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If embattled BP chief executive Tony Hayward leaves the company, he is not likely to walk with a massive windfall, compensation experts said.

While his departure is not imminent, speculation is rampant that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will cost Hayward his job. According to a prediction market run by Intrade, there is a 70% chance Hayward will be gone before the year is out.

That raises the question of how much severance he could receive if he steps down.

BP spokesman David Nicholas would not comment when asked about a possible severance plan, adding that Hayward remains the company’s chief executive.

But experts say Hayward will probably not get a lucrative package of bonus money and stock awards that many U.S. companies give to outgoing CEOs as so-called golden parachutes.

"He will be lucky to get a single year’s salary," said Paul Hodgson, a senior researcher at The Corporate Library, a governance group. "And even that could be mitigated in certain circumstances."

Hayward’s salary last year was just over 1 million British pounds, or $1.5 million, according to BP’s annual report. He also received a bonus worth more than $3 million and stock valued at nearly $1 million in 2009, the report said.

Given his recent track record, however, Hayward will probably not get a bonus this year, Hodgson said. It is also unlikely that he will receive much in the way of stock awards, which are often the most lucrative part of a severance package.

According to BP’s annual report, Hayward stands to gain nearly 1.2 million "performance shares" under a deferred compensation plan for company directors. But those shares, which would vest in 2011, are contingent on "an assessment of safety and environmental sustainability," the report said.

"If there are shares that are unvested, such as the performance shares, they are unlikely to vest," said Hodgson. "Shareholder return is not going to look good, and the performance condition won’t be met."

Shares of BP’s U online payday loans.S.-listed stock have plunged 50% in the weeks since the April 20 disaster and shareholder groups are threatening to sue BP for damages.

The sell-off could also hit Hayward, who owned over 500,000 options to buy U.K.-listed shares of BP at the end of last year, according to the company’s annual report. Those options, which are set to expire in 2011 or 2012, are currently worthless. But they could have some value if the stock recovers.

To be sure, Hayward will not be destitute if he leaves BP. In his 28 years of service, he has amassed a pension worth over $16 million, according to the annual report.

"Retirement is really the bulk of what he will see," said Julie Davidson, a consultant at Cogent Compensation Partners. But it is not clear whether the 53-year old executive will be eligible for retirement benefits before he turns 60, she added.

Davidson said BP’s board appears to have more discretion over severance payments than companies in the United States - particularly when performance is lacking.

"This is a contrast to what you see in the U.S.," she said. "He’s probably not going to get very much."

The average severance package for the chief executive of a major U.S. corporation is three times annual salary, plus bonus and stock awards, according to Hodgson.

These types of golden parachutes were intensely criticized last year after a number of chief executives at financial firms were awarded billions of dollars in compensation despite exceptionally poor performance.

Hodgson, who previously worked for the London-based publication Executive Compensation Review, said that few U.K. companies award severance packages comparable to their U.S. counterparts.

"In the U.K., compensation committees tend to have a little bit more muscle and shareholders have more say when it comes to poor performance," he said. 

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The "Keep Austin Weird" campaign must have worked, because the Texas capital is among the country’s oddball cities that bucked the downturn.

In fact, Texas cities starred on the new list of recession-proof metro areas, with six of 21 spots, according to MetroMonitor, a quarterly report released by Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

These 21 large metro areas were singled out by Brookings for keeping their labor and housing markets stable and posting robust economic activity during the past few years.

In fact, all but five of the 21 leading cities have economic output levels that top records set just prior to the recession.

"Most of these cities have some general characteristics in common," said Howard Weil, author of the report and a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "They didn’t experience huge housing bubbles followed by a crash, and their economies weren’t rooted in the auto industry."

Weil added that a number of cities are also government centers, like Austin, where job cuts have been limited and spending remains healthy.

Gross metropolitan product, a broad measure economic activity, has surged the most in the nation’s capital. In first quarter of 2010, the economy in Washington D.C. expanded by 6.3% from its pre-recession peak. Austin also touts considerable growth at 5.3%.

"We’ve seen a significant increase in government spending since the start of the recession, and even though it has been spread throughout other parts of the country, some of that extra spending stays in the D.C. metro area," Weil said. "But if government hawks succeed in cutting spending, we could see the growth in Washington slow down."

Meanwhile, as unemployment rates climbed higher in every major city across the nation during the recession, the jobless rate in Austin only rose to 7.1% in March 2010 from 3.5% three years earlier. During the same period, the U.S. unemployment rate spiked to 9.7% from 4.4%.

"We have a stable base of employment with the University of Texas, one of the largest universities in the country, and the second largest state government with 65,000 employees," said Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell.

Similarly, job losses were muted in Austin, as employment in Texas’s capital city dropped by 2.3% from its pre-recession peak through the first quarter of 2010.

Leffingwell said that a decade ago, Austin worked to attract high-tech companies, and while some manufacturing jobs in the sector have since diminished, companies are still expanding their workforce, including Samsung Electronics, which recently announced a $3.6 billion project that boosts the company’s payroll by 500 permanent positions.

