- NYSEG slashes the size of its rate hike request - David Robinson/The Buffalo News New York State Electric & Gas Corp. is slashing the size of the rate increase it is seeking from its electric customers by more than 40 percent, the utility said Thursday. NYSEG, which last September requested a rate hike that would have boosted a typical residential customer’s electric bill by a total of almost 19 percent, or $12.39 per month, said it is reducing that proposed increase to $6.70 per month. Exactly how big of a rate increase customers will end up paying will be decided by the State Public Service Commission late this summer. NYSEG provides service to about 175,000 customers in suburban and rural portions of Western New York.
- HSBC Mortgage Corp. slashes jobs in Depew- Jonathan D. Epstein/The Daily News HSBC Mortgage Corp. (USA) is slashing 80 jobs at its Depew headquarters and operations facility in a cost-cutting move. The primary mortgage unit ofHSBC Bank USA andHSBC North America Holdings said it is "eliminating a small number of mortgage loan operations roles to enhance operational efficiency," according to an e-mailed statement.
-Greatbatch profits fall 17.9% -Jonathan D. Epstein/The Buffalo News Medical battery maker Greatbatch said Thursday that first-quarter profits fell 17.9 percent on lower sales across all product lines and higher research and development costs.
There was one thing that went up: - Five Star Bank profits soar- Jonathan D. Epstein/The Buffalo News The parent of Five Star Bank said first-quarter profits soared 80 percent, as the bank made more money from loans, cut expenses and suffered lower losses. Warsaw-based Financial Institutions reported net income of $5.3 million, or 40 cents per share, up from $2.9 million, or 19 cents per share, in the same three-month period a year ago.
- Delaware North charts global course with caution - David Robinson/The Buffalo News Jeremy Jacobs Jr. thinks it’s a good idea for Delaware North Cos. to branch out into new countries. He just doesn’t like going into unfamiliar territory. So the Buffalo-based food service, gaming and hospitality giant has been following what Jacobs calls a “regional global” approach to its fast-growing international business, which has more than tripled its sales over the last five years. “Stay close to what you know, and don’t stray too far toward the fringes,” Jacobs, a principal at Delaware North, said Thursday during a speech to members of the World Trade Center Buffalo Niagara. [Apparently nothing was said about the uncomfortable fact that DNC also owns the dad-gumBoston Bruins.]
- Brothers buy former Marinaccio's - Jonathan D. Epstein/The Buffalo News The owners of the Family Tree restaurant in Eggertsville have purchased the shuttered Marinaccio's Steak & Seafood restaurant in the Village of Williamsville, with plans to reshape its menu and offerings. Nectarios and Raymond Kollidas, through Kollidas Properties LLC, paid $875,000 to buy the high-profile restaurant site at 5877 Main St. from LWH Restaurant, controlled by Paul Marinaccio. The Italian restaurant, previously called the Little White House, has been closed since the end of December after a seven-year run.
When East Germany and West Germany got back together in 1990, SNL anchorman Dennis Miller had this to say:
I view this in much the same way I view a possible Dean Martin - Jerry Lewis reconciliation: I never really enjoyed their work, and I'm not sure I need to see any of their new stuff.
It looks like all is forgiven: - Spain gets downgraded as European crisis spreads - AP/Buffalo News Chancellor Angela Merkel [right] said Germany would speed up approval of its share of a nearly $60 billion joint bailout with the International Monetary Fund and other euro countries, rushing it through parliament by May 7. That would beat a May 19 deadline when Greece has debt coming due — and which it can’t pay without a bailout.... Her remarks and a promise from Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble that the package could be signed, sealed and delivered — provided Greece agrees to tough austerity measures — helped shore up confidence the country would not suffer a disastrous default. That would make borrowing more expensive for governments across Europe. Related: - Ash, Greek credit crises reveal a disunited Europe- Michael Weissenstein/AP/Buffalo News It can be easy to forget about borders in Europe, a continent united by fast trains, cheap flights, a single currency and passport-free travel stretching from Portugal to Poland. A pair of massive crises that hit the European Union this month have been a startling reminder, however, that cooperation and regulation are still a long way from taming the old forces of national self-interest and disorder. - Merkel Tested as Escalating Greek Crisis Hurts Euro - Nicholas Kulish/New York Times Mrs. Merkel grumbled that Greece’s entry into the euro zone was not based on “sustainable factors,” making the present crisis particularly difficult to deal with. She went on to say that “we cannot allow the same situation with countries as with Lehman Brothers.”
