(Corrects euro bond holdings in ninth paragraph in story that was published on May 4.)
Norway
Cashadvance Online without the hassle of credit checks, faxing or long waits. Fill out application 100% online and get your money quickly!
The U.S. trade deficit rose in March at the fastest rate in 10 months. A rise in consumer goods lifted imports to a record level, outpacing a solid gain in U.S. exports.
The Commerce Department says the trade deficit widened to $51.8 billion in March, up from $45.4 billion in February. Imports rose 5.2 percent to a record $238.6 billion, reflecting more foreign oil, autos, cell phones and clothes.
Exports increased 2.9 percent to $186 instant payday loan.8 billion. Sales to Europe reached an all-time high despite the region’s debt crisis.
Economists caution that export growth, a bright spot for the U.S. economy, could slow in coming months if more European countries fall into recession.
Apply for a payday loans today and as a first time customer, you can get up to $1000 directly to your account overnight.
It’s barely a rounding error in their multimillion-dollar pay packages, but America’s imperial CEOs are losing some of the trappings of power.
Companies that once paid for their leaders’ cars and club memberships – and sometimes handed them extra cash to pay the taxes on those goodies – are now taking a principled stand against perquisites.
Among St. Louis firms, Olin and Spartech eliminated their executive perks at the beginning of last year. Express Scripts, Reinsurance Group of America, MEMC Electronic Materials and a few others already had no-perks policies.
Spartech used to give auto allowances of more than $10,000 to some executives. Olin provided company cars along with financial planning services to help executives manage their millions. As of last year, those goodies are gone.
Pay consultant Steven Hall says Olin and Spartech are part of a trend. “In the last few years, companies have been eliminating these kinds of benefits,” he said. “In some cases, the amounts are not meaningful at all, but companies are saying it’s a matter of principle.”
Hall, managing director of Steven Hall & Partners in New York, was speaking about the largest U.S. companies, which tend to be trendsetters in pay practices. St. Louis CEOs, especially at smaller companies, have been slower to give up their perks.
Among 40 St. Louis companies that have made their pay disclosures for 2011, three-fourths offered special benefits to top executives. A car allowance was the most common perk, offered by 17 companies. Fourteen firms let the boss and/or a spouse take personal flights on the company dime, and 12 paid for club dues. Six gave the boss extra cash to pay taxes on the benefits, a practice that shareholder-advocacy groups frown upon.
One of the longest lists of perks went to payday loan.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/smaller-bonus-shrinks-pay-total-for-viasystems-ceo/article_84c7c0e0-7384-11e1-b7ba-0019bb30f31a.html” target=”_blank”>Viasystems Chief Executive David Sindelar: a $33,994 car allowance, $15,337 worth of financial consulting, $31,296 in club dues, $61,603 for entertainment, $6,110 worth of continuing education and $1,000 in charitable contributions. Some of those amounts were grossed up to cover taxes.
The biggest single perk, though, belonged to David Farr, chief executive of Emerson. Farr took $304,007 worth of personal flights on company aircraft, a practice that Emerson justifies on security grounds.
Other frequent fliers included Energizer CEO Ward Klein, who took $176,478 worth of free flights; Brown Shoe Chairman Ronald Fromm ($165,365) and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant ($124,665).
Free flights seem to be the one perk that isn’t going away, Hall says. Companies justify it based on security – Emerson and others actually require their CEOs to use company planes for all trips – and efficiency.
For watchdog groups, though, such perks are a red flag. They are indicators of an entitlement mentality and a situation in which the board is subservient to an imperial CEO.
As the Corporate Library, a governance-research firm that’s now part of GMI Ratings, said in a 2010 study, “If the board cannot set appropriate limits for the CEO in this regard, will it be able to do so in matters of greater strategic consequence?”
No one took issue with Antonio Hegwood’s dreadlocks when he worked for the temp service. Or the fast food restaurant before that.
But in mid-April, four months after a service station and convenience store hired him as an overnight clerk, Hegwood learned his hair style had suddenly became a problem.
Hegwood, 24, hasn’t been fired. But he hasn’t collected a paycheck since.
His supervisors at a St. Louis Petro Mart have told Hegwood that he’s welcome to return to work — if he shears the dreadlocks that run about halfway down his neck.
Hegwood doesn’t understand the fuss.
