Gallimaufry

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a0loHRLReCSw&pos=10

Solving a problem that may not exist.



Carbon Profit Grows on Trees for New Zealand Farmers
By Stuart Biggs

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- New Zealand’s sheep farmers are flocking to a government carbon trading program that pays more to plant trees than sell wool and mutton.

The system, begun in 2008 and the only one of its kind outside Europe, awards farmers credits that are sold to offset greenhouse gas emissions. The project may earn them about NZ$600 a hectare ($172 per acre) a year on land unprofitable for grazing animals, said David Evison, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury’s New Zealand School of Forestry.

Forests planted for carbon credits may increase to 30,000 hectares a year compared with 3,500 hectares in 2009, the government estimates. The system is a welcome alternative for sheep farmers who’ve struggled for decades from a combination of slumping wool prices, drought and competition for land from the dairy and lumber industries, says Neil Walker, a forester in the Taranaki region of New Zealand’s North Island.

“If you’re an industry in decline, you have to see what options are available,” said Walker, who also heads the Taranaki Regional Council’s policy and planning committee. “There’s an economic case to be made for converting hill- country sheep farms to forests.”

Sheep have been in decline for decades and have fallen in number from a 1982 peak of 70 million to about 40 million, official data show. Carbon trading is embraced by some farmers and rejected by others as too harsh a change for New Zealand, the world’s biggest sheep meat exporter last year.

Belching Cows, Sheep
The nation’s carbon-trading project was expanded in July to require energy producers to pay for their emissions. By 2015, the system will include agriculture, forcing farmers to pay for emissions their cows and sheep make through belching.

That, says Don Nicolson, president of Federated Farmers of New Zealand Inc., is too big a burden on its 25,000 members. The Wellington-based group opposed the program, particularly after it became clear the nation would adopt the policy largely alone. Australia’s government shelved a carbon trading plan in April.

“We’re the only national emissions trading scheme outside of Europe,” said Nigel Brunel, head of futures trading at Auckland-based OM Financial, which acts as a broker for carbon trading. “If at the end of 2012 we’re the only country standing there, then we will give up.”

Spot prices for carbon credits were NZ$18.45 per metric ton on Aug. 16. The market remains in limbo until more credits are available and the deadline for offsetting emissions comes closer, Brunel said.

One-for-Two
Until December 2012, there’s a transition period in which companies in the system have the option to pay a carbon tax on emissions capped at NZ$25 per ton, or buy carbon credits backed by forestry. They also need to offset only one ton of emissions for every two they produce.

“Demand will be constant and supply is likely to be lumpy and infrequent,” Brunel said.

Even the government says the program will have little impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. New Zealand ranks 51st in greenhouse gas emissions with 0.2 percent of the global total, according to the United Nations.

Rather, the government introduced carbon trading to enhance the country’s green image, boost exports, attract tourists and increase influence in global climate talks, Prime Minister John Key said on Television New Zealand in June.

Scrubland to Pasture
The difficulties for back-country sheep farms began when the government deregulated New Zealand’s economy in 1984, scrapping the subsidies that had incentivized farmers to convert marginal scrubland to pasture since the 1960s, said Edwyn Kight, a farmer on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

Over the years, the converted land became more unprofitable as fertilizer prices rose when subsidies were removed, Kight said in a telephone interview from his 3,600-hectare Akitio Station. He’s planted 600 hectares of forest since carbon trading began and plans 800 more. He’s keeping 1,000 hectares for livestock.

Carbon has the “potential to markedly alter the profitability of New Zealand’s hill country,” he said. “That land is not marginally economic to farm for sheep and cattle, it’s totally uneconomic. There’s a real opportunity for land use change here.”

At Cambridge Forest & Native Nursery in the center of New Zealand’s North Island, the emissions trading scheme is a “significant” reason for year-on-year sales growth of 35 percent, owner Jonathan Sudano said in a telephone interview. He declined to give revenue figures.

Lumber for China
The company has already sold all of next year’s supply of radiata pine saplings, a softwood used to make frames for houses, he said.

Introduction of carbon trading incentives will add to an existing trend to convert pasture land for forest, driven by sales of lumber to China.

Since 1990, about 3.5 million hectares, or 28 percent, of land used for grazing sheep and beef has switched use. About a quarter went to dairy and the rest to forests, urban development and conservation, according to Meat & Wool New Zealand Ltd., an industry group.

Log exports from New Zealand to China more than doubled in the year ended March to 5.4 million cubic meters, driving a NZ$300 million increase in log export earnings to NZ$1.1 billion, official data show.

Storing Carbon
Carbon trading makes planting forests even more appealing, the University of Canterbury’s Evison said. Instead of waiting for trees to grow before they can sell the timber, they’re now paid annually for storing carbon, he said.

“It turns forestry into a cash flow business,” Evison said.

Not all farmers are happy with the trend.

Federated Farmers’ Nicolson estimates 20 percent, or 2,800, sheep and beef farms could be replaced by carbon forests, harming communities that rely on livestock farming for jobs as shearers, mechanics and vets.

He said farmers are being sold on the profit in carbon farming without understanding the risks, such as losing trees to fires or disease, or the government canceling the program.

“You can’t blame farmers who’ve had their profitability tested from taking a punt on their marginal land,” Nicolson said in a telephone interview. “The trouble is, it comes with massive risk and that’s not what’s being talked about.”

Many hill farmers are already struggling and rural depopulation from loss of jobs is already taking place, said Kight the farmer.

“It hasn’t happened because of forestry, it’s happened because of economics,” said Kight, who is a member of Federated Farmers.

For farmers like Kight, whose sheep and cattle are part of the exports Key wants to protect, the trading scheme is a means to stay in business.

“You don’t want it to be a call for the last one around to turn out the lights,” he said. “That’s what it was coming to.”

 

[thør]

Solving a problem that may not exist.

Pays the bills.....

 

[trysail]

Human Genome Sciences and GlaxoSmithKline Announce FDA Priority Review Designation for BENLYSTA® (belimumab) as a Potential Treatment for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Business Wire

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- August 19, 2010

Human Genome Sciences, Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a priority review designation to BENLYSTA® (belimumab) as a potential treatment for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). A priority review designation is granted to drugs that, if approved, offer major advances in treatment or provide a treatment where no adequate therapy exists. The FDA has assigned belimumab a Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) target date of December 9, 2010.


The Biologics License Application (BLA) for belimumab was submitted to the FDA on June 9, 2010, and includes the results of two pivotal Phase 3 clinical trials that treated a total of 1,684 autoantibody-positive patients with SLE. HGS designed the Phase 3 program for belimumab in collaboration with GSK and leading international SLE experts, and in consultation with the FDA.


“We are very pleased that FDA has chosen to grant priority review to belimumab, the first in a new class of drugs called BLyS-specific inhibitors,” said H. Thomas Watkins, President and Chief Executive Officer, HGS. “We believe that the priority review designation speaks both to the significant medical need of people living with lupus and to the potential belimumab may hold as a new treatment option for these patients.”


Carlo Russo, M.D., Senior Vice President, Biopharm Development, GSK, said, “Belimumab is the first medicine for lupus that has completed Phase 3 trials with positive results. We look forward to continuing to work together with HGS to progress regulatory files and we hope that we will be able to deliver a new treatment option for patients living with lupus.”


GSK submitted a Marketing Authorization Application for belimumab to the
European Medicines Agency (EMA) on June 4, 2010.


About the HGS/GSK Collaboration

In 2006, HGS and GSK entered into a definitive co-development and commercialization agreement under which HGS has conducted the belimumab Phase 3 trials, with assistance from GSK. The companies will share equally in Phase 3/4 development costs, sales and marketing expenses, and profits of any product commercialized under the agreement.


About GlaxoSmithKline

GSK Biopharm R&D is employing novel approaches to harness the therapeutic potential of biopharmaceuticals for the benefit of patients with serious autoimmune disease.


GlaxoSmithKline – one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – is committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer. For further information please visit www.gsk.com.


About Human Genome Sciences

The mission of HGS is to apply great science and great medicine to bring innovative drugs to patients with unmet medical needs.


For more information about HGS, please visit the Company’s web site at www.hgsi.com. Health professionals and patients interested in clinical trials of HGS products may inquire via e-mail to medinfo@hgsi.com or by calling HGS at (877) 822-8472.

=========================================================================

http://www.reuters.com/article/idCNLDE67T0FC20100901?rpc=44



Lupus study suggests blood-thinner drugs may help
By Kate Kelland


LONDON, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Scientists studying the autoimmmune disease lupus have found that blood platelets are key in its development and say their findings in the lab suggest blood-thinning drugs may offer a new way to treat patients.

The researchers found that lupus patients have an excess of platelets -- a type of blood cell that clump together to form clots -- and, after tests on mice, suggested that treating them with a drug like Sanofi-Aventis' (SASY.PA) and Bristol-Myers Squibb's (BMY.N) Plavix could prevent flare-ups of the disease.

"These observations open a possible therapeutic avenue for human inflammatory autoimmune diseases -- the long-term utilisation of antiplatelet therapy," the scientists wrote in the Science Translational Medicine Journal on Wednesday.

Patrick Blanco of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Bordeaux, France, said his team hopes to start clinical trials soon on human lupus patients, but it could be many years yet before such a treatment is approved.

Lupus is a chronic disease where the body's own immune system attacks healthy tissue, causing inflammation, pain and damage in organs, particularly the kidneys. Its cause is largely unknown although researchers say there are several genetic, hormonal and environmental factors that can drive it.

According to the Lupus Foundation of America, as many as five million people around the world have a form of lupus, including 1.5 million in the United States.

