerge that the terms of tender were such as to inhibit open competition for the contract," the EU said in a statement.
In 2008, the EADS-led consortium was awarded a contract for the fleet, but Boeing protested and the deal was annulled later that year cheap credit report.
In December, Northrop Grumman/EADS expressed concerns to the Pentagon and the Air Force that the new criteria were slanted in favor the Boeing design.
"It is highly regrettable that a major potential supplier would feel unable to bid for a contract of this type," said EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht. "Open procurement markets guarantee better competition and better value for money for the taxpayer."
The EU noted that the trade balance in defense equipment with the 27-nation EU has traditionally been heavily in favor of the American side, and that in 2008, the US exported $5 billion worth of defense materials while importing only $2.2 billion from the European side.
"The Commission will be following further developments in this case very closely," the statement said.
On the last day of 2009, the state of Missouri gave $19.6 million to developer Paul McKee.
It came in the form of tax credits, from a program never before used, to pay back some of the cost of the land McKee spent five years secretly buying in north St. Louis.
It was a good day for McKee, and for his hugely ambitious $8.1 billion NorthSide project.
It was also a good day for his bankers.
Because after McKee sold the tax credits for cash, he used the money not on NorthSide itself but to pay down his debt, mostly to the small Washington, Mo., bank that is his primary lender on the project.
Yet nearly half of the $19.6 million was reimbursement for interest and fees already paid to lenders. In a sense, the bank got some added protection and a quick payback.
This is exactly how the new tax credit program was intended to work, supporters say. The credits provided the backup a bank needed to see before accepting the risk of financing a long, complex process of assembling land in beleaguered north St. Louis neighborhoods.
"We’ve got to understand, these are high-risk loan areas," said Missouri Sen. John Griesheimer, who pushed the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage tax credit in the Capitol. "This is where bankers and developers don’t want to go."
But the way the program has worked so far speaks to the heart of a lawsuit against it to be heard this week in Cole County. The tax credits won’t create jobs, said attorney Irene Smith. They won’t build buildings or generate any other public good, at least not directly.
"You’re basically just incentivizing the collection of land," she said. "You’re not incentivizing any development."
When state lawmakers established the program in 2007, they designed it to encourage lending on a speculative project such as NorthSide, something risky that might take years to pan out. Indeed, many say it was written specifically for McKee.
Griesheimer, a Republican from Washington, Mo., chairs the Senate’s economic development committee and helped author the credit. Early on in that process, he said in a recent interview, the senator consulted with McKee and with L.B. Eckelkamp, a constituent of his and chief executive of McKee’s primary lender, the Bank of Washington.
They met, Griesheimer said, "to explain what they needed." And after talking with a few other experts, he inserted the tax credit program, worth $95 million, into a massive state economic development bill. It had the vocal support of Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley. And it passed.
The measure included a 100 percent reimbursement for money spent on interest and loan fees to buy at least 50 acres of land in low-income neighborhoods, and a 50 percent reimbursement for the cost of land itself. It was structured that way, Griesheimer said, to protect any banker willing to take a chance on a major project such as this. It was, he said, the only way NorthSide would happen.
"It was a very high-risk area," he said. "The banks and everybody wanted to make sure that they’re going to recoup at least some of their losses, some of their money."
Indeed, beyond a $27 million loan from the Bank of Washington, McKee has struggled to attract lenders, even with the support of the tax credits. He has pitched NorthSide to a number of local banks, but none has publicly committed to him.
The Bank of Washington’s money did not come cheap. Since 2005, McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration has paid at least $9.25 million in interest and fees on loans held by the bank, according to documents obtained from the Missouri Department of Economic Development under state open records laws. Another $529,000 in interest went to a small Illinois bank that’s now defunct. Now, every cent of that has been reimbursed by the state.
In a recent e-mail, McKee acknowledged that his interest costs were high. But so, he argued, was the risk.
"The loans were unique," McKee wrote. "They were the only loans made in decades for large-scale site development in north St. Louis that were not backed by government guarantees."
