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Last week, Christina Romer

Posted on Nov. 14, 2009 at 12:21 AM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledges the federal budget deficit is too high, but that the pearl jewelry priorities now are economic growth and job creation.

Asked repeatedly on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether this means taxes will rise, Geithner avoided giving specifics. He did say President Barack Obama is committed to dealing with deficit in a way that will not add to the tax burden of people making less than $250,000 a year.

The White House has not decided how to reduce the red ink, Geithner said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

"Right now we're focused on getting growth back on track," he said. "And we're not at the point yet where we have to decide exactly what it's going to take."

He acknowledged that the economic recovery, while showing positive movement, has been shaky and uneven.

"A lot of damage was caused by this crisis. It's going to take some time for us to grow out of this. It could be a little choppy," he said. "It could be uneven. And it's going to take awhile."

A bright spot in the recovery identified by Geithner is the banking system, which he said is "dramatically more stable" because of the government bailout.

Geithner said that just one year ago economic activity came to a standstill as major financial institutions shut down due to lack of liquidity.

Even though 115 banks have failed so far this year, Geithner said there has been a "dramatic improvement in confidence," with private capital back in the system. He said large businesses are now able to borrow again.

"The banking system is dramatically more stable than it was three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago, a year ago," he said.

But Geithner said more needs to be done to assist small businesses, adding that the administration is working to help open up credit to them. These businesses, he said, "face a really tough environment on the financing side."

After financial institutions were widely blamed for assuming too much risk and bringing the economy to the brink of collapse, Geithner said a biwa pearl concern now is that they might end up being too timid.

"The big risk we face now is that banks are going to overcorrect and not take enough risk," he said. "We need them to take a chance again on the American economy. That's going to be important to recovery."

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, citing the growing unemployment rate, said Sunday the president's economic stimulus program has done nothing but increase the size of government. He said businesses are "sitting on their hands" because of government spending and proposals for health care and other initiatives he contended would increase taxes.

"Business people are afraid to invest in their business, afraid to grow their business, because they don't know what's going to happen next," Boehner said on CNN's "State of the Union."

Geithner acknowledged the economy remains tough for many workers who have lost jobs and it's going to be some time before the employment outlook starts to brighten for many of them.

"Unemployment is worse than almost everybody expected. But growth is back a little more quickly, a little stronger than people thought," he said.

Unemployment hit a 26-year high of 9.8% in September, and the October report due in the coming week could show it topping 10%.

"It's likely still rising. And it's probably going to rise further before it starts to come down again."

Geithner said it's too early to decide whether a second government stimulus package should be offered, though he acknowledged unemployment probably will rise even more before it starts to turn around. Economists expect to see job growth after the first of the year, probably in the first quarter, he said.

"You're not going to see real recovery until it's led by the private sector, by businesses," he said.

The treasury chief added that with about half of the stimulus money left, along with tax cuts and investments ahead, "there's a lot of force still moving its way through the system now" and that will keep providing economic support. "It's working. It's delivering what it should result."

Last week, Christina Romer, who heads the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said the government's economic stimulus spending already had its biggest impact and probably wouldn't contribute to significant growth next year.

Geithner also said the administration supports steps being considered by Congress like extending unemployment insurance and the homebuyer tax credit.

In addition, he complimented Obama's pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, for his work in reining in pay for senior executives at the top seven recipients of government bailout money. Geithner played down concerns about government interference in executive compensation and the potential for the most talented and productive executives to leave their companies.

"We were very concerned about that from the akoya pearl beginning. And he had to balance some very difficult kind of choices. I think he's found a very good balance among them," Geithner said.

Data from the new study demonstrates

Posted on Nov. 14, 2009 at 12:20 AM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Data from the new study demonstrates that a more convenient twice-daily dose of telaprevir is just as effective and safe as the thrice-daily dose, Vertex said.

The hepatitis C cure rates of greater than 80% across all four patient groups of the study are also the highest ever recorded in any telaprevir study to date and exceed the cure rates reported in separate studies of boceprevir, a pearl jewelry competing hepatitis C drug under development by Schering-Plough(SGP Quote).

Generally speaking, investors were looking for telaprevir cure rates of greater than 70%, with a difference between the twice-daily and three-times-daily dosing group of 10% or less. The data from the telaprevir study exceeded those biwa pearl expectations on both measures.

"These data greatly enhance the potential for twice-daily telaprevir dosing," said Vertex chief medical officer Bob Kauffman.