There is no cure for lupus, although its symptoms can be managed to some extent with a range of different drugs. Raging infections and kidney failure are the most common causes of death in people with the disease.


WIPING OUT PLATELETS

Current standard lupus treatments include steroids and some chemotherapy-like medications -- but almost all of these options can have toxic side effects.

Being able to treat lupus with a drug like Plavix, known generically as clopidogrel and commonly used to treat heart disease and stroke, could markedly improve quality of life for lupus patients, the French researchers said.

Plavix is the world's second-biggest drug, with sales last year of more than $9.5 billion. It is already off patent in parts of Europe and will lose U.S. patent protection in 2012.

For this study, Blanco and colleagues collected blood platelets from patients experiencing lupus flare-ups. They found these platelets had an abundance of CD154 -- a protein normally activated for clotting -- and that they triggered production of interferons, causing inflammation in both human and mouse cells.

Using mice with lupus, they found that if they wiped out platelets by injecting an antibody to destroy them, the inflammation of the kidneys -- an organ often affected by lupus -- was significantly decreased.

"Because wiping out platelets is not possible in humans, we decided to test the lupus mice with clopidogrel, which has been used for many years in humans -- and found that this also significantly reduced the development of the lupus disease," Blanco said in a telephone interview.

As well as experiencing less kidney damage, the clopidogrel-treated mice also lived for an extra three months.

British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) and U.S. biotech firm Human Genome Sciences Inc (HGSI.O) are seeking approval for their keenly awaited lupus drug, Benlysta.

If approved it would be the first new drug for the disease in 50 years. Analysts expect it to be a blockbuster with annual sales of $2.2 billion by 2014

 

[trysail]

No good or service was, is or ever will be "free" of cost. Somebody pays. "Free" is an illusion suffered by pie-eyed dreamers and exploited by manipulators.


Any good or service for which there is unlimited demand will be rationed. The only question is how.

 

[trysail]

Uncle Sam Needs You!


Business Opportunity
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportu...0702f10e22485cde970e9&tab=core&tabmode=list&=

NATIVE AMERICAN MEDICINE MAN

Solicitation Number:
RFQP04021000018 Notice Type:
Cancellation Synopsis:
Added: Aug 17, 2010 4:13 pm
The Federal Bureau of Prisons, FPC Duluth, Duluth, MN, intends to make a single award to a responsible entity for providing the services of Native American Medicine man to the inmate population as outlined in the statement of work. The anticipated date of the award will be approximately October 1, 2010 subjected to funds availability for the next fiscal year. The duration of the contract will be from the date of award through 09/30/2011. The contractor shall perform all services at FPC Duluth, in the Religious Services Department, located at 6902 Airport Road, Duluth MN, 55814.

The contractor will conduct Native American ceremonies and provide instruction to inmates in the Native American Faith.

General Topics for Contractors - Native American
1. Red Road
2. All My Relation
3. Medicine Wheel
4. The Sacred Pipe
5. Sweat Lodge
6. Elders
7. Circle of Life
8. Traditions/Rituals
9. Prayers
10. Ceremonies
11. Fasting
12. Smudging
13. The Drum
14. Grandfather/Grandmother
15. Dances
16. The Medicine Pouch
17. Offerings
18. Decision-making
19. Ritual Objects
20. Eagle
21. Eagle Feathers
22. Nature Lessons
23. Family Relations
24. Parenting
25. Learning
26. Healthy Relationships
27. Culture
28. Healing Traditions
29. Herbal Medicines
30. Understanding Self
31. Respect
32. Traditional Games
33. Traditional Foods
34. Seasons
35. Healing Self
36. A Grateful Heart
37. Cleansing Ceremonies
38. What is the role of faith and Community Re-entry?



The contractor will supply all of their own religious garments and books. The contractor will control, supervise, and be responsible for all government materials and equipment and will ensure that such equipment and materials are used only for legitimate program purposes.

The contractor will provide 4 sessions per year. The sessions will either be on Thursdays from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (Pipe ceremony) or on Sundays from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (sweat ceremony). The day and time of these services is subject to change with agreement of the religious services department and the contractor. A session will consist of 4 hours to include entry and exit.

 

[trysail]

http://downloads.pewcenteronthestates.org/The_Trillion_Dollar_Gap_final.pdf


New York May Reduce Assumed Returns on Pension Assets
By Michael Quint

Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- New York state’s $132.6 billion pension fund, the nation’s third-largest, will cut the assumed rate of return on its investments to less than the 8 percent it has used for a decade.

A reduction to 7.5 percent or 7.75 percent is likely, said Robert Whalen, a spokesman for Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. The move “will increase the required contributions from the state and local governments but will keep the fund as strong as it is now,” Whalen said.

The plan, which covers 1 million current and retired workers, had assets equal to about 107 percent of its future liabilities, according to the fund. New York was one of only four states with pension systems in 2008 that fully funded their future obligations, according to a study by the Washington-based Pew Center on the States.

“A more conservative approach is warranted,” based partly on recent years’ stock market performance and the level of interest rates, Whalen said. The assumed rate of return on investments is used to calculate the size of pension contributions from employers needed to pay retirees.

The 30-year Treasury bond yielded 3.66 percent today, compared with an average of 5.81 percent for the past 20 years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, a benchmark for equity investments, fell at an annualized rate of 0.76 percent during the past 10 years, with reinvested dividends, and rose 8 percent the past 20 years.

The Actuary Advises
The recommendation to lower the rate came from the pension fund’s actuary, Michael Dutcher. It was reviewed by an advisory committee of outside actuaries, Whalen said.

The New York fund earned annualized returns of 3.1 percent for the 10 years ended in March 2009, and 1.1 percent over five years, according to the annual report. Returns exceeded 8 percent annually if measured over 20 years, Whalen said.

The market value of the state fund’s investments were volatile the past few years, falling 26 percent in the 12 months through March 2009, and then rising 26 percent through the next fiscal year, according to the comptroller’s office.

To compensate for investment returns below 8 percent, payments to the fund by the state and local governments in February 2011 are to increase 61 percent to about 11.9 percent of payrolls, DiNapoli announced last year.

Pension IOUs
New York lawmakers and Governor David Paterson approved a plan this month allowing the state and local governments to substitute interest-earning IOUs for cash payments above 9.5 percent of their payroll. Those who defer cash payments must agree to pay more than the required amounts in future years.

Spreading out the payments is expected to save the state $242 million this year, according to budget documents.

The median annual return for state plans in the 25 years ending with 2009 was 9.25 percent, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.

About half of 116 state pension plans assumed an 8 investment return, according to a study by Joshua D. Rauh, associate professor of finance at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

New York reduced its assumed rate of return from 8.5 percent in 2000. The rate was as high as 8.75 percent in 1989 through 1997, and was as low as 4.87 percent in the years before 1975, Whalen said.

Target Mix Shift
A reduction in the expected investment returns would follow a shift last year in the New York fund’s targeted asset mix. The target for domestic and international stocks was cut to 43 percent from 51 percent, while the proportion of hedge funds dropped to 4 percent. The share of private-equity investments, which the state expects to exceed stock market returns, was increased to 10 percent from 8 percent, and the target for fixed-income investments was unchanged at 30 percent.

New categories were established for so-called real assets, such as land, infrastructure projects and gold, at 3 percent of the fund. Opportunistic investments were targeted at 4 percent of the total. Whalen said there haven’t yet been any investments in the real category.

A drop in the assumed rate of return for the New York fund would follow similar reductions by state pension plans in Colorado, Utah and Pennsylvania. In 2008, Utahlowered its assumed rate to 7.75 percent from 8 percent, according to Pew. Last year, Pennsylvania reduced its expected return to 8 percent from 8.5 percent. Colorado matched that cut this year.


http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a3EB1AFcYsqg

 

[trysail]

9,111
retired California government workers​

receive pensions
in excess of $100,000​

from CalPERS.​

They're all listed here:
http://database.californiapensionreform.com/?vttable=calpers

 

[trysail]

http://www.time.gov/images/xearths/11N/52S.jpg


​

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIuuL7BZhgVU




Investors Shake Up Fund Industry With Record Bond Love Affair
By Charles Stein

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Retail investors in the U.S., burned by two market crashes in a decade, have shunned stocks for the longest stretch in more than 23 years, upsetting the balance of power in the $10.5 trillion mutual-fund industry.

Bond funds attracted more money than their equity counterparts in 30 straight months through June, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington-based trade group. Preliminary data show the trend continued in July, matching the streak posted by bonds from 1984 through 1987.

The shift is pressuring asset managers, especially equity- focused firms such as Janus Capital Group Inc. and Capital Group Cos., because bond funds charge about 20 percent less in fees. Among the big winners are bond specialist Pacific Investment Management Co. and Vanguard Group Inc., whose index stock funds have become popular alternatives to actively managed portfolios.

“Retail investors are still shocked by what has happened in the past two years,” James Kennedy, chief executive officer of fund manager T. Rowe Price Group Inc. in Baltimore, said in an interview last month after releasing second-quarter earnings that fell short of analysts’ estimates.

Bond funds attracted $559 billion industrywide in the 30 months through June, according to ICI. Investors pulled $209.4 billion from domestic equity funds and $24.4 billion from funds that buy non-U.S. stocks.

Stocks fell 26 percent including reinvested dividends during the period, as tracked by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Bonds returned 16 percent, based on Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data.

The Case for Stocks
Fund companies are trying to lure investors back into equities. Franklin Resources Inc., in a marketing campaign started in January, says that history shows stocks usually do well following a decade in which they lost ground.