Once he sold the tax credits in January, McKee used the proceeds to pay a substantial portion of his debt. The bank "required a pay down," he wrote, and it makes sense for the project. Paying off debt will reduce interest payments — which were nearly $3.8 million last year — and free up cash for actual redevelopment.
But some say all this focus on protecting lenders reflects misplaced priorities.
"Half of the money is going to pay interest on loans," Smith said. "What public benefit do we gain from a tax credit being used to pay someone’s interest?"
That question will be up to a judge.
Smith said she planned to focus her case on the constitutionality of the tax credits, an issue, she says, that’s never been thoroughly vetted in court. It’s a fairly narrow legal question, Smith said, and she expects the trial, set for Wednesday, to be brief.
In the mean time, McKee continues to buy property in north St. Louis.
His tax credit application says he has spent $25.1 million on 98 acres across two square miles near downtown. It estimates another $66 million in land-buying costs to come. And there’s still about $75 million in the pot of money available through the Distressed Areas credit; McKee’s financial plans project his getting nearly all of it.
Even the program’s critics express little surprise in how it’s been used so far. In floor debate three years ago, Sen. Brad Lager, R-Savannah, raised questions about so much reimbursement for borrowing costs and whether the state should spend $95 million on this sort of project. But he lost that debate.
"And right, wrong, or indifferent, they’re using the credit exactly how it was written," Lager said recently. As for whether it will work, he said: "Only time will be the judge."
Greece’s debt rating may be cut within a month as it struggles to pare the European Union’s largest budget deficit, driving up borrowing costs and renewing pressure on the euro.
Standard & Poor’s said late yesterday it may lower its BBB+ rating by the end of March and Moody’s Investors Service said today it may reduce its A2 grade in a few months. The warnings further complicate the government’s effort to persuade investors that it can slash its fiscal shortfall from last year’s 12.7 percent of gross domestic product.
The euro slumped to a one-year low against the yen, most stocks dropped and the premium on Greek 10-year bonds over German debt widened to the most since Feb. 8 on concern that the country may need EU assistance to avoid missing debt payments. Unions yesterday staged a strike to protest Prime Minister George Papandreou’s drive to slash spending.
“It’s getting more difficult than anticipated for the Greek government to implement the spending cuts it promised,” said Susumu Kato, chief economist in Tokyo at Credit Agricole Securities Asia. Further downgrades “may spread sovereign concerns through other European nations,” he said.
The country’s willingness to keep funding itself in the commercial bond market is key to S&P’s assessment, the company said. The rating could be pressured by lower profitability at the country’s banks or a decline in public support for the budget plan, it said. EU assistance could help if it was likely to lead to a “sustained reduction” in borrowing costs.
Two Grades
“We believe that a further downgrade of Greece of one to two notches is possible within a month,” S&P analysts led by Marko Mrsnik in London said in a statement.
Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at Moody’s, said in an interview in Tokyo today it may act “in a few months” if policy makers appear to be deviating from their deficit-reduction plan. At the same time, Moody’s may stabilize its rating if Greece follows through with its austerity measures, he said.
“We have to let the government implement its plans,” Cailleteau said. “You can’t expect a government to be able to turn around public finances in a few days.”
S&P cut Greece’s rating in December from A- and signaled at the time it may reduce it again from BBB+. Moody’s lowered its rating by one step the same month.
ECB Rules
If Moody’s cuts its credit rating to the same level as the other major ratings companies, it could exacerbate Greece’s financial distress at the end of this year when the European Central Bank is due to revert to old collateral rules that were loosened during the global recession. Greek government bonds would then no longer be eligible as collateral at the ECB, making it even more difficult for the nation to borrow.
The euro dropped to 120.51 yen as of 11:20 a.m. in London from 122 cash advance america.03 yen in New York yesterday. It earlier touched 120.24 yen, the lowest since Feb. 24, 2009. The single currency has fallen about 6 percent against the dollar this year on concern Greece’s fiscal woes may extend to Spain, Portugal and other European nations seeking to pare budget gaps.