“It’s a gas station,” he said. “People aren’t going to not buy gas just because the clerk has dreads.”
Policies on the personal grooming habits of employees land on the edge of state and federal employment discrimination laws.
Companies doing business in Missourihave the right to terminate or suspend any employee that doesn’t meet established guidelines addressing hair, tattoos or dress.
“An employer may condition a job on an employee’s compliance with the employer’s hair styling preferences, unless the employee’s alternative hair styling preference is connected with the employee’s inclusion in a protected category,” Missouri Department of Labor spokeswoman Amy Susan explained in an e-mail. “For example, a particular hair style may be a tenet of the employee’s religion, or the employer may decline to hire a prospective employee because the employee is considered to be disabled because of his or her hair style (such as believing someone without hair to be suffering from cancer).”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a bit more exacting. It looks at how various groups of people wearing various hairstyles are treated in comparison to other groups.
“The baseline for evaluating grooming policies is to look at their overall burden on different groups of employees,” EEOC spokeswoman Justine Lisser wrote in a general overview of the Petro Mart matter.
“…If an employer prohibits a range of hair styles, such as both corn rows and mohawks, and the no cornrows/dreadlocks policy affects 30% of its African-American employees while the no mohawks affects only 3% of its white employees, we could say that the policy had a disparate impact on African-Americans, even if it applies to all employees.”
Hegwood has sported dreads on and off for years. The dreadlocks were in place when he applied for and was offered the $8.50-an-hour position at Petro Mart late last year.
“They didn’t say anything about it then,” he said.
Nor, Hegwood added, was there any mention of the dreads posing a threat to safety or the health of co-workers.
Owned and operated by Western Oil Co. in Earth City, Petro Mart does have a written policy stipulating that hair should be “kept neat and clean…immoderate styles… such as corn rows, braids etc. must be approved by a supervisor…dreadlocks and mohawks are unacceptable.”
Western Oil did not respond to requests for a response.
A father of three, Hegwood doesn’t know how long he can take a principled stand against Petro Mart and its grooming policy.
He needs a salary to support his children and pay for the remainder of his education at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park, where Hegwood hopes to earn a degree in business.
The worst of the job crisis may be over — unemployment in the St. Louis region dropped to 8.1 percent in March.
But back in the hunt four months after starting a job “I really liked,” Hegwood fears landing employment remains a challenge.
“Maybe I’ll start my own business,” he said, looking ahead. “That way I can wear my hair anyway I want.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We’re all technology companies at heart. Whether you’re a law firm or a bank, the core of your company is technology. And that is kind of shaking the core of the office today.” — Thomas Vecchione, head of Workplace Design at Gensler, the global architectural firm, on the work space evolution that includes “free range” offices in which employees take a seat each day at whatever desk is available.
Source: The Point, WBUR/Boston
BY THE NUMBERS
3.9 million - The population of Oregon — and the number of Americans who continue to suffer the effects of unemployment lasting more than a year. The long-term unemployed represent 29.5 of the nation’s jobless.
Source: The Pew Charitable Trusts
FINAL WORD
“You know, how could you not look?” - Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III on whether he tracks the struggles of a former employee, Albert Pujols, in the box scores each day.
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Time Warner Inc. said Wednesday that its first-quarter earnings fell 11 percent, but adjusted income beat Wall Street’s expectations on the strengths of the company’s television and movie studio businesses.
Time Warner had net income of $583 million in the first three months of the year, compared with $653 million a year earlier. Both translated to 59 cents a share because the company now has fewer shares outstanding.
Excluding one-time factors, including charges related to a decision to shut down a TV network in India, Time Warner had adjusted income of 67 cents a share. That’s better than the 64 cents expected by analysts surveyed by FactSet. The New York-based company’s adjusted income a year ago was 58 cents.
Revenue grew 4 percent to $7 billion, ahead of expectations of $6.82 billion.
Time Warner’s cable TV networks, which include CNN, TBS, TNT and HBO, saw revenue grow 3 percent to $3.6 billion. The company benefited from strong ad rates, better timing of the March Madness basketball games and higher fees collected from U cheap credit report.S. cable and satellite TV distributors to carry the channels. That was offset partly by a decrease in content revenue; last year’s quarter got a boost from licensing HBO’s “Sex and the City” to other cable outlets in the U.S.