“But many investors are turning their backs on equities now -- after one of the worst decades the stock market has ever seen,” the company, manager of $603 billion including the Franklin and Templeton funds, says in a presentation on its website.

Investors aren’t biting. In the first half of 2010, 98 percent of the money that San Mateo, California-based Franklin attracted went into bond funds.

“We are going to keep talking about equities,” CEO Gregory Johnson said on a July 29 conference call with investors. Johnson said he was concerned investors were putting “too much” money into bonds, whose price falls when interest rates rise, without realizing the risks involved.

‘Hair-Trigger Mentality’
The speed and depth of the market’s decline has rattled investors in a way past selloffs didn’t and has conditioned them to retreat from stocks at the first hint of trouble, said Jim Jessee, president of the U.S. fund business for Boston-based MFS Investment Management.

In the week following May 6, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly lost almost 1,000 points and then recovered, investors pulled $12.3 billion from stock mutual funds, ICI data show. In April, equity funds had deposits of $13.2 billion.

“People have developed a hair-trigger mentality,” said Jessee in a telephone interview. “Their feeling is: ‘I am not going to be too slow the next time.’ ”

The S&P 500 has fallen 12 percent from its high for the year on April 23 amid signs the economic recovery is slowing. Investor pessimism deepened after the Federal Reserve said Aug. 10 that growth probably will be “more modest.” The central bank said it will maintain its holdings of securities to stop money from draining out of the financial system, its first move to bolster the economy in more than a year.

Little Good News
“It is hard to pick up the newspaper and see anyone optimistic,” said Francis Kinniry, who studies investor behavior for Vanguard, which is based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “The problem is there is not a lot of good news on the recovery front and that translates in people’s mind into poor capital markets.”

Only one of the 10 best-selling mutual funds in 2010, the $117 billion Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, invests exclusively in stocks, data from research firm Morningstar Inc. show. Its success shows that when investors put money into stocks, they prefer index-based funds over those that are actively managed.

Vanguard, a pioneer in indexed investments, attracted $58 billion in deposits to its stock funds over the 30-month period, the most of any company, according to Chicago-based Morningstar. Over that stretch, U.S. investors put $111 billion into stock index funds even as they withdrew $271 billion from equity funds whose managers pick securities.

Fees Squeezed
Vanguard, which has almost $1.3 trillion in mutual funds, manages an additional $112 billion in exchange-traded funds, which typically mimic indexes while trading throughout the day like stocks. The firm is owned by investors through their mutual-fund holdings.

Investors are using bond funds as a haven from the turmoil in equity markets, squeezing firms previously accustomed to the fatter fees charged by stock funds.

On a dollar-weighted basis, the average stock fund collects 76 cents in fees for every $100 invested, compared with 61 cents for bond funds, according to Denver-based Lipper.

The impact can be seen in return on equity, a measure of profitability, reported by publicly traded asset managers.

At T. Rowe Price, ROE fell to 22 percent in the second quarter from 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, the last before the bond-dominance streak began. Stock and blended portfolios accounted for 72 percent of the company’s $391 billion in assets, down from 80 percent.

‘On the Sidelines’
Franklin’s ROE declined to 19.5 percent from 26 percent in the same period, as equity funds dropped to 41 percent of assets from 59 percent. ROE at Legg Mason dropped to 4 percent in the second quarter from 10 percent at the end of 2007, while stock funds fell to 24 percent of its $645 billion of assets from 32 percent.

“A big part of the problem is that people are still sitting on the sidelines in this market environment,” Mary Athridge, a Legg Mason spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

The company posted net deposits into stock funds for the first time in more than four years in the second quarter.

Janus, with 93 percent of its $147 billion in assets in stocks, “has probably been hurt the most,” said Jonathan Casteleyn, a New York-based analyst for Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP.

The Denver-based company earned $61.5 million in the first half of this year, down 27 percent from same period in 2007. Equity assets fell 28 percent during the 30 months through June as investors pulled $3.9 billion from its stock funds and the decline in stock prices reduced the value of existing holdings.

Boon for Pimco
Janus’s return on equity climbed to 12.1 percent in the June quarter from 5.8 percent in the final three months of 2007, when earnings were depressed by a writedown of the value of a printing unit. James Aber, a spokesman for the firm, declined to comment.

The move by retail investors into bond funds plays to the strength of Pacific Investment Management, which started in 1971 as a fixed-income manager and whose $1.1 trillion in assets includes just $600 million in stock funds.

While Pimco’s parent, Allianz SE, doesn’t report financial results for the Newport Beach, California-based firm, the German insurer said on Aug. 6 that operating income at all its asset- management units more than doubled to 516 million euros ($656 million) in the three months ended June 30 from a year earlier.

Mark Porterfield, a Pimco spokesman, declined to comment on the firm’s profitability.

By other measures, Pimco is thriving. It attracted $40.2 billion in the first half of 2010, more than any other fund company, according to Morningstar. Pimco Total Return Fund, run by Bill Gross, had deposits of $20.9 billion in the period, the most for an individual fund.

American, Fidelity
The $239 billion fund, the world’s biggest, returned 5.8 percent in the first half, compared with a loss of 6.4 percent by the average stock fund.

The rise of the $822 billion ETF business, along with the shift to bonds, has hurt firms with a reputation for active management, including Capital Group and Fidelity Investments, which are both closely held.

American Funds, part of Los Angeles-based Capital Group, had $48.8 billion in withdrawals from stock funds in the 30 months ended in June, more than any other fund firm, Morningstar data show. American Funds has 72 percent of its $950 billion of assets in stocks and 19 percent in bonds, Chuck Freadhoff, a spokesman for the firm, said in an e-mail.

Fidelity experienced $48.1 billion in withdrawals from its stock funds in the two and a half year period, the second-most after American Funds, Morningstar data show.

1987 Streak
Fidelity said its withdrawals in the period were $32.8 billion, according to an e-mailed statement from Vincent Loporchio, a spokesman for the Boston-based firm.

Both American Funds and Fidelity have largely ignored ETFs.

From September 1984 through March 1987, a 31-month stretch, bond funds took in more money than stock funds, ICI data show, even as the S&P 500 Index rose 75 percent. Many U.S. investors were not yet comfortable owning stocks in the mid-1980s, said Geoff Bobroff, a mutual-fund consultant in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

“In contrast to today, bonds also offered pretty good returns back then,” he said in a telephone interview.

The 10-year U.S. Treasury note had an average yield of 9.3 percent in that period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The 10-year note yields less than 3 percent now.

Institutions More Bullish
Fund investors’ latest aversion to stocks contrasts with buying by institutions such as pension plans and endowments, whose equity holdings rose to 68 percent of assets in July, the highest level in 15 months, a Citigroup Inc. survey showed.

If institutions ignite a sustained run-up in stocks, individual investors will eventually jump back in, said Jack Ablin, who helps manage $55 billion as chief investment officer at Chicago-based Harris Private Bank.

“What will happen is that the market will rally first, and retail investors will chase it later,” he said in a telephone interview.

More than 80 percent of investors polled in July by Fidelity said they wanted to see at least six months of market stability before making further investments.

Lasting Scar
“Someone who is waiting for stability is likely to miss out on the upside,” John Sweeney, an executive vice president at Fidelity, said in a telephone interview.

Sweeney said that in speaking to clients the firm stresses the value of diversification and the importance of owning stocks, especially for younger investors who may be 30 or 40 years from retirement. Fidelity has $1.25 trillion in mutual- fund assets.

Vanguard’s Kinniry said that the reaction to the 2008 market decline “is different from what we have seen in other bear markets.” Investors have been slower to return to stocks, he said, despite a roughly 60 percent climb for the S&P 500 Index since prices reached a 12-year low in March 2009.

The swiftness of the 2008 crash may explain some of the caution, said Kinniry.

From Sept. 2 to Nov. 20, 2008, the S&P 500 Index fell 41 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Investors were further frightened by the decline in home prices that was already underway, Kinniry said in a telephone interview. U.S. home prices dropped by almost one-third from July 2006 to April 2009, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index.

Jessie of MFS said it may take a major market rally to get investors back into stocks.

“Unfortunately, my gut tells me the market will need to go up 30 to 50 percent,” he said.

 

[trysail]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/24/AR2010082403778.html



New Microbe Discovered Eating Gulf Oil Spill

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

WASHINGTON -- A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf following the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., reported Tuesday in the online journal Sciencexpress.

"Our findings, which provide the first data ever on microbial activity from a deepwater dispersed oil plume, suggest" a great potential for bacteria to help dispose of oil plumes in the deep-sea, Hazen said in a statement.

Environmentalists have raised concerns about the giant oil spill and the underwater plume of dispersed oil, particularly its potential effects on sea life. A report just last week described a 22-mile long underwater mist of tiny oil droplets.

"Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea" cold temperature bacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes, Hazen reported.

Their findings are based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2. They found that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.

This microbe thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit).

Hazen suggested that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent while within the plume it was 59-percent.

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

Sciencexpress is the online edition of the journal Science.

---
Abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1195979
Online: http://www.sciencexpress.org.

_________________________________________________________________

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129408584

Deep In Gulf Water, Bacteria Are Eating Spilled Oil
by Christopher Joyce
NPR

August 25, 2010 There are some encouraging signs from the Gulf of Mexico that bacteria are consuming the underwater oil plume from the broken BP well. The news comes just days after oceanographer Christopher Reddy and a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said they had found a big underwater oil plume in May and June, but no signs of oil-eating bacteria.

At the time, Reddy said microbes are about as predictable as teenagers. "Microbes are pretty selective in how they eat oil," he explained. "Sometimes they kick in; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do the easiest work and they don't do the hard work."