Credit-default swaps protecting the debt of Greece rose 10 basis points to 392, according to CMA DataVision. The spread between 10-year Greek bonds and similar-maturity German debt widened by 13 basis points, or 0.13 percentage point, to 352 basis points.
Tear Gas
Papandreou’s government is running into opposition at home to its strategy. Air-traffic controllers, customs and tax officials, train drivers, doctors at state-run hospitals and school teachers walked off the job yesterday to protest spending cuts. Police fired tear-gas and clashed with demonstrators in central Athens after a march organized by labor unions.
Greek bonds have slumped, driving up borrowing costs, as investors fear the government will fail to meet its pledge to cut its budget gap to 8.7 percent of GDP this year. It aims to cut the deficit below the EU’s 3 percent limit in 2012.
The premium investors demand to hold Greece’s 10-year securities instead of Germany’s rose to the most in more than two weeks.
The government needs to sell 53 billion euros ($72 billion) of debt this year, the equivalent of 20 percent of GDP. The yield on the country’s two-year note yesterday rose to the most since Feb. 9.
EU governments are looking for guarantees that Papandreou will slash spending before they spell out what help they may offer. EU and ECB officials visited Athens this week to verify that budget cuts are being implemented.
Additional Measures
Under proposals adopted this month by euro-area finance ministers, the Greek government will have to take additional measures to cut its budget gap if it fails to satisfy the European Commission next month that its current strategy is on track. These may include higher value-added tax, a levy on luxury goods, higher energy taxes and spending cuts, they said.
“There will be some conditions attached” to European assistance for Greece, Cailleteau said. “I don’t see the evidence that would justify these kinds of assertions that Europe will not help Greece.”
German, French and Greek voters are “in denial” about Greece’s ability to get its deficit under control without external aid, Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a 2006 history of the European economy, said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday.
Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said Feb. 23 that the government will do “everything it needs to meet” its targets and that any decisions on possible new measures will be announced after talks with European governments.
Dell shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading, after the computer maker reported a 5% drop in fourth-quarter earnings Thursday.
The Texas-based company beat Wall Street’s expectations, however, on solid sales across all its segments as businesses started spending on IT again.
Net income dropped to $334 million, or 17 cents per share, compared with $351 million, or 18 cents per share a year ago.
Results included a one-time charge of 11 cents per share for special items, mainly related to the company’s $3.9 billion acquisition of Perot Systems in November. Without the charge, Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) said it earned 28 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial, who typically exclude one-time items from their estimates, were looking for 27 cents.
Sales rose 11% to $14.9 billion from $13.4 billion last year, beating analysts’ forecast of $13.85 billion.
In a conference call with analysts following the results, chief financial officer Brian Gladden and Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell said they expect to see an uptick in commercial sales in the next year and continuing into fiscal 2011 as businesses upgrade to Windows 7.
Gladden said the company is focused on cutting overhead and manufacturing costs and in simplifying its supply chain. Last year, Dell announced plans to trim expenses by $4 billion annually by the end of fiscal 2011. Gladden noted that in the last two years, Dell had consolidated its manufacturing facilities to six from 11.
"Ongoing competitor pressure and economic realities never stop, and we can’t either," he said in the call. "We’re moving into the next phase of our transformation."
While Dell’s financials beat analyst expectations, the news comes with a mixed bag of concerns such as high consumer sales with lower margins, and tight commodity prices, said Shannon Cross, an analyst with Cross Research. On the upside, the company is investing in key growth areas, she said.
"The biggest concern is a lack of leverage in the model," she said. "People had hoped to see more of that revenue upside fall through to the bottom line."
Segment by segment
Analysts say trends point to a hardware-driven uptick in IT spending during the recent holiday months. Notebook and desktop computer sales together account for more than half of Dell’s revenue.
Dell reported a 16% year-over-year jump in laptop sales and a 3% drop in revenue from desktops.
