The Federal Reserve Bank of New York bought the building at 33 Maiden Lane for $207.5 million from Merit US Real Estate Fund III, LP, according to a statement on the district bank
Bank of America announced plans Thursday to freeze pension plans, effective in July, and increase its 401(k) contributions instead.
Eligible employees will keep the pension benefits that they’ve earned to date but will not receive additional benefits, Bank of America (, Fortune 500) spokesman Scott Silvestri said.
The company will instead begin making an additional 2-3% annual contribution to employees’ 401(k) accounts, on top of the existing program that matches employee contributions up to 5%.
"Making these changes simplifies our offerings, gives employees control in managing their retirement savings and ensures our retirement benefits remain competitive," Silvestri said in an email instant payday loan lenders.
U.S. companies are increasingly moving away from traditional pensions and toward 401(k) plans in an effort to save costs and minimize funding uncertainty. Last week, General Motors (, Fortune 500) announced that it had shifted its senior salaried workers away from a traditional pension plan to a 401(k) plan.
Bank of America had roughly 282,000 full-time employees as of December. In September, the bank announced plans to eliminate 30,000 positions over the next few years.
In the city of St. Louis, there is no bigger land-owner than the city of St. Louis.
Over the past four decades, the city has accumulated more than 11,000 parcels of real estate that no one else wants, long-empty houses and thousands of vacant lots, big downtown buildings and even a 30-acre cemetery. It sells some parcels every month and accumulates more after five annual tax sales. But most of the land just sits, waiting.
Last week’s deal to sell more than 1,200 parcels on the near north side to developer Paul McKee highlights the potential for this “land-banking.” McKee, who already owns 800 parcels in the area, will be able to market more and larger sites to potential tenants for his massive NorthSide Regeneration project under the deal. It’s progress, says the city.
But as land banks bloom from New York to Nebraska, St. Louis’ experience illustrates two simple facts: That this practice is no panacea for blight and that any real progress requires lots of patience.
St. Louis has been banking land since 1971. Residents and businesses were fleeing for the suburbs, leaving behind crumbling buildings with unpaid taxes. The city wanted a central repository to hold that property, clear the title, maintain it, and sell it to someone to redevelop. The Land Reutilization Authority — the nation’s first city-run land bank — was born.
LRA started taking properties that went unsold at St. Louis sheriff’s office tax sales, and its inventory quickly ballooned into the thousands. Despite a constant churn of sales, inventory has stayed high ever since. Today, the LRA and two smaller land banks own 11,136 parcels, more than two square miles of ground; they’ll still own 9,900 after the NorthSide sale closes. Mowing and maintaining all this costs $2.7 million a year.
The authority has some success stories, such as the old City Hospital — now high-end condos — and large-scale rebuilding in the Gate District and Gaslight Square. But it still has vast holdings, especially in battered sections of north St. Louis, neighborhoods such as The Ville, Hyde Park and Wells Goodfellow, where as much as one-fifth of all real estate is owned by LRA. Much of the land is vacant lots, but there are also plenty of empty buildings, with crumbling roofs, patchy walls and the LRA’s trademark dark red boards over the doors.
The trouble, said Otis Williams, who oversees the authority for St. Louis Development Corp., is that there just isn’t much interest in these properties, even at a price tag of just a few thousand dollars.
“The goal is to get each of them back on the tax rolls,” Williams said. “The problem we have is the market. There’s a real lack of demand.”
But some say the LRA holds on to too much property for too long.
Every month, at a meeting in a downtown office building, the LRA considers offers. Typically it receives dozens. Some are from people who want to buy the plot next to their house for a sideyard. Some come from rehabbers who want to turn a shell into apartments, or people looking for an affordable way to purchase a home.
In a report last year, free-market thinktank the Show-Me Institute combed through eight years of LRA records, and found that the agency rejected more than 40 percent of purchase offers, often saying the land was being held for “future development.” In some cases, LRA turned down offers for the same property several times.
That seems to run counter to the goal of putting property back on the tax rolls and getting it redeveloped, said Audrey Spalding, the Show-Me policy analyst who led the study.
“When you turn down an offer to purchase property today in the hopes of a future, better development tomorrow, you are turning down a certain offer, and property tax revenue, in the hopes that a future offer will materialize,” Spalding said. “In this economy, such a bet is ill-advised.”
Williams said the LRA weighs a number of factors, including the potential for future development and whether the buyer’s plan for the site fits the city’s plan for the area no fax pay day loan. But, he said, a major reason why sales get turned down is because the buyer doesn’t have the resources to redevelop the property.