The hard work is what scientists had been hoping to see — bacteria consuming the more toxic chemicals in the oil plume and rendering them harmless. Reddy said sooner or later, the bugs should show up.

And now, apparently, they have.

"There's this unique cold-loving bacteria," says Terry Hazen, a microbiologist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "They actually grow better at 5 degrees than they do at room temperature."

Hazen and a large team of scientists found these new, coldwater bacteria in the oil plume, 3,000 feet deep, and in the same plume the WHOI team was following. There are several kinds of microbes, in fact — and they're eating the oil.

"Oil is the only carbon source down there deep, so they immediately take advantage of that," says Hazen. "And of course they undoubtedly have been adapted to that over millions of years."

That's because oil has been in the water for millions of years, bubbling up from the seabed. "The Gulf has natural seeps that have been putting the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill into the Gulf every year," he says.

Every Spill Is Unique
So why hadn't other scientists seen the bacteria? One possibility is that they were looking for low oxygen levels in the water and didn't see that. Low oxygen is the principal sign that lots of bacteria are eating oil.

But Hazen says in this case, ocean currents and the use of dispersants has spread the oil out into a thin veil of tiny droplets. So the bacteria are spread out too, and you don't find concentrated areas with low oxygen levels.

"The thing that I'm learning from this project is that there are no shortage of surprises from the microbial point of view," says Benjamin Van Mooy, a scientist with the WHOI team.

Van Mooy says every oil spill is unique "because the oil has a unique composition and it's also being released into an environment with its own unique chemical and physical factors at play. And there's also the microbial community."

Scientists working on the Gulf spill say that's why it's hard to predict how the remaining oil in the Gulf will behave. Unlike the Exxon Valdez spill, the BP oil was released at the seafloor, under great pressure. Dispersants spread it out into cold water, but as it rose, it reached much warmer water.

Hazen says it appears that the combination of bacteria and ocean mixing could degrade and disperse the remaining oil in a matter of weeks. "It does fit with what we've seen," he says. "So in the last three weeks, the plume at depth is completely undetectable."

But "gone" doesn't necessarily mean the Gulf is free of BP's oil. Van Mooy points out that oil has scores of chemical constituents. Bacteria consume the "low hanging fruit" first, but the harder stuff takes longer to digest. And scientists who track oil say the plume may thin out in one place and then pop up in another.

The research, published in the journal Science, was funded by the federal Energy Department, along with support from BP through a university consortium.

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aO2EUiuma17c



Louisiana’s Treasurer Says ‘Chuckleheads’ Caused Gulf Oil Spill
By Jim Snyder and Margaret Brennan

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy said “chuckleheads” on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caused the explosion and oil spill, and said the isolated incident shouldn’t delay resuming Gulf of Mexico exploration.

Kennedy urged an end to the ban on deep- water drilling imposed by the Obama administration after BP Plc’s Macondo well blew out, causing the largest U.S. oil spill. The moratorium has hurt the state’s economy and cut tax receipts, he said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness” program.

“The main reason for this catastrophe was not that we didn’t have enough rules, it was that we didn’t follow the rules that we had,” Kennedy said. “Some of the people making decisions on the Macondo well were acting like chuckleheads, and that was the problem. It was human error, it wasn’t a systemic failure.”

*****​

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601104&sid=a1m6JfzdW8JI


Private Equity Loses Fund Commitments as Tony James Woos Oregon
By Jason Kelly and Cristina Alesci

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- A year after the financial crisis subsided, the $2.5 trillion private-equity industry is finding the easy money may be gone.

Managers saddled with $1.6 trillion in buyouts made during a three-year boom have marked at least 6 of the era’s 10 biggest deals at or below cost, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. About $470 billion sits idle, according to London-based researcher Preqin Ltd. Announced purchases so far this year total less than a fifth of their volume at the peak in 2007.

Pensions, endowments and mutual funds cut new commitments to buyout funds by more than 50 percent, according to Preqin, questioning whether firms led by Blackstone Group LP have grown too large to generate the returns that made their founders billionaires. Blackstone, the world’s biggest private-equity company, has dropped 67 percent in New York trading since a 2007 offering, and Fortress Investment Group LLC lost 82 percent. KKR & Co. this month canceled a $500 million stock sale.

“There is a rightsizing of the industry right now,” said Joncarlo Mark, senior portfolio manager at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest state-run U.S. public pension. “A lot of investors have limited ability to commit new capital, and it’s going to stay that way for years unless public markets come back in a meaningful way.”

Calpers slashed its commitments to 2009 funds by 90 percent from those made to 2008 funds -- to $1.27 billion from $12.7 billion -- according to data compiled from the pension’s website. It committed a record $15.1 billion to 2007 funds.

Overall, private-equity funds raised $281 billion last year, a 57 percent drop from the record $646 billion collected in 2007, according to Preqin.

Rates of Return
Private-equity firms, which have their roots in the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s, pool money from investors to take over companies, usually with a mix of cash and debt, with the intention of selling them later for a profit.

The firms grew into multibillion-dollar asset managers, helped by returns that dwarfed what investors could earn in traditional assets such as stocks and bonds. Funds with more than $2 billion in commitments that were completed in 2001 and 2002 generated median rates of return of 34 percent and 33 percent, according to Preqin.

Institutional investors including endowments and pensions poured money into the funds as limited partners, committing more than $200 billion in a single quarter at the height of the buyout boom. The fund managers, or general partners, collected management fees of 2 percent of the capital committed and 20 percent of profits, making buyout pioneers including Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman and KKR’s Henry Kravis and George Roberts billionaires.

‘Pumped Out Profits’
“From 2005 to 2008, firms pumped out profits in 24 hours, buying on Monday and selling on Tuesday,” said Antoine Drean, head of Triago SA in Paris, which helps firms raise money. “That made for fundraising that was like a lottery, in which every ticket was a winner. That was too good to be true.”

The “lazy” days of easy fundraising are over, Tony James, president of New York-based Blackstone, said in an interview. Last month the 59-year-old Wall Street veteran flew across the country to win a commitment from the Oregon Investment Council to invest in a new $13.5 billion buyout fund. Instead of jumping at the opportunity, the council’s members grilled James for almost an hour about the performance of Blackstone’s 2007 fund, its fifth buyout pool.

The Oregon pension committed $1.6 billion to private-equity funds last year, down from $2.7 billion in 2008, according to the state treasury.

Blackstone Fund V
“That all sounds really great, and you probably raised money at the right time so you could go out and get deals,” Katherine Durant, who helps oversee $52 billion for state employees as a member of the council, said during James’s presentation in the Portland suburb of Tigard, which was open to the public. “That said, why does Fund V look so bad?”

Blackstone Capital Partners V was valued at a loss of 2 percent including fees, compared with a 7 percent drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index during the same period, James told council members seated around him in a semicircle. He said it would return investors twice their money eventually.

The firm’s 1994 fund delivered 2.2 times investors’ money and average annual returns of 37 percent, according to Calpers, one of the investors.

Below Cost
Blackstone’s Fund V isn’t the only pool started in the boom years that’s struggling. As of the end of the second quarter, New York-based Fortress had $4.9 billion in unrealized, or paper, losses from private-equity funds started since 2005.

That’s because at least six of the 10 largest buyouts announced between 2005 and 2007 are marked at or below cost, according to public disclosures and communications with investors obtained by Bloomberg. KKR and TPG Capital’s Energy Future Holdings Corp.; Blackstone’s Hilton Worldwide; and Apollo Global Management LLC and TPG’s Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. have all sought to restructure their debt through methods such as debt exchanges or additional equity infusions.

Energy Future Holdings, the Dallas-based power producer formerly known as TXU, was the largest leveraged buyout in history when it was announced in 2007, with a value of $43.2 billion. At the end of the second quarter, KKR valued the company at 30 cents on the dollar.

Harrah’s, NXP
Harrah’s, the world’s largest casino company, was taken private in a $30.7 billion deal completed in January 2008. The Las Vegas-based firm’s owners have trimmed about $4.2 billion in debt through discount deals with banks and exchanges with creditors. Apollo valued the investment at 63 cents on the dollar as of June 30, according to an investor presentation obtained by Bloomberg.

Firms that were able to sell holdings had to cut the price or sell below cost. KKR and Boston-based Bain Capital LLC this month raised $476 million in an initial public offering of NXP Semiconductors NV after reducing the price to $14 a share from as much as $21. They bought the Dutch chipmaker in 2006 in a deal valuing the company at about $9.4 billion including debt. NXP has reported combined losses of $5.5 billion since then, and its current market value is $2.7 billion. KKR said this month that its stake in NXP was worth 50 cents on the dollar.

“Too much capital in any strategy, sector, time or place renders a market efficient, or hyper-efficient, and dilutes returns,” said Peter Yu, managing partner of Cartesian Capital, a New York-based private-equity firm.

Smaller Deals
Private-equity managers have been able to reap profits from some smaller deals of recent years. KKR’s Dollar General Corp., bought in 2007 for $7.3 billion, went public in November and sold shares at $21 apiece. The stock has gained 35 percent since then, and KKR sold part of its stake in a secondary offering in April. Chipmaker Avago Technologies Ltd., controlled by KKR and Silver Lake Partners, went public in August 2009 and has since conducted two secondary share sales.

KKR distributed $3 billion to its private-equity investors during the past 18 months, said Alex Navab, the firm’s co-head of North American private equity.

Even so, investors are reluctant to commit new money because funds are sitting on an estimated $469 billion in capital commitments they haven’t been able to invest, according to Preqin. Funds announced $128 billion in private-equity deals over the past 12 months, less than a fifth of the $668.5 billion announced in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Wary of Overpaying
At that pace, it would take more than seven years to invest the existing commitments, assuming funds borrow half the purchase price.