How much easier it is, this week, to be in charge of the American economy: - As expected, Fed holds rates steady - Jeannine Aversa/AP/Buffalo News The Federal Reserve sounded a more confident note Wednesday that the economy is strengthening but pledged to hold rates at record lows to make sure it gains traction. Wrapping up a two-day meeting, the Fed, in a 9-1 decision, retained its pledge to hold rates at historic lows for an “extended period.” Doing so will help energize the recovery.
New on the AP: - Rosy earnings show that corporate America is back - Dave Carpenter / AP / Buffalo News Companies that do everything from making appliances to selling cruises are reporting strong first-quarter profits - not because of the layoffs many of them used to dress up last year's earnings reports but because people are spending more. The turnaround has yet to produce a dramatic increase in hiring, which isn't expected until 2011 or later. But it provides emphatic new evidence that the economy has moved past the crisis and should continue to strengthen. "We're out of the woods for good," says Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. "This is not just an arithmetic story. It's a story of legitimate growth."
And there's lots of good news in the Business Today section:
- More signs point to recovering economy - Anne d’Innocenzio / AP / Buffalo News The best consumer confidence reading since September 2008’s financial meltdown and bullish earnings reports this week from companies ranging from Whirlpool to UPS show increasing demand and a rebound gathering steam. Americans are even feeling a bit better about the job market. The biggest remaining worry? Housing. That market has shown signs of strengthening this spring because of government subsidies but remains on fragile ground and could start to weaken once rebates expire.
- First Niagara on course- Jonathan D. Epstein/Buffalo News First Niagara Financial Group’s top executive told shareholders Tuesday that bank management wants to create a franchise that would be attractive to investors and also potential buyers but that it intends to keep growing, not sell out. [Photo:At annual meeting of First Niagara shareholders, CEO John R. Koelmel calls 2009 "a breakout year" and sets sights on making the bank attractive to investors, as well as potential buyers, while pursuing aggressive growth. Sharon Cantillon/Buffalo News]
-Ford turns profit, but shares tumble - AP/Buffalo News Ford Motor Co. earned $2.1 billion in the first quarter as the economic clouds parted and consumers grew confident enough to buy cars again. But the confidence didn’t extend to investors, who pushed Ford’s shares down Tuesday on concerns that the automaker’s recovery isn’t sustainable.
Today's business news -- a lot of it worthy of Page One -- can be hopefully summarized as a bad day for people who make up mythical amounts of money to trade back and forth and a good day for people who make real products that reasonable people might want to buy.
- No apology by Goldman as senators grill execs - Marcy Gordon and Tom Raum/AP/Buffalo News Defending his company under blistering criticism, the CEO of Goldman Sachs testily told skeptical senators Tuesday that customers who bought securities from the Wall Street giant in the run-up to a national financial crisis came looking for risk, “and that’s what they got.” Related: - Two planets collide for three hearings on Goldman - Steven Pearlstein/Washington Post The issues were never really joined, the conflicting viewpoints never resolved, the full story never told. - Goldman Is Bruised, Defiant in Senate - Wall Street Journal It highlighted a mismatch in how Wall Street sees itself and how it is seen. Goldman's witnesses said a market maker—someone who matches buyers and sellers and can also hold securities and take a bet on them—has an obligation to describe accurately the product being traded, but needn't disclose its own position. - Olive Oil and Snake Oil - Maureen Dowd/New York Times And the traders and executives who dreamed up the idea of packaging smoke were every bit as slick, evasive and dismissively unapologetic as Michael Corleone. He only claimed to trade in olive oil; they actually delivered the snake oil.