“We’re not going to sell to just anybody,” he said. “They’ve got to be able to do something with it.
If not, he said, it’s quite possible that the land will just wind up back with LRA a few years down the road, maybe in worse shape than it is now. The LRA has changed policies in one regard, though. Williams said it has tried to sell more land as side yards, and to neighborhood groups that want to create community gardens and parks.
‘BANKING’ TREND
In the meantime, new land banks — often with more powers than the LRA — are sprouting up across the country.
Michigan now has 41 land banks, and Ohio has expanded its land-banking programs. New York is readying to launch them in five cities this year, proposals are before state lawmakers now in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nebraska, and Kansas City officials are asking the Missouri General Assembly to create one there.
“More states are really recognizing that vacant and abandoned properties impose tremendous costs on their cities and their neighborhoods,” said Frank Alexander, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta who works on land bank legislation. “(Land banks) can step in where there’s no market.”
Most of these new banks would be more powerful than the LRA, with access to more funds to rehab or demolish buildings and clean up sites for reuse. New York law gives land banks the right to all land that is seized for unpaid property taxes, not just the sites left over after investors have picked over sheriff auctions — which is how St. Louis’ LRA accumulates most of its land.
That’s huge, said Dan Kildee, who developed the land bank in Genesee County, Mich. — home of Flint — because it means land banks get some good properties to work with, too.
“The land bank gets to be the smartest and luckiest speculator,” Kildee said. Then they can market the properties or partner with nonprofit groups or developers to rebuild them. And more sales means more money for demolition of properties that can’t be rebuilt.
Funding demolition has been a challenge in St. Louis. It costs about $8,000 for LRA to knock down a structure, and it owns roughly 2,000. In recent years, the agency has demolished 200 to 240 buildings a year, though that number plunged to 142 in 2010 because of budget cuts. Other cities — most notably Detroit — have used federal money designed for foreclosure relief to knock down thousands of houses. St. Louis used most of that money on rehab work. The LRA does, though, plan to spend much of the $3.2 million its getting from McKee on much-needed demolition.
Take the 3300 block of Blair Avenue in Hyde Park, where the shells of three LRA-owned brick four-families sit crumbling in a row, their roofs gone and brick walls caving in. Across the street, another LRA house, this one of blue shingles, sits empty, its roof rotting. On a recent afternoon, a boy played in a fort built of mattresses in the yard. Otherwise the street was dead.
Just a few blocks away, construction crews are working, rehabbing 27 buildings scattered across several blocks in a project called Hyde Park South. When they’re done, there will be 50 affordable apartments.
Most of the buildings were bought from the LRA, said Michele Duffe, a development consultant who is working on the project, and the former LRA director herself. Duffe’s firm and the development arm of nearby Bethlehem Lutheran Church have built 206 units of housing in the neighborhood, with 40 more in the pipeline.
Buying all those parcels from individual owners, instead of a land bank, said Duffe, would have been impossible.
As any driver knows, rising gas prices can put a dent in a household budget. For small business owners, it can hurt _ or even wipe out _ profits.
The recent rise in the price of gas is pressuring business owners to find ways to protect their earnings. Some of their strategies are simple, such as using GPS devices to track fuel usage. Others are drastic _ like moving manufacturing operations to the U.S. from Asia.
Small business owners have navigated this road before _ most recently in 2008 when the price of gas rose to a national average of $4.11 a gallon. But gas is expected to surpass that record and reach $4.25 by late April. And even if the price follows its usual pattern of gradually falling back from a high reached in the spring, it will still be expensive for the rest of the year.
Here’s a look at how some companies are coping:
A DIRECT HIT
Chris Hundley runs Limousine Connection, a 31-car limousine service in Los Angeles. He likens the surge in gas prices to “being run into by someone without insurance” _ there’s no way to avoid having to pay.
In 2007 Limousine Connection began adding a 3 percent fuel surcharge to its bills to offset the cost of gas. Since then, the rate has crept up to 10 percent. Hundley says customers have come to understand the necessity for a fuel surcharge, and prefer it to a rate increase.
But the company doesn’t start charging extra on its base hourly rate the minute gas prices rise. For customers that have contracts with Limousine Connection, he’ll wait 30 days, and until prices have gone up 10 percent, before raising the surcharge. If prices rise, say, only 7 percent, he won’t raise it. “We are eating it _ it’s the cost of doing business,” he says.
Hundley also tracks fuel usage. Speeding or idling for extended periods wastes gas, so Hundley monitors driver behavior using the GPS systems installed in his fleet. When the company detects wasteful patterns a manager sits down with the employee to explain how he can help the company keep down fuel expenses. Limousine Connection is so serious about saving gas that, in some cases, it has issued verbal warnings to some drivers.