Deals that would allow funds to put money to work faster have fallen apart as investors are wary of overpaying. Blackstone, TPG and Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners in May walked away from talks with Fidelity National Information Services Inc., a Jacksonville, Florida-based payment-services provider, over a $15 billion buyout after the company sought a higher price, said people briefed on the talks. The transaction would have been the largest deal in almost three years.

Funds usually have three to six years to deploy commitments. If they exceed that period, they need to seek an extension or release investors from their commitments and forgo management fees.

“We all have to be accountable to our investors and explain our track record and strategy, so the decision to raise too much capital relative to the opportunities in the market comes home to roost pretty quickly,” said Bain managing director Mark Nunnelly.

‘Oddball Things’
Private-equity managers contend that the 2005 to 2007 time period was an aberration and that they’re now returning to business as usual. Blackstone’s James says his firm is more comfortable with deals worth less than $5 billion and its best returns have come from transactions in that range.

“You have to be able to create these oddball, one-off things” and eschew the headline-grabbing sales of companies, he said in a July 22 interview. “In today’s environment, anything that’s auctioned and public is fully priced.”

Finding those deals means increasing staff, which leads to higher costs and lower compensation across the firm, said James. Blackstone’s private-equity investment staff, which totaled 59 for its fourth fund, has swelled to 149 employees, and pay for deal partners is “substantially” down, he said. At KKR, the buyout staff has more than doubled to 180 from 75 in 2005.

“Despite the downturn, this has been part of our long-term strategic plan to significantly grow our private-equity business domestically and globally, by adding to our investment teams and increasing our operational capabilities,” KKR’s Navab said.

Lower Fees
Blackstone is pursuing deals like its April purchase of a heavy-crude-oil refinery in Delaware, which it bought with energy specialist First Reserve Corp. for $220 million from Valero Energy Corp. KKR is building an exploration business for gas trapped in shale and coal beds under parts of Appalachia and Texas, using mostly equity.

Blackstone had about $1 billion left to invest in its fifth fund, with another $2 billion reserved for follow-on investments, James said at the meeting in Oregon last month. KKR had $11.9 billion in uncalled commitments in its private markets unit as of June 30.

James ultimately wrung a $200 million commitment from the Oregon Investment Council for Blackstone’s new fund -- the pension’s first ever with the private-equity firm. The decision came after Blackstone agreed to share more fees, an offer the firm later had to extend to other investors. Blackstone had previously lowered the annual management fee for the fund to 1 percent from 1.5 percent for investors with more than $1 billion in commitments.

Smaller Funds
Even with those concessions, the new pool is 62 percent of the size of its $21.7 billion predecessor, raised in 2007. Blackstone cut the target after aiming for about $20 billion and has told investors it secured $13.5 billion. Other firms postponed fundraising or refrained from seeking new money.

Fortress, the buyout and hedge-fund firm co-founded by Wesley Edens, in September released long-time investor Washington State Investment Board from a $300 million commitment to a new private-equity fund, according to the pension plan, which manages $74 billion. Fortress had aimed to raise $6 billion for the fund, according to Preqin.

The Washington fund made $2.2 billion in private-equity commitments during its fiscal 2009, about half of the $4.1 billion it committed in 2008, according to its annual report.

Raising a new fund is taking an average of 20 months, more than twice as long as in 2004, according to Preqin. New funds are also smaller. For U.S. buyout funds of more than $2.5 billion, the average size in 2009 was $4.3 billion, compared with $7.8 billion in 2007, according to data compiled by Preqin.

New ‘Zeitgeist’
“The zeitgeist in the era in which we are living is not to allow people to raise $20 billion funds,” David Rubenstein, 61, co-founder of Washington-based Carlyle Group, said in a June interview. “I don’t think we are going to see $20 billion funds for some time, and I don’t think we’ll see $30 billion or $40 billion deals for some time, but it’s difficult to predict beyond three or four years.”

Blackstone, KKR and Carlyle, the largest firms, have responded in part by expanding beyond buyouts. Blackstone, created by Schwarzman and Peter G. Peterson in 1985, has cut its dependence on private equity to about 11 percent of its fee income. The largest unit at the firm by assets now is one that includes funds of hedge funds.

That’s a shift from 2004, when Blackstone’s private-equity assets under management totaled $15.7 billion, or almost half of the $32.1 billion total, according to the company’s 2007 IPO prospectus. The fund of funds unit had $11.6 billion in assets.

‘Like Mutual Funds’
KKR is seeking fees from underwriting debt and stock offerings by companies it owns and investing in oil and gas. The New York-based firm’s capital markets and principal activities business accounted for about 15 percent of its fee earnings in the second quarter of this year.

“KKR’s new efforts are highly complementary to our private equity business,” said Navab.

The firm’s private-markets segment accounted for 66 percent of KKR’s fee-related earnings in the second quarter.

Expanding beyond private equity is transforming the firms into asset managers and separating them from traditional buyout investors, said Colin Blaydon, director of the Center for Private Equity & Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“In that regard they start looking like the big mutual funds,” Blaydon said.

Fortress, KKR
Shareholders aren’t convinced that profits will return to levels during the boom. Blackstone, which managed to sell shares before the financial crisis, declined to $10.37 yesterday from an IPO price of $31. The stock reached a high of $38 on the first day of trading.

Fortress has done worse, declining 82 percent since going public in February 2007. Top executives including Edens and Peter Briger, who last year bought 3.6 million shares at $5 apiece, last week filed to register 6.1 million shares, about 2 percent of their holdings, a step that would permit them to sell the stock on the open market. The shares have declined 24 percent this year to $3.38.

KKR, which has dropped about 4 percent since listing its shares in New York on July 15, canceled a planned stock sale on Aug. 9, citing “unfavorable market conditions.” KKR, which abandoned an IPO in 2007, gained a listing in New York after combining with its publicly traded fund in Europe last year. Shares in that fund lost 58 percent between May 2006, when it went public, and July 14, 2010, when it was delisted.

‘That World Is Gone’
Apollo, the firm run by Leon Black, 59, is seeking to move its Class A shares, now held by private investors, to the New York Stock Exchange. Calpers invested $600 million in the firm in July 2007. That stake is now worth $210 million based on a share price of $7 on GSTrUE, a system run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that is open to institutions and wealthy investors, according to a person with knowledge of the stock’s pricing who asked not to be identified.

The California pension, which has led a push by institutional investors for lower fees and a bigger say in buyout funds, in April won a $125 million fee reduction --spread over five years -- for funds Apollo manages solely for the $212 billion fund. Firms often charge lower fees for such vehicles, called managed accounts, because it costs less to raise them. Apollo, in a letter to investors, said such accounts are “the fastest growing part” of its business.

Blackstone’s James says the time when investors accepted fund terms without questioning are over for good. He recalls how, about a year ago, after the peak of the financial crisis, he and his partners sat at the company’s headquarters on Park Avenue and agreed that each of them would start calling investors regularly to check in.

“We as an industry were lazy,” James said. “We were unresponsive to our investors. That world is gone.”

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a2b5umYaWJ.Q


Atomic-Bomb Survivors May Offer Clues on Cancer Treatment Risks
By Kanoko Matsuyama and Jason Gale

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) -- DNA from survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago may help doctors gauge whether certain cancer treatments can trigger genetic defects that can be passed on to patients’ children.

Scientists at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, Japan, are investigating whether the health consequences of the bombs continue beyond those survivors who developed cancer. They are looking for gene changes linked with conditions including leukemia and heart disease, and checking whether those alterations can be inherited, said Evan Douple, the foundation’s associate chief of research.

The findings may help doctors better understand the levels of radiation to which cancer patients can be safely exposed, Douple said. Survivors’ children born after the August 1945 attacks are reaching ages when malignancies are more likely to appear.

“As they enter their cancer-prone years, the next 20 years are going to be very important,” Douple said. “We don’t want to overlook that as a possible mechanism for the disease.”

The genetic basis of cancer has been recognized for a century. The researchers in Hiroshima will examine the descendants of survivors to see whether the environment changed the activity of genes, a field of study known as epigenetics.

Genes’ Behavior
The field has emerged since the 1940s to bridge the gap between nature and nurture. Epigenetic processes can change the behavior of a gene without altering the DNA sequence, prompting “good” genes -- such as those suppressing tumors -- to switch off and “bad” genes -- those promoting tumors -- to switch on.

Douple, a radiobiologist who spent more than a decade at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, said there is no evidence yet that the bomb survivors, known in Japanese as hibakusha, suffered epigenetic effects.

Still, laboratory experiments with human cells and mice showed that the effects are possible and the descendants of the bomb survivors offer an unparalleled opportunity to determine whether epigenetics plays a role in disease following radiation exposure.

Knowing that the effects can’t be passed on would be reassuring, said Mikiso Iwasa, 81, who was less than a mile (1.2 kilometers) from where the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Iwasa, who lives in suburban Tokyo, said his body was covered by a rash after his exposure, and doctors later told him it caused his two bouts of skin cancer. He and his wife, who was about two miles from the detonation, worried that their children would be born with defects, Iwasa said.

They weren’t.

“We still live today with anxiety and fear about what may happen to our descendants,” he said.

Social Stigma
Some people believed radiation sickness was hereditary or even contagious, said Osamu Yoshitomi, head of administration at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum’s peace promotion department.

“Back in 1945, there was no understanding of what might happen to the people who were contaminated,” Yoshitomi said. “The victims were worried that their kids might not be able to get married.”