At the Warner Bros. movie studio, a stronger slate at the box office contributed to a 7 percent revenue increase to $2.8 billion. Big performers included “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” and “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.” The division also benefited from higher licensing revenue of TV shows and the video-on-demand availability of a television series, but revenue from DVDs and other home entertainment sales fell.
Revenue at the Time Inc. magazine division fell 3 percent to $773 million. Advertising and subscription revenue both declined. Weak sales at newsstands worldwide were offset partly by higher sales of U.S. subscriptions.
The U.S. economy expanded less than forecast in the first quarter as a smaller contribution from inventories overshadowed the biggest gain in consumer spending in more than a year.
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., rose at a 2.2 percent annual rate after a 3 percent pace, Commerce Department figures showed yesterday in Washington. The median projection of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a 2.5 percent gain. Government spending fell for a sixth straight quarter.
Job creation and income gains propelled sales at car dealerships and retailers like Target Corp. (TGT), helping cushion the U.S. economy from weakness overseas. Further gains in consumer spending will depend on progress in reducing a jobless rate that has hovered above 8 percent since early 2009.
Shares of H&R Block tumbled 16% in premarket trading Thursday after the tax prep company announced significant staff cuts and office closings, and projected weaker-than-expected earnings.
The company also announced a series of changes in its top executive ranks in its after-hours statement Wednesday, including that it is looking for a new chief financial officer, and that the president of its retail tax services is leaving the company effective April 30.
Shares tumbled $2.74 to $14 ahead of the market open.
The company said it will cut about 350 full-time positions throughout its Kansas City headquarters and nationwide field organization, and close about 200 company-owned offices, which will result in a drop in seasonal temporary employment Payday Loan for Bad Credit.
The moves are expected to save the company of $85 million to $100 million a year. It will take a $30 million charge in the quarter associated with the staff reductions.
H&R Block () also expects full-year earnings of $1.09 to $1.15 a share, well below the forecasted earnings of $1.39 a share.
Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you can’t be robbed.
Identity thieves steal the personal information of about 2.4 million deceased Americans each year, according to a new report from fraud prevention firm ID Analytics. That amounts to a rate of more than 2,000 thefts per day.
Using these stolen identities, criminals typically apply for credit cards, cell phones and anything else requiring a credit check, the report found.
About 800,000 deceased Americans get their identities stolen intentionally, and another 1.6 million identities are stolen by chance — when an identity thief uses a Social Security number that happens to match that of a deceased individual, for example.
Debt after death: Banks chase down mourners
Lenders are typically the main victims when thieves use identities of deceased people to apply for credit products. But surviving family members should also be careful, said Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer at ID Analytics bad credit personal loan lenders.
"Surviving family members can also be the victims of this identity fraud as they are left to manage the estates of their deceased loved ones," he said. "It’s important for people to monitor their deceased family member’s identities for at least one year."
Social Security pays millions to dead people
To determine how many deceased people get their identities stolen each year, ID Analytics collected the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers on 100 million credit applications.
It then calculated how many of these applications used information that was associated with deceased individuals listed in the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File — a government database of deceased Americans.
McDonald’s ever-evolving mix of old menu standbys and new items like Chicken McBites lured in more diners who helped boost its first-quarter profit.
The world’s biggest hamburger chain said Friday that its net income rose 5 percent in the first quarter, in line with Wall Street expectations.
McDonald’s Corp. said global sales rose 7.3 percent at stores open at least 13 months, driven by gains from all regions. The metric is key because it excludes the impact of newly opened stores.
A big part of the McDonald’s success story in recent years has been the chain’s rollout of popular menu items such as coffee frappes and fruit smoothies, which have high profit margins and bring in customers throughout the day. Customers also love them because it’s a way to have a treat for a couple of bucks.
Other recent introductions by the fast-food chain include oatmeal and Chicken McBites, which the company said helped boost sales in the U.S. in the first quarter.
For the first three months of the year, McDonald’s reported a profit of $1.27 billion, or $1.23 per share. That compares with a profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.15 per share, in the year-ago period.
In the U.S., sales at restaurants open at least 13 months rose 8.9 percent, as new menu items like Chicken McBites, updated restaurants and warm weather drew customers. The results also benefitted from an extra day in the Leap Year.