Hundley also has added more fuel-efficient vehicles to its fleet. The company has some hybrids, and all except a few Mercedes use regular, rather than premium, gas.
CHEAPER TO MAKE IT IN THE U.S.
The rising cost of jet fuel has convinced Seesmart Inc. to make the commercial and household lights that it sells in U.S. factories instead of Asia. Ray Sjolseth, president of the Simi Valley, Calif.-based company, says that the savings he used to get from manufacturing overseas is being wiped out by higher air freight rates.
Sjolseth says his customers tend to have last-minute deadlines. “We don’t have a choice but to air freight the products,” he says He estimates that 80 percent of his goods are shipped by air and that rising rates are raising his manufacturing costs between 5 percent and 8 percent.
So Sjolseth’s solution is to move his manufacturing to the U.S. He currently has one factory in California and expects to have one in Chicago operating by the end of the year. He estimates that a year from now, he’ll save between 5 percent and 10 percent because he won’t be getting shipments by air.
SHIFTING RESOURCES
Higher gas prices are cutting into travel budgets and that’s hurting Towne Park Systems’ revenue. The Annapolis, Md., company runs valet parking services for hotels across the country. These days, fewer guests are parking cars in hotel lots so the hotels don’t need as many attendants.
Town Park responded by shifting some staffers to different jobs, says Kirk Pozadzides, the company’s general manager. The company also provides concierge and other services for hotel guests. Now, the employee who parks cars may shift to working as a concierge.
The company also added “park and fly” services. Towne Park finds unused spaces in garages near airports, and shuttles passengers to airline terminals. It costs a traveler less to use the service than it does to park in an airport lot, Pozadzides says.
“You have to find creative ways to artificially drive revenue,” he says.
WORKING WITH VENDORS
The surge in gas prices in 2008 was a shock for Capriotti’s, a chain of sandwich shops based in Las Vegas. CEO Ashley Morris says the company didn’t pay much attention to a clause in his company’s contracts with distributors that said Capriotti’s would pay more for deliveries if the price of gas went up. So when gas soared that spring and summer, the company was paying far more than it expected for food, paper products and other supplies.
“It hit our business fairly hard,” Morris says.
Now, the surcharge rises and falls based on the price of diesel gas. This time around, he says, Capriotti’s won’t suffer. “We heavily negotiated a sliding scale.”
DELIVERY DILEMMA
Companies that make deliveries are also hurting. Ricky Eisen’s catering business in New York has two trucks and a van. She used to pay $40 to $60 a day for gas for each truck. Now it costs her $72 to $76. And she pays more to vendors for deliveries.
“I’m getting squeezed at both ends,” says Eisen, owner of Between the Bread. “It’s enough to cut a dent in the profit.”
Eisen held out for a long time _ until March 2011 _ before she began tacking on fuel surcharges for her deliveries. She has charged 5 percent extra. Now, she says, “I’m thinking as fuel prices rise, I’m going to have to increase the percentage. Right now, I want to keep it where it is.”
Can the market sustain its rally, or will prospects of a Greek default shatter investors’ risk appetite?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average () closed at its highest level since 2008 Friday. For the year, the Dow is up almost 6%, and the S&P 500 () is up more than 8%. The Nasdaq () has made an impressive 13% run.
Yet, the possibility of a Greek default looms large over world markets. European finance ministers will meet Monday, and are expected to sign off on Greece’s latest economic reform proposal.
Greece needs that sign off from Europe’s finance ministers to avoid defaulting on a €14.5 billion bond payment due March 20. Another delay is unlikely to rattle the markets, but if it becomes clear that Greece will default, markets strategists fear a sharp sell-off.
"Markets have priced in a positive outcome," said Joseph Tanious, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
All three indexes posted solid gains for the week, as investors largely ignored concerns over Greece and focused squarely on better-than-expected economic reports in the United States. The S&P was up 1.4%.
With few key economic reports on the agenda this week, and U.S. markets closed Monday in observance of Presidents’ Day, investors will keep an eye on quarterly earnings from major retailers to assess the health of the American consumer fast payday loan no faxing.
"There will be a heightened sensitivity to retailers and their earnings to either confirm that the U.S. economy is picking up and recovering or cast a doubt on the consumer’s appetite," said Tanious.
On Tuesday, retailers Barnes & Noble (, Fortune 500), Home Depot (, Fortune 500), Macy’s (, Fortune 500), Wal-Mart (, Fortune 500) and Saks () will report quarterly results.