Overall, consumer sales were up 11%. That’s better than expected, Gladden said in the conference call. That said, operating margins in the consumer segment were below a target 1% to 2%, due to holiday discounts, he noted.
Software sales from Dell’s third largest division were flat. Meanwhile server sales rose 26%, while sales in Dell’s tech services division were up 51%, year-over-year.
The company’s acquisition of Perot Systems in November marked a strategic shift toward ramping up its technology services market share and taking on Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) and IBM (IBM, Fortune 500).
Revenue from Dell’s public business unit jumped 16% to $3.8 billion, with sales from services more than doubling, due in large part from the Perot addition.
Dell’s number one rival HP reported results Wednesday that blew past Wall Street’s expectations. The company said earnings jumped 25% on 8% rise in sales.
"HP had a lot more room to cut costs that Dell did, and HP has seen far more of the revenue upside fall through to their bottom line. HP is more focused on the consumer, so they’ve benefited from consumer strength more than Dell has," Cross pointed out.
For the full year, Dell reported a 42% drop in earnings and a 13% drop in sales over the year before.
NEW YORK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will cut about 11,200 jobs at Sam’s Club warehouses as it turns over the task of in-store product demonstrations to an outside marketing company.
The move is an effort to improve sales at Sam’s Club, which has underperformed the company’s namesake stores in the U.S. and abroad.
The cuts represent about 10 percent of the warehouse club operator’s 110,000 staffers across its 600 stores. That includes 10,000 workers, most of them part-timers, who offer food samples and showcase products to customers. The company also eliminated 1,200 workers who recruit new members.
Employees were told the news at mandatory meetings on Sunday morning.
"In the club channel, demo sampling events are a very important part of the experience," said Sam’s Club CEO Brian Cornell in a phone interview. "Shopper Events specializes in this area, and they can take our sampling program to the next level."
Shopper Events, based in Rogers, Ark., currently works with Wal-Mart’s namesake stores on in-store demonstrations. Sam’s Club is looking to the company to improve sampling in areas such as electronics, personal wellness products and food items to entice shoppers to spend more.
Sam’s Club has performed more poorly than Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s namesake stores in the U.S. and abroad. Cornell has been working to improve results since taking the helm in early 2009, introducing new store formats, price cuts and offering more variety and more brands of items from take-home meals to baked goods.
As consumers eat out less in the shaky economy, Sam’s Club has tried to steal customers from grocery chains and rival warehouse stores such as Costco Wholesale Corp no fax payday loans. by offering more everyday goods such as food and health and beauty items and by paring its assortment of general merchandise such as furniture and clothes.
But in Wal-Mart Stores’ most recent quarter, revenue at the Sam’s Club division slipped nearly 1 percent to $11.55 billion while U.S. Walmart stores posted a 1.2 percent sales increase to $61.81 billion. Earlier this month, Wal-Mart Stores closed 10 underperforming Sam’s Club locations, resulting in the loss of about 1,500 jobs.
"Sam’s has been the relative laggard, and it has lagged relative to its direct competitors, Costco and the smaller BJ’s (Wholesale Club)," said Craig Johnson, president of retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners.
The move to outsource its food sampling efforts is a way for the company to tout its fresh food offerings in a cost-effective manner, Johnson said.
—"’Fresh’ is where the real competitive battles are being fought in the club sector," he said.
Shopper Events will launch a new demo program called "Tastes and Tips" with new carts, signs, uniforms and a trained team, said Cornell. He said the move was not made to save money.
"It’s not a cost-cutting measure, it’s really an investment in enhancing our demo program," he said. Cornell added that Shopper Events planned to hire "roughly the same number of people" cut, and said Sam’s Club workers are invited to apply for those positions.
Independent Bank Corp., the parent of Rockland Trust Co., said net income in the fourth quarter increased 33 percent to $9.1 million from the previous three months as the bank saw a strong upswing in wealth-management revenue.
Net income was up more than 200 percent when compared with the year-ago quarter, or before the bank acquired Benjamin Franklin Bancorp Inc.