And during the last two quarters, Austin welcomed job growth, adding nearly 8,000 new jobs during the period and increasing payrolls by more than 1%. Augusta, Ga.; Jackson, Miss.; Dallas; and Honolulu also posted similar gains.

"We’ve worked hard to diversify our economy and are aggressively targeting companies focused on renewable energy, medical technology and digital media," Leffingwell said.

Earlier this year, Texas invested $1.4 million through its Texas Enterprise Fund to lure Facebook into opening its first office outside of Palo Alto, Calif., in Austin. The social media giant opened the office last month and is actively hiring for its online sales and operations team. Facebook said it plans to hire over 200 employees in Austin over the next four years.

Meanwhile, further south, McAllen, Texas, which also made the top 21, has been boasting job growth for the past four straight quarters, and employment in the city has only declined by a modest 1.1% during the recession.

Houston, another Texas city, is included among the recession-proof metro areas for enjoying the smallest slide in housing prices at just 0.5% through the first quarter of 2010 compared to three years earlier. Austin followed close behind with a 0.6% dip during the same period.  

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Intel Corp. said Monday that it is in talks with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on a possible settlement of the government's antitrust case against the giant chipmaker.

The Santa Clara-based company (NASDAQ:INTC) said in a regulatory filing that both sides have filed a motion to suspend proceedings until July 22 in the antitrust trial while both sides work on the potential settlement.

The FTC sued in December, saying Intel had illegally stifled competition for a decade. The action came after Intel settled similar charges in a civil case brought by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE:AMD) and was fined by the European Union in a separate antitrust case.

A settlement with the FTC is expected to prompt another one with Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), which also claims that Intel has illegally used its dominant market position to cut off competition.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has also filed antitrust allegations against Intel.

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A proposed rule to stop financial firms from shopping for credit ratings will instead be postponed and studied, under an agreement finalized Wednesday by lawmakers negotiating a final Wall Street reform package.

The deal calls for a two-year study but then would mandate that the Securities and Exchange Commission adopt a system to independently match ratings agencies with firms that want securities rated.

The change is among the most controversial so far in two days of meetings of hammering out differences between House and Senate bills. Later on Wednesday, lawmakers also came to an agreement on new congressional reviews of the Federal Reserve.

The nation’s largest ratings agencies — Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch — have been under fire for their role in the financial crisis. The agencies gave top ratings to toxic financial products, like bonds backed by subprime mortgages. Lawmakers are most concerned with preventing financial firms from fishing for top-notch ratings.

Lawmakers, particularly Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., were concerned that the credit rating agency curb, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, would be tough to carry out. The measure originally required the SEC to appoint an independent panel tasked with creating a random process that matched rating agencies with financial firms.

The new measure leaves the door open for the SEC to figure out a better way to match rating agencies with financial firms. But if it can’t, the SEC is required to follow the original plan proposed by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., in two years.

Lawmakers on the negotiating committee said Franken indicated he could live with the agreement.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said the House agreed to the measure on Wednesday.

The provision is not the only one in the Wall Street bill aimed at credit rating agencies. The final legislation is also expected to strip federal law of any provisions that suggest credit rating agencies’ seal of approval is necessary.

Auditing the Fed: The House bill subjected the Fed to ongoing audits, while the Senate had ordered a one-time audit of the central bank’s loans during the financial crisis.

The compromise lawmakers are agreeing to would subject the Fed to ongoing audits. But the audits would only review the Fed’s emergency and cheap loans, as well as open market transactions.

Also, the compromise may force the Fed to publicly disclose who it makes loans to, after two years.

Also, Senate negotiators are leaning toward dropping a measure they had wanted that would have made the head of the New York Fed presidentially appointed, instead of chosen by New York banks. 

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ZHONGSHAN, China — Striking workers at a Honda auto parts factory in southeastern China have won higher wages — but not necessarily for themselves.

Factory managers began hiring a steady stream of replacement workers on Sunday, and a significant number of strikers went back to work after increases in wages and benefits, even as many others remained on strike.

The 20 or so members of the factory’s council of workers, chosen by the workers to represent them when the strike began on Wednesday, went into hiding over the weekend, fearing retaliation by the authorities.

It is too early to tell whether the apparent resolution of this strike — somewhat higher wages but lost jobs for many of the strikers — will set a pattern elsewhere as labor unrest spreads. Workers in the industrial southeast of China and elsewhere have been turning a labor shortage to their advantage by demanding better pay and working conditions.

But in Zhongshan, Honda has used the area job market to its advantage.

The Honda Lock parts factory in Zhongshan can run on lower-skilled, less-educated workers than the Honda transmission factory in Foshan, a two-hour drive to the northwest payday loans for bad credit. The Foshan strike brought the company’s auto-assembly operations in China to a temporary standstill — and the regular work force there was lured back to its jobs with reportedly much larger wage increases than Honda is offering in Zhongshan.