On Thursday, Kohl’s, Sears (, Fortune 500), Target (, Fortune 500) and Gap (, Fortune 500) will report.
On Friday, J.C. Penney (, Fortune 500) will release its earnings.
Other quarterly earnings due out next week include Dell (, Fortune 500) and Kraft (, Fortune 500) on Tuesday and Hewlett-Packard (, Fortune 500) on Wednesday
Meanwhile, investors will continue to monitor developments in Iran to determine whether concerns over the country’s nuclear program will drive up the price of oil.
U.S. crude oil rose 3% last week to close at $102.35, and economists worry that further increases in oil prices could threaten the global economy.
"I’m watching oil with trepidation," said Ram Bhagavatula, partner at the hedge fund Combinatorics Capital. "It’s the one thing that could threaten the recovery."
China is clamping down on overcapacity in the world
Iran is poised to greatly expand uranium enrichment at a fortified underground bunker to a point that would boost how quickly it could make nuclear warheads, diplomats tell The Associated Press.
They said Tehran has put finishing touches for the installation of thousands of new-generation centrifuges at the cavernous facility _ machines that can produce enriched uranium much more quickly and efficiently than its present machines.
While saying that the electrical circuitry, piping and supporting equipment for the new centrifuges was now in place, the diplomats emphasized that Tehran had not started installing the new machines at its Fordo facility and could not say whether it was planning to.
Still, the senior diplomats _ who asked for anonymity because their information was privileged _ suggested that Tehran would have little reason to prepare the ground for the better centrifuges unless it planned to operate them. They spoke in recent interviews _ the last one Saturday.
The reported work at Fordo appeared to reflect Iran’s determination to forge ahead with nuclear activity that could be used to make atomic arms despite rapidly escalating international sanctions and the latent threat of an Israeli military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Fordo could be used to make fissile warhead material even without such an upgrade, the diplomats said.
They said that although older than Iran’s new generation machines, the centrifuges now operating there can be reconfigured within days to make such material because they already are enriching to 20 percent _ a level that can be boosted quickly to weapons-grade quality.
Their comments appeared to represent the first time anyone had quantified the time it would take to reconfigure the Fordo centrifuges into machines making weapons-grade material.
In contrast, Iran’s older enrichment site at Natanz is producing uranium at 3.4 percent, a level normally used to power reactors. While that too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, reassembling from low to weapons-grade production is complex, and retooling the thousands of centrifuges at Natanz would likely take weeks.
The diplomats’ recent comments came as International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are scheduled to visit Tehran on Sunday. Their trip _ the second this month _ is another attempt to break more than three years of Iranian stonewalling about allegations that Tehran has _ or is _ secretly working on nuclear weapons that would be armed with uranium enriched to 90 percent or more.
Diplomats accredited to the IAEA expect little from that visit. They told the AP that _ as before _ Iran was refusing to allow the agency experts to visit Parchin, the suspected site of explosives testing for a nuclear weapon and had turned down other key requests made by the experts.
Iranian officials deny nuclear weapons aspirations, saying the claims are based on bogus intelligence from the U.S. and Israel.
But IAEA chief Yukiya Amano has said there are increasing indications of such activity. His concerns were outlined in 13-page summary late last year listing clandestine activities that either can be used in civilian or military nuclear programs, or “are specific to nuclear weapons.”
Among these were indications that Iran has conducted high explosives testing and detonator development to set off a nuclear charge, as well as computer modeling of a core of a nuclear warhead. The report also cited preparatory work for a nuclear weapons test and development of a nuclear payload for Iran’s Shahab 3 intermediate range missile _ a weapon that could reach Israel.
Iran says it is enriching only to make nuclear fuel. But because enrichment can also create fissile warhead material, the U.N. Security Council has imposed sanctions on Tehran in a failed attempt to force it to stop.
More recently, the U.S., the European Union and other Western allies have either tightened up their own sanctions or rapidly put new penalties in place striking at the heart of Iran’s oil exports lifeline and its financial system.
The most recent squeeze on Iran was announced Friday, when SWIFT, a financial clearinghouse used by virtually every country and major corporation in the world, agreed to shut out the Islamic Republic from its network.
Diplomats say the choke-holds are being applied in part to persuade Israel to hold off on potential military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities _ among them Fordo, a main Israeli concern because it is dug deep into a mountain and could be impervious to the most powerful bunker busting bombs.
Diplomats told the AP earlier this month that Iran had added two new series or cascades of old-generation IR-1 centrifuges to its Fordo operation, meaning 348 centrifuges were now operating in four cascades.