For the year ended Dec. 31, Rockland Trust’s (Nasdaq: INDB) net income was $23 million compared with $24 million in 2008.
Total assets increased by $48 million, or 1.1 percent, to $4 us fast cash.5 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with the previous quarter.
The company recorded non-interest income of $10 million during the fourth quarter, an increase of $5.6 million when compared with the quarter ended Sept. 30. The change in non-interest income included a wealth management revenue increase of $451,000, or 19.8 percent, because of general stock market appreciation and strong sales results. Assets under management in the wealth management division were $1.3 billion at the end of December.
Four top bank chief executives told a panel probing the financial crisis Wednesday that they made mistakes but didn’t realize how bad they were at the time.
In a heated exchange in Washington with the head of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’ CEO, agreed the banks had assumed too much exposure to risk at the height of the crisis, and he wished he could go back and change things.
"Anyone who says I wouldn’t change a thing, I think, is crazy," Blankfein said. "Knowing now what happened, whatever we did, whatever what the standards of the time were — It didn’t work out well."
"Of course, I’d go back and wish we had done whatever it took not to find ourselves in the position we found ourselves in," he added.
The remarks came during a hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member panel appointed last summer by Congress. Testifying were chiefs of some of the best-known and largest banks: Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500).
The panel’s chairman, Philip Angelides, said he wanted to hear about the banks’ role in creating the crisis and benefiting from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was set up to provide them with liquidity.
During the hearing, Angelides cast doubt on Blankfein’s defense of Goldman Sachs’ actions in the mortgage markets — such as buying parts of risky mortgages and then placing bets against such morgages — as part of their job as a "market maker."
"It sounds to me a little like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyers of those cars," Angelides said. "It doesn’t seem to me that that’s a practice that inspires confidence."
Blankfein responded that Goldman was just selling what investors wanted.
"These are the professional investors who want this exposure," he said. "Even today, people are coming for exposure to these very products. .. That’s what a market is."
The chief executives — Blankfein, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America — testified under oath, standing up for a swearing-in during the public session.
The hearing lasted more than three hours and most of the testimony revolved around bad lending in the housing market.
Dimon said that one of the the banks’ "big misses" was failing to "stress test" the housing market.
"We didn’t stress test housing prices going down by 40%," Dimon said.
It has been suggested that this lack of accountability could be remedied if all of the firms and individuals involved in the creation of financial instruments had to "eat their own cooking." That would, for example, require that the bulk of their fees not be taken in cash, but in the securities they created, which they would be required to hold unhedged until maturity.
One commissioner asked Morgan Stanley’s Mack if investment banks could have remediated the volume of illiquid toxic securities by eating "their own cooking," and taking fees for financial transactions via toxic securities, instead of cash. Mack said his firm did hold some of those securities.
"We did eat our own cooking and we choked on it," Mack said. " We kept positions and it did not work out."
‘Sound’ regulatory changes
Blankfein, Dimon and Mack all talked about the need for "sound" regulatory changes to help ward off future crises bad credit unsecured personal loans.
"I want to be clear that I do not blame the regulators … however, it is important to examine how the system could have functioned better," Dimon said. "The current regulatory system is poorly organized with overlapping responsibilities, and many regulators did not have the statuatory resolution authority needed to address the failure of large, global financial companies."
In written testimony, the bank chiefs laid out their banks’ mistakes that led to the crisis, detailing the housing bubble, with "new and poorly underwritten mortgage products," "excessive speculation," and mortgage securitization that allowed people to duck responsibility for poorly underwritten loans.
However, they added they didn’t expect the financial crisis and especially its magnitude.
"After the fact, it is easy to be convinced that the signs were visible and compelling," Blankfein said. "In hindsight, events not only look predictable, but look like they were obvious or known. But none of us know what is going to happen."
In the past several weeks, the commission has talked to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, but that testimony isn’t being made public yet.
Lawmakers say the commission was modeled after the Pecora Commission, a panel that was convened after the 1929 Wall Street crash and other events leading to the Great Depression.