Meanwhile, back at the factory: - GM plant expects to add 415 jobs - Matt Glynn/Buffalo News General Motors' Town of Tonawanda engine plant plans to add 415 jobs and retain 300 others as a result of winning a new V-8 engine line, Gov. David A. Paterson said Tuesday. Production of the "Generation V" engine — representing a $400 million investment by GM — is set to begin in 2012. It could bring the total job count to near 1,400, welcome news for a plant that last year was nervous about its future amid job cuts, the phaseout of two engines and GM's bankruptcy. ... It was the second major investment by GM in the plant announced this year. In February, the automaker chose the River Road site for a $425 million investment tied to a next-generation Ecotec engine, set to begin production in 2012 and retaining 470 jobs. "This is like winning the Super Bowl two years in a row, isn't it?" said Salvatore Morana, president of Local 774. - Jobs at plant show wisdom of GM bailout - Donn Esmonde/Buffalo News Idoubt that Joe Cantafio considers himself a socialist. But I think that he and hundreds of other workers at General Motors’ Tonawanda engine plant—and hundreds more who are coming to it—are testament to the rightness of the government bailout. Related: - GM touts millions sunk into four U.S. engine plants - USA Today At time when it seems like American manufacturing is flat on its back, General Motors is investing more than $655 million, creating more than 1,200 jobs at four U.S.plants to make a new generation of fuel efficient small-block truck and car engines. - GM to invest in 5 plants, with $32M in Bay City - Detroit News GM is eager to show the public and government officials that its recovery will benefit employees and cities across the United States. The investment also is aimed at demonstrating the automaker's progress since emerging from bankruptcy court last summer. - GM to invest $115M in Defiance Powertrain, saves up to 190 jobs - Toledo Blade Mark Barbash, Ohio Department of Development, told about 100 workers gathered for announcement at the plant Tuesday: "It really is a testament to the faith that GM has in the work you do everyday."
Here's the Blankfein testimony from C-SPAN. All three hours and 28 minutes of it:
- GM's Tonawanda plans will preserve 710 jobs - Matt Glynn/The Buffalo News General Motors today announced it is investing $400 million in its Town of Tonawanda plant to produce a new V-8 engine, securing 710 jobs. The investment is part of a plan to put $890 million into five factories to make its V-8 engines more fuel efficient, preserving or creating roughly 1,600 jobs at the company. A source familiar with the project confirmed the details to The News on Monday. GM made a formal announcement this morning. The spending, which has been in the works for a long time, will help GM meet government fuel economy standards that become fully effective in 2016. [Photo: Plant Manager Steve Finch, left, and Bob Coleman, chairman of the UAW Local 774, answer questions following today's announcement at the Town of Tonawanda plant. Derek Gee / Buffalo News]
To look at the Business Today section of The Buffalo News, one might conclude that the money is in, well, money. Certainly not in anything as frivilous as toys.
- Mattel may cut jobs at Fisher-Price in outsourcing move - Samantha Maziarz Christmann/The Buffalo News More job cuts may be coming to East Aurora's Fisher-Price. Its parent company, Mattel, has confirmed that, "after a lengthy due diligence process," it is outsourcing the company's information technology work to Indian company Wipro. But there is no official word yet on whether East Aurora employees will be affected or if so, how many of them. ... The job cuts were foreshadowed in Mattel's first-quarter earnings call earlier this month, when it commented to investors and media that it was "working on outsourcing [its] IT infra structure" as part of its strategy to cut costs. Mattel reported a surprise 12 percent increase in revenue for the quarter ending March 31.
- For bank, quarter was very productive - Jonathan D. Epstein/The Buffalo News First Niagara Financial Group has been on a tear for the past year — gobbling up two banks, raising $1 billion in capital and converting to a commercial bank — and its aggressive growth strategy appears to be paying off. First Niagara said Monday that first-quarter profit soared 79.5 percent from a year ago, following a successful major acquisition in Western Pennsylvania that is yielding strong growth in loans and deposits.