Olli Heinonen, who retired last year as the IAEA’s chief Iran inspector, recently estimated that these machines, and two other cascades at Natanz can produce around 15 kilograms (more than 30 pounds) of 20-percent enriched uranium a month, using Iran’s tons of low-enriched uranium as feedstock.
The low and higher enriched uranium now being produced “provides the basic material needed to produce four to five nuclear weapons,” Heinonen said.
But he suggested “an altogether different scenario” _ a much quicker pace of enrichment to levels easily turned into weapons-capable uranium if Iran starts using newer, more powerful centrifuges at Fordo. That, said the diplomats, is exactly what Iran appears to be on the verge of doing by finishing preparatory work recently for new centrifuge installations.
Fordo, which can house 3,000 centrifuges, was confidentially revealed to the IAEA by Iran in 2009, just days before the U.S. and Britain jointly announced its existence.
Iran announced last year that it would move its 20-percent uranium production to Fordo from Natanz and sharply boost capacity. It started making higher grade material two years ago saying it needed it to fuel a research reactor.
But the U.S. and others question the rationale, pointing out that Iran rejected offers of foreign fuel supplies for that reactor and is making more of the higher-enriched material than that small reactor needs.
A storm of criticism in China over share listing plans by a company that sells tonics made with bear bile is highlighting the increasingly affluent country’s changing attitudes toward the environment and wildlife.
Reports Friday said dozens of well-known entertainers, writers and other celebrities signed a petition to the China Securities Regulatory Commission urging it to withhold approval for the initial public offering by Guizhentang, a Chinese medicines maker. The company is awaiting approval for a share listing in Shenzhen.
Hundreds of thousands of comments on “weibo,” the Chinese version of Twitter, blasted the company for extracting bile from bears.
Animal rights groups contend the practice of bear bile farming is cruel because the animals are confined to small cages and milked of bile through catheters inserted into fistulas, or permanent wounds, in their gall bladders.
They say that antibiotics used to counter chronic infections from the practice, and other contaminants in the bile, also pose a hazard to human health.
A photo on the front page of the state-run newspaper China Business News on Friday showed a satirical photo montage of a caged bear, its muzzle bloodied, with a picture of the head of the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicines, Fang Shuting, quoted as saying that bears are “very comfortable” while the bile is extracted.
News reports cited Fang as saying China has 68 licensed bear farms and more than 10,000 bears farmed for their bile, which can cost up to 4,000 yuan ($635) a kilogram.
A spokesman for Guizhentang, who gave his surname as “Xu,” refused comment.
“It is not the right time for an interview now. We will let you know when we want to do an interview,” Xu said.
Officials at the CSRC said they could not comment on an IPO plan under consideration.
Animal rights are gaining increasing attention in China, with public figures like basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan speaking out against eating shark fins and other customs that many view as cruel or a threat to endangered species.
The change reflects both a growing awareness of the need to protect the environment and wildlife and also increasing affluence among many ordinary Chinese who now keep pets, travel overseas and have changing attitudes toward traditions they may not have questioned in the past.
In recent years, for example, animal protection groups have staged mass releases of cats and dogs caged for shipment to restaurants and markets, where they are slaughtered for dishes considered to be delicacies or especially nourishing.
The petition to the stock watchdog from more than 70 celebrities and environmental protection groups seeks to block the IPO and urges the use of synthetic substitutes for bear bile, which is a digestive substance made in the liver and stored in the gall bladder.
The main active ingredient in the bile is ursodeoxycholic acid, or UDCA, which is thought to act as an anti-inflammatory and is used to treat gall stones and liver ailments. It is mainly taken from the Asiatic Black Bear, a protected but not endangered species in China.
Chinese media reports cited Fang as defending Guizhentang’s bile collecting practices in a news conference in Beijing, after visiting its facilities in southeast China’s Fujian province.
“Collecting bile is like turning on a tap. It’s painless, natural and simple. I didn’t see bears suffering in the process,” Caijing magazine quoted Fang as saying.
“After the bile is extracted, bears can still drink milk and honey and have fun in the farm.”
Fang argued that bear farms helped to protect wild bears by discouraging poaching, and that China must preserve its unique, ancient medicinal practices. Animal rights groups contend that poaching continues because buyers view wild bear bile as more potent.
Farmed bears live about four or five years, while those in the wild live up to 30, according to the Animals Asia Foundation, which has been working to close down bear farms and rescue the animals.
A few members of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting said the central bank may soon have to consider more asset purchases, while others said the economic outlook would have to deteriorate first.
A few members said economic conditions
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