The ongoing research may be relevant for scientists studying the effects of computed tomography (CT) scans and radiation therapy, which uses high-energy radiation to kill cancer cells by damaging their DNA. The tumor-shrinking treatment also can impair normal cells and, in rare cases, cause new malignancies to develop, according to the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Potential Risk
“When normal tissues such as the heart are exposed during radiation therapy for, say, breast cancer, it is important to know the potential risk of exposures to other organs of the body and to try to minimize the exposure,” Douple said.

The foundation, located two miles from the epicenter of the blast, runs the world’s largest and longest scientific investigation of a population exposed to radiation.

Its research has helped set international guidelines for the International Committee on Radiological Protection.

The project, which receives a total of about $35 million annually from the U.S. and Japanese governments, has followed more than 200,000 bomb survivors and their children since 1947. The foundation estimates that the blasts killed as many as 166,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki.

The researchers found that hibakusha had a 45 percent higher death rate from leukemia and an 8 percent higher death rate from cancerous tumors than the general Japanese population.

Studies so far haven’t found higher rates of disease in 80,000 first-generation descendants born after the bombings, Douple said. The oldest children are 65, with an average age of about 50.

Mutations
Epigenetic changes alone won’t prove the cause of diseases, said Emma Whitelaw, head of genetics and population health at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia. Instead, they may reflect genetic mutations.

“This is an area of great controversy and a rapidly changing field,” Whitelaw said.

Douple said he expects it will take at least two years to gather evidence of any epigenetic changes. He and colleagues are seeking advice from other researchers to identify the best techniques for measuring those effects in blood, serum and immune cells called lymphocytes.

“We have an incredible resource of samples here but we have been saving them very carefully to wait as the technologies develop,” Douple said. “We don’t want to consume a finite resource.”

 

[trysail]

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/fix-fubar.jpg?w=232&h=217​

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aomp9vvCA7Uo


Pfizer, Bayer Fight to Replace Warfarin in Stroke-Drug Market
By Shannon Pettypiece, Naomi Kresge and Michelle Fay Cortez

Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH may be the first drugmaker to win U.S. approval of a revolutionary alternative for preventing strokes. It likely won’t be the last.

Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker, and Bayer AG will present data at a medical meeting tomorrow on pills racing to overtake Boehringer’s Pradaxa, which U.S. regulatory advisers will review Sept. 20. The prize: a bigger stake in a blood- thinner market that may be worth $10 billion to $20 billion a year, said Seamus Fernandez, an analyst with Leerink Swann & Co.

Positive findings for Pfizer and Bayer may put their pills in line to replace warfarin, a 65-year-old drug that can cause dangerous bleeding at high doses and deadly blood clots when too little is given. Pradaxa was more effective than warfarin at preventing strokes in atrial fibrillation patients, a study last year found. Research tomorrow will give clues on whether the Pfizer and Bayer pills are as good as, or better, than Pradaxa.

“Pradaxa has set a pretty high bar,” said Deepak Bhatt, chief of cardiology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. “It showed superiority. That is really a tough threshold that has been set in terms of apixaban and Xarelto.”

Pfizer, based in New York, rose 19 cents to $16.09 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading at the 4 p.m. close on Aug. 27. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., also of New York, gained 27 cents to $26.12. Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, increased 34 cents to $57.60, and Leverkusen, Germany- based Bayer climbed 32 cents to 47.15 euros in Frankfurt trading.

Drug Partnerships
Pfizer is partnering with Bristol-Myers on apixaban, while Bayer has teamed with J&J on Xarelto. Boehringer, based in Ingelheim, Germany, is the world’s biggest family-owned drugmaker and isn’t publicly traded.

Doctors now rely on aspirin and warfarin, a powerful but difficult-to-control medicine crafted from rat poison, to help prevent strokes in 2.2 million Americans with an irregular heartbeat, a condition also known as atrial fibrillation, Bhatt said. For patients at risk for developing clots in the leg or veins deep within the body as the result of other conditions, physicians use the generic drug heparin or Sanofi-Aventis SA’s Lovenox, with 3.08 billion euros ($3.9 billion) in 2009 sales.

All these drugs, though, have flaws making them difficult and dangerous to use, Bhatt said.

Tomorrow’s data, to be presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Stockholm, will provide early insight into whether apixaban or Xarelto can match last year’s finding on Pradaxa, said Tony Butler, an analyst at Barclays Capital in New York, in an Aug. 25 note to clients.

Positive Results
Analysts are expecting positive results from Pfizer and Bristol-Myers’s product after the companies stopped their study comparing apixaban to aspirin ahead of schedule when an early analysis showed it cut the rate of strokes and certain clots, said Leerink Swann’s Fernandez, in an Aug. 20 report.

Apixaban may have trimmed the relative risk of having a stroke in the study by 38 percent, compared with aspirin, Fernandez said in a June report after the study was halted.

For Pfizer and Bristol-Myers, getting apixaban to market is critical as they brace for generic competition to their top- selling pills. Next year, Pfizer will start losing the majority of revenue for its cholesterol pill Lipitor, the world’s biggest drug with $11.4 billion in sales last year. The company has had a string of research setbacks this year, halting late-stage testing on four medicines.

Bristol-Myers is expected to face generic competition in 2012 for its anti-clotting drug Plavix, the world’s second-best selling medicine generating $6.1 billion last year for Bristol- Myers. It markets the drug with Paris-based Sanofi.

Einstein
The Bayer trial, dubbed Einstein-DVT, found that Xarelto was as effective as the standard therapy of Lovenox plus warfarin at preventing clots in the lungs and legs, the company said on Aug. 4. Investors will be looking at the specific bleeding rates when the full results of the study are presented tomorrow to determine how it compares to Pradaxa, Butler said.

Boehringer has said it expects approval of Pradaxa for atrial fibrillation patients later this year or early next year. Bayer has said it will request regulatory approval for Xarelto in both deep vein thrombosis and atrial fibrillation by the end of the year.

Pfizer’s apixaban may not come to market in the U.S. until 2012 as the company waits for results from a larger 18,000- patient study of atrial fibrillation patients comparing apixaban with warfarin, said Deutsche Bank analyst Barbara Ryan. The results from that study should be presented early next year, she said.

Sold in Europe
Both Xarelto and Pradaxa are sold in Europe, mainly to prevent blood clots from forming after hip and knee surgery. European regulators may approve apixaban next year for blood clots following surgery, Ryan said in a July 13 note to clients.

Pfizer and Bristol-Myers’s study to be presented tomorrow, dubbed Averroes, compared apixaban to aspirin for preventing strokes in patients with atrial fibrillation who couldn’t tolerate or chose not to take warfarin. Almost half of atrial fibrillation patients choose aspirin over warfarin because it has a lower risk of bleeding, fewer drug interactions and requires less monitoring, said Bhatt.

Atrial fibrillation means the heart doesn’t properly pump blood out of its upper chamber, allowing it to pool and clot, according to the American Heart Association. A stroke can result if part of that clot breaks off and gets lodged in the artery to the brain.

“Physicians and patients are sick of warfarin and there is a lot of hope of not having to deal with it anymore,” Bhatt said. “If something comes along that is as good or better than warfarin, that would be a very big improvement.”

________________________________

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a2dKDnvSKmqk

Pfizer, Bayer Clot Drugs Shown to Be Safe in Studies
By Naomi Kresge and Chris Kay

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc. and Bayer AG revealed study results today that may give their medicines a foothold in a $10-billion-a-year market to prevent clots that cause strokes and deadly lung damage.

The research provided evidence that Pfizer’s apixaban and Bayer’s Xarelto are as safe as existing therapy, which may ease concerns among doctors who are seeking a replacement for warfarin, a powerful and unwieldy blood thinner used for more than a half-century. Apixaban beat aspirin at preventing strokes in patients with irregular heartbeat, while Xarelto matched standard treatments for clots in the legs and lungs.

At stake is a share in a warfarin-replacement market that could reach $10 billion to $20 billion a year, according to an estimate from Seamus Fernandez, an analyst with Leerink Swann & Co. Doctors and patients will “insist” on using a replacement as soon as one is available for warfarin, which requires regular blood tests and can leave patients vulnerable to deadly clots or uncontrollable bleeding at too low or high a dose, said Ralph Brindis, president of the American College of Cardiology and a cardiologist at Oakland Medical Center in California.

“We’re getting pretty close to the holy grail in finding a replacement for warfarin,” Brindis said in an interview. “I don’t know which one is going to win or lose in that family, but the body of evidence is growing.”

Pfizer fell 5 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $15.81 at 9:48 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, while partner Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. rose 27 cents, or 1 percent, to $26.12. Bayer rose 1.16 euros, or 2.5 percent, to 48.20 euros in Frankfurt trading, and partner Johnson & Johnson fell 9 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $57.21 in New York.

Boehringer’s Pradaxa
Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH may be the first drugmaker to win U.S. approval of a revolutionary alternative to warfarin, which is derived from rat poison. U.S. regulatory advisers will review Pradaxa, already approved in Europe to prevent clots following hip and knee surgery, on Sept. 20.

Pradaxa, apixaban and Xarelto interfere with the body’s own clotting mechanisms to minimize strokes, lung clots and extended leg clots, commonly at a risk of increased bleeding, Brindis said. Apixaban, which is still being tested, and Xarelto, which is approved in Europe for hip and knee surgery patients, appear to be effective and safe, perhaps safer than the current standard, he said.

Apixaban Results
Patients who took apixaban were 54 percent less likely to have a stroke or damaging clot than those who took aspirin in a study of 5,600 patients who couldn’t use warfarin, researchers said today at the European Society of Cardiology conference in Stockholm. Apixaban and aspirin showed a similar risk of major bleeding, a feared side effect of blood thinners, according to the study, dubbed Averroes after a 12th century Islamic philosopher.