The Pecora panel’s findings led to an overhaul of federal banking laws, including the creation of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Glass-Steagall divided investment banking from government-insured commercial banking; ending that separation in the 1990s was seen by some critics as contributing to the current crisis.
Slow start
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has taken a while to get up on its feet.
The panel was appointed last July and held its first meeting in September. It has only started getting staffed up over the past few months.
It has new offices in downtown Washington, a few blocks northwest of the White House. Funded to the tune of $8 million, it aims to employ between 40 and 50 investigators and other staffers.
The crisis panel’s one big goal is to complete a final report, sort of like the final 9/11 Commission report that found federal agencies missed signs of the impending terrorist attacks in 2001. The financial crisis report is due Dec. 15.
Critics have noted the panel’s impact may be blunted by timing, as the House has already passed a bill to overhaul regulations and the Senate is deep in negotiations on similar proposals.
But panel members have consistently pledged their work will serve as more than window dressing for politicians worried about the appearance that they allowed the financial crisis to happen.
The panel, which has subpoena power, plans to issue interim reports as it collects data, Angelides has said.
The panel’s second-in-command is Bill Thomas, a retired California Republican congressman described as strong-willed during his tenure running the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
Other key panel members include: Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser under President George W. Bush; former Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat; and Brooksley Born, a past chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who called for stronger regulation of complex financial products such as derivatives in the 1990s.
Midtown Manhattan office rents fell 33 percent in 2009 as New York’s financial industry cut staff and relinquished space, commercial property broker FirstService Williams said in a report.
Rents in the nation’s most expensive office district dropped to $59.31 a square foot in the fourth quarter and are down almost 50 percent when concessions including temporary free rent are included, the New York-based broker said today.
Financial companies occupy more New York office space than any other non-governmental employer. They cut 25,200 local jobs in the 12 months through November, helping push the city’s unemployment rate to 10 percent, according to the New York State Department of Labor.
“Employment is not going to trend up with any alacrity,” FirstService Williams Executive Chairman Robert Freedman said in an interview. “We’re going to see a very, very modest uptick in demand” for offices.
The percentage of available space in Midtown climbed to 14.9 percent from 11.9 percent a year ago, FirstService Williams said. The rate applies to office space between 34th Street and Central Park in Manhattan.
The decline in neighborhood rents showed signs of leveling off as more than 1 million square feet along Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas were leased in the fourth quarter, FirstService said. Landlords stopped increasing incentives to lure tenants, the broker said.
Wall Street Area
Downtown rents declined 22 percent in 2009 to $38.60 a square foot and availability jumped to 13 percent from 10.5 percent at the end of 2008. Most of the available space downtown was added in the fourth quarter.
Between 8 percent and 10 percent of downtown leases signed in 2009 were for financial tenants, according to FirstService’s preliminary numbers. About 30 percent of the New York City office market is already occupied by the industry.
“With the financial sector still a major driving force in the downtown market, recovery in lower Manhattan may be slower than expected,” Freedman said.
In Manhattan’s Midtown South area, roughly located between 34th and Canal streets, office availability climb to 11.7 percent from 8.5 percent at the end of last year. Asking rents averaged $39.73 a square foot, down 28 percent from a year ago.
Thirteen of Arizona’s 21 billion-dollar public companies saw their stock prices move up during the fourth quarter.
Seven of the companies posted double-digit gains, with Clear Channel Outdoor leading the pack at 58 percent, according to the Phoenix Business Journal’s analysis of prices from Sept. 30 through 30 through Dec. 18.
Penny stock Mesa Air Group mirrored that performance with a 58 percent decline to lead the group of eight companies with a drop in price per share over the quarter.
Over the same period the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 6.4 percent and the Nasdaq Composite moved up 4.2 percent.
The Arizona group did better when price changed is measured over all of 2009, but all but four of the stocks still lag from the end of 2007. Click here for the 2009 wrapup and here for a two-year look at local stocks.
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