McDonald’s said sales in Europe, its biggest market, rose 5 percent despite economic turmoil and severe weather in many parts of the region. Sales rose 5.5 percent in the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa region, where the company is focusing its expansion efforts in the coming years.
Although McDonald’s has consistently outperformed its peers in the fast-food industry, the company is facing the pressures of increasing costs for ingredients. The company’s is also seeing costs for labor and rent increase in some overseas markets.
The higher expenses are particularly problematic for a chain like McDonald’s, which risks driving away customers if those costs are passed on.
Still, the fast-food chain last year raised prices three times for a total price increase of 3 percent. The company has said it expects commodity costs to increase an additional 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent this year, which would be roughly in line with last year’s increases.
Because of its size, the way McDonald’s handles price increases can set the tone for the rest of the fast-food industry.
Shares of McDonald’s, based in Oak Brook, Ill., rose $1.72, or nearly 2 percent, to $95.28 in premarket trading.
Goldman Sachs more than doubled its first-quarter profits and announced plans to raise its dividend Tuesday.
The strong results masked other problems, including a 16 percent decline in revenue. To make up for that, and to propel earnings higher, Goldman turned to cost-cutting.
The storied investment bank slashed 3,000 workers over the year, or about 8 percent of its work force. It cut back on salaries, trimmed occupancy costs and paid less in brokerage fees, cutting total expenses by 14 percent.
Revenue from financial advising, where the bank advises big companies and investors on mergers and acquisitions, was one of the few areas to record a revenue gain, 37 percent.
Revenue from underwriting stock and bond sales fell 27 percent. Revenue from trading fell 14 percent, hurt by lower fees and revenue from the division that trades bonds, currencies and commodities. Total revenue fell to $9.9 billion from $11.9 billion, though that beat the $9.4 billion that analysts polled by FactSet had been expecting.
Goldman Sachs said its net income available to common shareholders rose to $2.1 billion, or $3.92 per share. That was a jump of about 128 percent from $908 million, or $1.56 per share, a year ago. The per-share earnings also beat expectations of analysts, who had been predicting $3.52.
The bank also announced it would raise its quarterly shareholder dividend to 46 cents per share from 35 cents. Though the bank didn’t say so, that’s a particular sign of strength in the current market, because it’s also a reminder that Goldman, unlike some of its peers, got permission to do so after passing the government’s most recent round of stress tests.
CEO Lloyd Blankfeink called the quarter a “solid performance.” In a prepared statement, he noted that “client activity remains relatively low in certain areas,” but said that “our mix of businesses gives the firm significant room for revenue growth as economic and market conditions continue to improve.”
For decades, Goldman has been known for beating its Wall Street competitors and churning out executives who go on to high leadership positions.
But the past few years have left it bruised. Last fall, it recorded a quarterly loss, only its second since going public in 1999. In 2010 and 2011, its net income fell year-over-year in six of the eight quarters.
Investors are trying to piece together whether the troubles are a short-term annoyance or a sign of deep-rooted problems. They wonder if the bank needs a new game plan.
Like the rest of the banking industry, Goldman has to figure out how to navigate a world of stricter government controls that will dry up some of its key revenue streams. Goldman has made big profits trading for its own account, especially when markets are volatile. But regulations taking effect this year will reduce Goldman’s ability to make those trades.
Unlike much of the banking industry, Goldman doesn’t have a large consumer banking arm to fall back on when trading and investment banking get bumpy. Its clients are largely hedge funds and multinational corporations that need to hedge their bets on foreign currencies, fluctuating interest rates and commodities.
Return on equity was about 12 percent, in line with a year ago. That was a big change from 38 percent five years ago, before the global economic meltdown.
Goldman also has public-relations problems to worry about. In the era of Occupy Wall Street, Goldman has been the target for much of the vitriol of people who blame the financial crisis on reckless practices in the banking industry. Last month, the vitriol came to a head when a mid-level executive resigned via a blistering editorial in the New York Times, where he accused the bank of losing its “moral fiber” and caring only about its own profits rather than its clients’.
The accusations are still swirling. Last week, the bank agreed to pay $22 million to settle regulators’ charges that Goldman analysts shared confidential research with favored clients. In the first quarter, the bank set aside $59 million for litigation and regulatory proceedings.
Goldman Sachs’ stock fell slightly in pre-market trading, down 73 cents to $117.
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0