“The use of aspirin will probably be reduced after this study,” said Harald Arnesen, a professor at Ullevaal University Hospital in Oslo.

Warfarin typically reduces the rate of stroke 40 percent more than aspirin, Larry Biegelsen, a New York-based analyst for Wells Fargo Securities, wrote in a note to investors on Aug. 30. That’s a less potent effect than apixaban showed in today’s trial.

Results from the larger 18,000-patient Aristotle study comparing apixaban with warfarin in patients with an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation are expected in the first half of next year, Tim Anderson, a New York-based analyst with Bernstein Research, said today in a note to clients.

Xarelto Results
“Aspirin isn’t the recommended treatment simply because there’s significant amounts of clinical data that shows that in fact protection is greater on warfarin,” said Nick Turner, a London-based analyst at Mirabaud Securities, in a telephone interview today. “So exactly how well a drug compares to aspirin is probably not that significant.”

Xarelto matched the standard therapy of Sanofi-Aventis SA’s Lovenox plus warfarin at blocking blood clots in the lungs and legs, researchers said today in a study of more than 3,400 patients. Some 2.1 percent of those in the Xarelto group developed clots compared to 3 percent of people taking the older standard treatments.

Patients who took Xarelto were 33 percent less likely to develop either clots or major internal bleeding, Bayer said. The Leverkusen, Germany-based drugmaker is developing Xarelto with Johnson & Johnson. About 8.1 percent of patients in both treatment groups developed serious bleeding, the study found.

The company designed the study, dubbed Einstein-DVT, to see whether the once-a-day pill could match the existing therapies, which are “very, very effective,” said lead researcher Harry Bueller, of Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam.

Bayer’s Plans
Medicines to prevent clots after knee surgery or in the lungs and legs are a small part of the blood thinner market, said Flemming Oernskov, head of the women’s health and general medicine unit at Bayer. The much bigger market is in atrial fibrillation, Oernskov said in an interview.

Bayer has said it plans to present its trial on Xarelto versus warfarin in atrial fibrillation patients at the American Heart Association conference in November.

“We think that when all indications are there, we have all the trials and it has worked out well, it could be for us as a company over 2 billion euros in annual revenue,” the Bayer executive said. “You can imagine this market will be several factors higher than the 2 billion euros.”

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=ar0KvaKIH4T8



Iceland Says It ‘Deserves’ More Mackerel as U.K. Spat Deepens
By Omar R. Valdimarsson

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Iceland’s decision to let its fishermen catch 65 times more mackerel than before won’t push the island into a new cod war with the U.K. as it’s only taking what it “deserves,” Fisheries Minister Jon Bjarnason said.

“We’re only doing what we’re fully entitled to do,” Bjarnason said in an interview in Reykjavik yesterday. “We’re fishing the mackerel, it’s in great abundance here, and we have the same right as other nations have when it comes to fishing within territorial waters.”

Iceland’s determination to ignore international quotas is souring relations with the U.K., already fraught after the Atlantic island’s failure to resolve depositor claims stemming from the collapse of one of its biggest banks in late 2008. The U.K. government accused Iceland on Aug. 26 of “behaving irresponsibly” and “undermining the sustainability of the stock.” The European Commission said the raised quota is leading to “overfishing,” which is a matter of “concern” for the bloc, Agence France-Presse reported Aug. 25.

Iceland’s government this year raised its mackerel quota to 130,000 tons from 2,000 tons. The island’s fishing vessels have already caught more than 100,000 tons, local newspaper Frettabladid reported, citing Fridrik Arngrimsson, the head of the Icelandic Federation of Vessel Owners.

“I think we’re taking from the stock what we deserve, according to estimates on the mackerel stock surrounding Iceland,” Bjarnason said.

Struan Stevenson, a member of Britain’s governing Conservative Party and a lawmaker in the European Parliament, has called for an EU-wide blockade of Icelandic ships.

‘Play Hardball’
“We should play hardball by closing EU ports to their vessels and banning all imports from” Iceland, Stevenson said on Aug. 23 in a statement on his website. “They need to understand the serious repercussions of this selfish and short- sighted action.”

Iceland isn’t expecting other countries to interfere with its fishing and Bjarnason said he doesn’t “believe that any civilized nation would carry out such an act.” He expects to be able to settle the dispute through negotiations in October.

Iceland last came into conflict with the U.K. over its fishing rights in the 1970s in the so-called “cod wars.” That dispute, which the Icelanders called the Landhelgisstridin, or the war for territorial waters, followed the island’s decision to declare an exclusive economic zone that extended beyond its waters. The feud resulted in the U.K. sending a fleet of warships to protect its fishing craft after the Icelandic coastguard cut through British fishermen’s nets to free cod they said were unlawfully caught.

“The mackerel is just like any other species that we have to negotiate on,” Bjarnason said.

Mackerel is a migratory fish that the Icelandic government says has been spending longer in Icelandic waters because of warmer sea temperatures.

When accession talks began on July 27, the EU identified Iceland’s refusal to accept EU fishing quotas as one of the main obstacles to membership.

 

[trysail]

I hear barking dogs and envision rabid foaming-at-the-mouth animals. Who do you think you’re kidding with your strident noise?

“It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”
-H. L. Mencken

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aLb9rLHWvgSk



Egyptian Billionaire’s Swiss Resort May Rival Verbier
By Jennifer M. Freedman

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- An Egyptian billionaire with a penchant for risk is transforming a sleepy Swiss village into a ritzy resort that may one day rival Verbier.

Samih Sawiris’s Orascom Development Holding AG plans to spend about $1.5 billion in Andermatt to build deluxe hotels and a golf course on a former Nazi supply route. His plans will double the number of ski slopes and revitalize an Alpine town at the base of Gemsstock mountain between Milan and Zurich that lost a fifth of its residents in the past decade.

“I wasn’t euphoric at the beginning,” Internet cafe owner Baenz Simmen said of the developer’s proposal to expand Andermatt. Sawiris has a vision to convert the town, where Elvis Presley learned to ski, into “a little paradise,” he said.

The cheapest housing units in Sawiris’s project are on sale for 1.2 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million). The first apartments in the village along the scenic Glacier Express train route from Zermatt to St. Moritz will be ready in late 2013 or early 2014. Orascom expects most of the buyers to come from outside Switzerland.

Sawiris, 53, made his fortune developing towns in the Middle East. Now he’s betting that a revived Andermatt will compete for skiers with more well-known resorts such as Verbier, St. Moritz or Zermatt. He envisions a new town the size of 200 soccer fields with an 18-hole golf course, a sports center, 490 apartments and six luxury hotels that’s next to the old village of 1,350 residents.

‘Crazy’
“They all thought I was crazy,” Sawiris said during an interview in Andermatt. “But they thought the same thing when I decided to build El Gouna,” he said, referring to Orascom’s flagship resort on Egypt’s Red Sea coast.

Sawiris caught the attention of Zermatt Mayor Christoph Buergin when announcing the project.

“I know Andermatt very well and hearing someone coming from Cairo saying he’ll build a resort here, my first reaction was that he must be stupid,” Buergin said in a July 20 telephone interview. “But now I think it’s a very good thing. This is a man with plans.”

Andermatt is the most expensive new resort in the Swiss Alps, four times more costly than the investment Mirax Group is planning for the Le Village Royal project near Crans-Montana. The Russian developer owned by Sergei Polonsky is committing about 400 million francs to the resort, which includes hundreds of deluxe apartments, ski chalets and a hotel complex.

New Jobs
Qatari property developer Barwa Real Estate Co. is investing 300 million francs at Buergenstock above Lake Lucerne for a 400-room spa resort project that includes 60 residential suites with hotel services.

Sawiris’s resort will create 2,000 jobs for Andermatt, whose economy has relied for decades on the Swiss army. While Switzerland was neutral during World War II, Nazi trains used the transit route through the Gotthard mountain passage for supplies, the Andermatt Internet café owner Simmen said.

The mountains above Andermatt are fortress-like, peppered with bunkers and underground tunnels, part of an area central to the Swiss national defense strategy until the Cold War ended. After a series of cutbacks, Switzerland no longer needed its Alpine fortress -- or Andermatt.

That’s when Sawiris stepped in. He bought land vacated by the army and won local support in 2007 to build the resort, convincing residents the project will bring jobs and prosperity without harming the environment.

Andermatt by Coincidence
“Andermatt came by coincidence,” Sawiris said. “I was asked by a friend for advice on what to do. When I came to give advice, I fell in love with the idea of doing this in Switzerland. I told them if you give me the right conditions I’ll come, and they did.”

Simmen, whose Internet cafe is on Andermatt’s main street, was among the early skeptics. He changed his mind after the third of four meetings that Sawiris held with residents.

“Sawiris is very transparent and cares about nature,” Simmen said. “He’s not going to make this an urban thing.”

While the Ursern valley is a magnet for skiers, snowboarders and hikers, Andermatt has offered little indoor entertainment until the emergence of the project, Simmen said.

“If there’s bad weather in Andermatt, you have to be a reading person or a drinking person because otherwise there’s nothing to do,” he said.

Hotelier Kevin Obschlager is upbeat about the new business the project will draw to Andermatt, though he doesn’t believe local residents grasp how big an impact the resort will have.

“When they roll in, they’ll rule because money rules,” Obschlager said of property buyers. Now is the time to figure out how best to cope with changes Sawiris’s resort will bring and to work out a strategy to ensure the old and new are compatible, he said. “Time is our capital right now.”