Replacement workers and returning employees in Zhongshan are receiving 11 percent higher pay and a 33 percent rise in allowances for food and housing, as of Sunday. The combined increase in wages and benefits was considerably less than the near doubling of wages alone that the strikers had sought. Even so, the improved compensation — wages of $152 a month and an allowance of $59 a month — was enough to make the jobs attractive to replacement workers.

The remaining strikers held a small rally outside the factory on Sunday morning but then went home and made no effort to picket as operations resumed.

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Thomas VanHimbergen, executive vice president and chief financial officer for Cardinal Stritch University, has been elected chairman of the board for Catholic Knights/Catholic Family of Milwaukee.

VanHimbergen has served on the Catholic Knights board since 2004 and the executive, audit, finance and technology, investments and compensation committees over the past six years.

“Tom brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to this position” said Bill O’Toole, president and CEO of Catholic Knights. “His 39 years of corporate and nonprofit leadership make him an excellent choice to help lead the Catholic Knights/Catholic Family board of directors best payday advance.”

As chair of the Catholic Knights/Catholic Family board, VanHimbergen oversees the board’s activities and responsibilities, and facilitates board and executive committee meetings.

Catholic Knights/Catholic Family is a 142-year-old Milwaukee-based fraternal benefit society. It recently completed a merger with Catholic Family Life Insurance, creating the second-largest Catholic fraternal benefit society in the United States. It has 125,000 members and $1.1 billion in assets.

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SEATTLE — After a series of leaked prototypes, it’s almost a given that Apple Inc. will unveil a new version of the iPhone at its annual software developers conference that opens Monday in San Francisco.

The revelation of a splashy new iPhone would clear up one of the highest-profile Apple mysteries of the year. Yet it would leave another unknown simmering at Apple, one with far-reaching implications for how we listen to music.

First, let’s talk iPhone.

Apple won’t comment on its plans, but it has used this conference to launch the last two generations of its smart phone. In April, Gizmodo, a tech blog, paid $5,000 to obtain a working iPhone prototype that was lost by an Apple engineer in a Silicon Valley bar. Apple didn’t say the prototype represented the next model of the iPhone, but if the descriptions posted online are accurate, the device will be getting a clearer display, longer battery life and a front-facing camera that could be used for videoconferencing. It’s also likely to have the updated iPhone software Apple previewed in April that makes it easier for users to run more than one program at a time.

In addition to the new iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to talk more about, if not release, a new operating system for the iPhone that will allow multitasking with third-party software.

What may not make an appearance during Jobs’ presentation Monday, but what Apple is also probably working on, is a service that could change the way many of us think about buying and listening to music.

The success of the iPod and the iTunes store has made Apple the world’s largest music retailer, but now there’s another revolution stirring in the digital song business.

As Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones became more popular, several new services started sending music over the Internet straight to the devices, letting users skip the step of plugging in and transferring songs from a computer as iTunes still requires. Such services, including Rhapsody and Spotify, which operates in Europe, give people access to just about every song imaginable, for a monthly fee.

Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi said these streaming services were still too small to lure Apple into directly competing. But Apple does need to keep an eye on Google Inc., which is building music-streaming technology into its increasingly popular Android phones. Google acquired a company called Simplify Media this year and said in May that it planned to build a desktop program that can beam people’s iTunes libraries over the Internet to Android phones.

Apple may be cooking up something similar. In late 2009, Apple bought Lala.com, which gave customers a way to listen to songs online, anywhere, if they had already purchased and stored the tracks on their own computers. Lala users could add new songs to their mix, paying 10 cents per song for an unlimited number of plays online or more if they also wanted to download the song to a device. Lala had built an iPhone application, but Apple bought the company before the app was made available to consumers.

Apple shuttered Lala’s service in May, and technology analysts believe that was a temporary step before Apple transforms the service into a way for iTunes shoppers to access music from the Web, the iPhone and other Apple devices.

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The number of pending home sales in Western Washington plummeted in May as federal tax credits for home buyers expired.

The number of pending sales in the 21 Western Washington counties surveyed by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) fell to 5,242 last month, down more than 44 percent from 9,438 in April. In King County, the number plummeted to 2,169 from 3,855 a month earlier.

The number of new listings of homes also fell. In the 21-county NWMLS area, they fell to 9,385 in May from 12,664 in April. In King County, the number of new listings fell to 3,480 last month from 5,054 a month earlier.

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US Airways Group Inc. has begun service from its Charlotte hub to Ottawa, Ontario.

US Airways Express partner Air Wisconsin will operate the daily service on 50-seat CRJ-200 regional jets.

“The new service to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, from Charlotte complements a growing choice of destinations from our largest hub,” says Jason Reisinger, US Airways director of route planning. “We’re now able to offer flights to and from Ottawa from both Philadelphia and Charlotte, providing flexible travel options for customers in those cities and abroad no fax payday advances.”

Ottawa joins five other destinations that have been added from Charlotte in the past 18 months, including service to Rome and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

US Airways (NYSE:LCC), based in Tempe, Ariz., offers more than 3,000 flights per day to 190 destinations.

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