- Good news for loan industry - Eileen AJ Connelly/AP/Buffalo News In its first publicly released examination of private student loan payment data, credit reporting agency TransUnion said the ratio of private student loans that were 90 days or more past due fell to 6.03 percent in the 2009 fourth quarter, reversing a five-quarter trend. [Press release] [Video]
Of course, if you've still got one of these sets, you could get a lot more than $7 for it now:
- George Pyle/The Buffalo News [Taking a look in his mother's basement]
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is dragging three panels of Goldman Sachs executives before the TV cameras today. You can watch it here. You can read the exhibits here. You can follow the New York Times DealBook live blog here. You can get caught up with the background [like the stack of e-mails held by subcommittee chairman Carl Levin, below]: - Goldman gained at clients’ expense, probe finds - AP/Buffalo News Goldman Sachs developed a strategy to profit from the housing meltdown and reaped billions at the expense of clients, a Senate investigation has found. Top Goldman executives misled investors in complex mortgage securities that became toxic, investigators for a Senate panel allege. They point to e-mails and other Goldman documents obtained in an 18-month investigation. Excerpts from the documents were released Monday, a day before a hearing that will bring CEO Lloyd Blankfein and other top Goldman executives before Congress. Blankfein says in his own prepared remarks that Goldman didn’t bet against its clients and can’t survive without their trust. Related: - Towards a unified-field theory of the financial crisis - Ezra Klein/The Washington Post - Goldman’s Dupe—or Willing Accomplice? - Mark Gimein/The Big Money - Investors Were Not Duped, Goldman to Tell Senators - Christine Hauser/The New York Times - Senate Readies Goldman Assault - The Wall Street Journal - The Goldman Drama - David Brooks/The New York Times This spectacle presents Goldman with an interesting public relations choice. The firm can claim to be dumb but decent, like the rest of the establishment, and emphasize the times it lost money. Or it can present itself as smart and sleazy, and emphasize the times it made money at the expense of its clients. Goldman seems to have chosen dumb but decent, which is probably the smart narrative to get back in the establishment’s good graces, even if it is less accurate. - Financial reform bill stalls in bid for accord - Los Angeles Times Senate Republicans united Monday to block debate on legislation that would make the most far-reaching changes in regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, slowing but probably not stopping a bill that has been propelled by angry voters who want to crack down on Wall Street. How angry? - Poll: Two-thirds support stricter financial regulations - CNN
An interesting sub-plot is last week's news about how, at the very time the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to be sniffing out all the malafactors of great wealth on Wall Street, many of its top executives were spending whole days watching porn on government-owned computers. In addition to the appropriate outrage comes the suggestion, led by ProPublica, that the porn scandal is really old news, but that harping on it now helps the banks and their Republican allies blame the blind watchdogs rather than the Wall Street schemers. - Is the SEC Porn Story a New Problem, or Political Ploy? - Marian Wang/ProPublica More on this rounded up in the NYT Opinionator.
Does the headline for this post sound familiar? Lookee here.
- US newspaper circulation falls 8.7 percent - Andres Vanacore/AP/Buffalo News Figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show average weekday circulation fell 8.7 percent in the six months that ended March 31, compared with the same period a year earlier. Sunday circulation fell 6.5 percent. ... USA Today's decline last year allowed The Wall Street Journal to surpass it as the newspaper with the biggest U.S. circulation. In Monday's report, the Journal once again posted the only gain in circulation among the top 25 newspapers that had comparable figures from a year ago. It grew its circulation 0.5 percent to 2.09 million. However, the Journal would have had a slight decline in circulation were it only counting printed newspapers. The Journal's paid online circulation rose about 31,000 from a year ago to 414,025, offsetting a decline of about 20,000 on the print side.
Something else the WSJ is up to: - Wall St. Journal metro section begins at 16 pages - AP/Buffalo News Monday's debut of the metro section had 16 pages, two of them bought out by Macy's and Bloomingdale's. These are the kinds of advertisers the Journal under Rupert Murdoch wants to peel away from The New York Times. - Newspaper War! - Harold Evans/The Daily Beast - New York Times Executives Belittle Murdoch's Wall Street Journal - Gillian Reagan/Business Insider So as our welcome gift to New York, we pass on a few helpful hints to our Journal colleagues: the Dodgers now play in Los Angeles, Soho is the acronym for South of Houston, Fashion Week has moved to Lincoln Center, Idlewild is now JFK and Cats is no longer playing on Broadway.
- Source: Tonawanda GM plant lands $400 million engine line - Matt Glynn/The Buffalo News General Motors Co. has selected its Town of Tonawanda engine plant to produce a new engine line, an investment worth $400 million that will create or retain more than 700 jobs, a source familiar with the negotiations said. The project involves building a new-generation V-8 engine, said the source, who asked not to be identified because the announcement had not yet been made. The exact number of new jobs attached to the project was not available. GM has sent out a news release saying it will hold an event on Tuesday morning with "positive manufacturing news" for the site, but offered no further specifics.