Vertex and partner Johnson & Johnson(JNJ Quote) will formally present data from this new telaprevir study -- dubbed "C208" -- Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, a large gathering of hepatitis C researchers.

Investors are keenly interested in the akoya pearl outcome of the C208 study because it has the potential to strengthen telaprevir against competing hepatitis C drugs that while still in earlier stages of testing are being dosed once or twice a day.

The nine failed banks were in four

Posted on Nov. 14, 2009 at 12:19 AM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The nine failed banks were in four states. All were subsidiaries of FBOP, a privately held banking company headquartered in Chicago. Together, they had $19.4 billion in assets.

U.S. Bank N.A. of Minneapolis, the pearl jewelry main subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp(USB Quote), acquired all of the nine banks' deposits and most of their assets.

FBOP had been under pressure over the past year as mounting losses on securities investments nearly wiped out its capital. The holding company's capital ratios were low enough for it to be considered undercapitalized for more than a year according to regulatory guidelines.

Despite the holding company's very weak capital position, five of the failed subsidiaries were still adequately capitalized as of June 30, so only four were included in TheStreet.com's most recent list of undercapitalized banks and thrifts.

Still, regulators shut down all nine banks because of the cross guaranty provisions that Congress added to the biwa pearl Federal Deposit Insurance Act in 1989. These provisions stipulate that all bank subsidiaries of a multibank holding company are financially responsible for the costs of resolving the failure of any of the other subsidiaries.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. had been quietly soliciting bids for FBOP's subisidiary banks for several weeks. After state and federal regulators acted on Friday, the FDIC sold the nine banks' $15.4 billion in deposits and $18.2 billion of their assets to U.S. Bank N.A. Although the FDIC did not announce what U.S. Bank N.A. actually paid for the acquisitions, the agency agreed to share in losses on $14.4 billion of the akoya pearl acquired assets and estimated that the combined cost to the FDIC's deposit insurance fund would be $2.5 billion.

The suit claims that Chen Tang

Posted on Nov. 14, 2009 at 12:18 AM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The suit claims that Chen Tang, of Fremont, Calif., gleaned nonpublic information through his job at an unidentified private equity fund and from his brother-in-law at a hedge fund that he and others used to pearl jewelry reap illegal trading profits of more than $8 million.

"As the CFO of a private equity firm, Tang was entrusted with highly confidential and material information, and he violated that trust by misusing the information to generate enormous illegal profits," Rose Romero, who heads the SEC's Forth Worth, Texas, office, said in a statement.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the biwa pearl Northern District of California, says Tang, 39, passed insider information to his brother and four others, who used the tips to make bets through a variety of personal accounts and investment funds on shares of Tempur-pedic International(TPX Quote) and Acxiom(ACXM Quote)

In one instance last year, the SEC said, Tang learned that Tempur-pedic would be announcing that its quarterly earnings would fall short of forecasts. He passed the information to three friends who took short positions on the akoya pearl stock, betting that shares would fall. After Tempur-pedic made the announcement, its stock tumbled 37%, leaving Tang's friends with a profit of $1.2 million, the SEC says.

workers have overwhelmingly

Posted on Nov. 14, 2009 at 12:05 AM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Ford Motor(F Quote) workers have overwhelmingly rejected contract changes that would have allowed the automaker to cut labor costs, leaving Ford at a disadvantage to its Detroit rivals as it continues its struggle to pearl jewelry return to profitability.

The United Auto Workers union had given local unions until Monday to complete voting. But a person briefed on the voting said Saturday that the contract changes have been rejected by large margins. The person asked not to biwa pearl be named because the UAW hasn't announced the results yet.

The UAW and Ford agreed to the contract changes several weeks ago, but Ford workers needed to ratify them. Ford has 41,000 UAW-represented workers.

Two large union locals in Kentucky and Ford's home city of Dearborn rejected the contract Friday, sealing its fate. Those unions together represent 13,000 Ford workers. Exact tallies weren't available, but at least 12 UAW locals representing about 27,500 workers so far have vetoed the deal, many overwhelmingly. Only about four locals with a total of 7,000 members favored the pact.

Ford sought the deal to bring its labor costs in akoya pearl line with Detroit rivals Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors, both of which won concessions from the union as they headed into bankruptcy protection earlier this year. Under pattern bargaining, the three automakers usually match pay, benefits and other contract provisions.