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601095&sid=ag512q5s.NLM



Blair Defends Iraq ‘Nightmare’ as He Says He Wept for the Dead
By Robert Hutton

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said it was right to invade Iraq, even taking into account “the nightmare that unfolded” there, and recounted that he wept on meeting one British soldier’s widow.

“On the basis of what we do know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him,” Blair wrote in his memoir, “A Journey,” published by Random House today. Of his critics, he said, “Do they really suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fiber of my being the loss of those who died? Tears, though there have been many, do not encompass it.”

The 2003 decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein was the most controversial of Blair’s decade in office, and 179 British soldiers died there. He devoted more than 100 of the book’s 736 pages to the subject, quoting United Nations resolutions and reports on Iraq’s weapons program at length to explain his thinking.

Blair, 57, denied Britain and the U.S. had secret reasons for wanting to invade. “If oil had been our concern, we could have cut a deal with Saddam in a heartbeat,” he said. Blair said President George W. Bush had accepted “on several occasions” that if Iraq complied with the UN, war would not have been on the agenda.

Blair said Vice President Dick Cheney resisted going through the UN, arguing “that the U.S. was genuinely at war.”

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it -- Hezbollah, Hamas, etc,” Blair said of Cheney. “In other words, he thought the world had to be made anew, and that after Sept. 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency.”

Blair described meeting the family of an unnamed soldier in his Downing Street office in London. “I asked to spend some time alone with the widow,” he wrote. “We talked a bit and suddenly I was overcome with tears.”

 

[trysail]

S&P: Foreign Sales by U.S. Companies Fall in 2009;
Domestic Sales Also on the Decline


New York, August 5, 2010 – After three consecutive years of rising foreign sales, S&P 500 companies with full reporting information posted 46.6% of their sales from outside of the United States in 2009 down from the 47.9% recorded in 2008, Standard & Poor’s, the world’s leading index provider, reported today. The data is derived from the 250 companies within the S&P 500 that have full reporting information.


Reported foreign sales for the current membership of the S&P 500 decreased 16.0% in 2009, while U.S. domestic sales decreased 11.2%.


“Total reported 2009 fiscal sales for the S&P 500, on an aggregate basis, decreased 12.0% from US$ 9.08 trillion to US$ 7.99 trillion, matching the 2005 level of US$ 7.94 trillion,” adds Howard Silverblatt, S&P Senior Index Analyst and author of the report. “The sudden and massive decline was the product of the global recession and the massive pull-back in consumer spending in the U.S.”


According to the report, European sales from S&P 500 companies declined to 25.6% of foreign sales in 2009 from 27.7% in 2008, as Asia increased to 17.6% from 13.2%. Canada was the primary recipient of S&P 500 foreign sales in 2009 at 7.4%. Information Technology continued to be the dominating sector with over 56% of its declared sales coming from outside of the United States; the sector represents 20.4% of all U.S. foreign sales. S&P Indices also determined that total income taxes paid declined 24% in 2009 as U.S. issues sent US$ 43 billion less to non-US governments than they did in 2008. Federal income taxes paid to the U.S. government fell 13.6% to US$ 92.7 billion in 2009 from US$ 107.2 billion in 2008. Additionally, income taxes paid to non-U.S. governments declined 32.0% to US$ 91.7 billion from US$ 135.1 billion in 2008.


“While actual country payments are not reported, the aggregate loss of US$ 43.3 billion of income to non-US sovereigns puts additional budgetary pressures on an already strained system,” notes Silverblatt. “Taxes paid to the United States now constitute a majority at 50.2% of all income taxes paid by U.S. companies, up from 44.2% in 2008.”


The full report, S&P 500: 2009 Global Sales, can be accessed by going to www.indexresearch.standardandpoors.com.

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aD43A_v3WFgo



Fuld’s Lehman ‘Peddled Junk,’ Betrayed Firm’s Founders
Book Review by James Pressley

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The first Lehman Brother was a Jewish immigrant from the Bavaria of King Ludwig I, a despot whose tastes ran to mistresses and monasteries.

Heyum Lehmann sailed to America in 1844 and became Henry Lehman, a peddler plying the plank roads of antebellum Alabama. He was a proud and honest risk taker, not one of the “huddled masses,” writes Peter Chapman in “The Last of the Imperious Rich,” a new history on the rise and ruin of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Henry sold simple wares of real value to farm folk, Chapman says. The ruination came only a century and a half later, when the Lehman of Richard S. Fuld Jr. “was caught peddling junk.”

That barbed epitaph befits an institution that prospered and became entwined in U.S. history -- from selling Confederate bonds to taking famous retailers such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. public and financing Boeing 747s -- before short-term thinkers such as Fuld took control and abandoned the company’s founding principles, as Chapman argues. His book lends needed perspective to Fuld’s attempt this week to shift the blame for Lehman’s collapse onto regulators working with “flawed information.”

Another title on Lehman, you say? A groan escaped me when the book hit my desk. What could Chapman add to a shelf that already includes Ken Auletta’s “Greed and Glory on Wall Street,” Lawrence G. McDonald’s “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” and Vicky Ward’s “The Devil’s Casino”?

Alternative History
The simple answer is context. Chapman brings little original reporting to bear, yet in a sense it doesn’t matter. Because “The Last of the Imperious Rich” turns out to be an alternative history of U.S. business, politics and economics as refracted through the prism that was Lehman.

Chapman, who writes for the Financial Times, has synthesized his wide reading into a narrative suitable for a college course on business history. The canvas is vast, spreading from the Lehmans’ slave-owning, cotton-trading roots in Montgomery, Alabama, and on through the glory days of Robert “Bobbie” Lehman, the salmon-fishing, polo-playing art collector who ran the shop from 1925 to 1969, the year Neil Armstrong did his first moon walk.

When the Great Depression came, the Lehmans rolled up their shirtsleeves, politically as well as financially. Bobbie’s cousin, Herbert Lehman, had become Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s right-hand man in the late 1920s, when Roosevelt was elected New York governor and Herbert the lieutenant governor. When FDR moved into the White House, Herbert was elected governor in his own right and countered the Depression with what came to be called the Little New Deal, including measures on minimum wages and unemployment relief.

Lindbergh and Goya
Bobbie Lehman, another man of his era, rubbed shoulders with Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy. His clients included RCA, Philip Morris and Pan Am. He staged exhibitions of his collection, which included works by Rembrandt and Goya, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Orangerie in Paris. His collection now fills a Metropolitan wing.

Bobbie’s death in 1969 marked the moment when Lehman Brothers began losing its way, Chapman argues. That was, tellingly, the same year Fuld joined Lehman full-time.

Chapman jogs through the years when Peter G. Peterson joined the firm in 1973 and was offered the top job following a boardroom coup. Peterson soon found himself pulling Lehman back from the brink after its government-bond traders lost between $15 million and $20 million before taxes, as he writes in his own memoirs.

Glucksman Showdown
Peterson’s reward was to be shoved aside by Fuld’s mentor, Lewis Glucksman, a rumpled, overweight trader sowing a whirlwind of expletives. From there, it’s but a short step to Fuld’s massively leveraged wagers and, when they went awry, his rage at anyone who bet against Lehman’s survival.

Lehman’s final act became a sad morality tale familiar to students of corporate governance: A great family firm succumbed to outsiders more interested in making fast money than in providing a valuable service and building lasting wealth. Here, too, Lehman reflected broader trends, notably Wall Street’s drift from its core purpose of funneling capital from investors to companies.

This greedy reader yearned for more firsthand reporting and more sifting through archives. Yet Chapman has succeeded in holding up a mirror to America’s past -- and what its future might hold.

“Lehman Brothers was like a Zelig of modern American history,” he writes. “It has been present at almost all of the momentous occasions. It was indeed sad that it should be present at this one.”

 

[trysail]

Yu Qingtai ( China’s lead negotiator in climate talks from 2007 through the tumultuous conference in Copenhagen last December ):

During my three years working on climate change, I have reached some personal conclusions. Concern about climate change and China’s role must be seen against the background of China’s economic and social development. China’s national circumstances cannot be ignored. China is bound to be dependent on coal for energy – we cannot afford oil as an alternative when it costs more than US$100 dollars (680 yuan) a barrel. We have factors limiting our development, and the price and opportunity costs of energy saving and emissions reduction must be taken into account and stable development continued. Many problems can only be solved through development.

We cannot blindly accept that protecting the climate is humanity’s common interest – national interests should come first. Individual enthusiasm and willingness to make sacrifice for the sake of the climate is worthy of respect and praise. I myself usually walk or take the bus to work. The individual can choose not to drive, but China cannot choose not to have an automobile industry. The individual can save power, but there are 600 million people in India without electricity – the country has to develop and meet that need. And if that increases emissions, I say, “So what?” The people have a right to a better life.

I once pointed out to an academic from a developed nation that the emissions resulting from their country’s two-car households had been accumulating in the atmosphere for decades. Many Chinese households have only just purchased their first car and they tell us we should ride bikes? It doesn’t make sense. We want to develop the economy until everyone has the option of buying a vehicle, but at the same time use taxation and subsidies to encourage the purchase of low-emission vehicles and the use of public transport.

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, we cannot only look at the current situation and ignore history, nor look at overall emissions and ignore per capita figures. China’s accumulated emissions account for only 7% of the global total. Emissions are caused by consumption of energy, and this is the foundation of social development. As a Chinese person, I cannot accept someone from a developed nation having more right than me to consume energy. We are all created equal – this is no empty slogan. The Americans have no right to tell the Chinese that they can only consume 20% as much energy. We do not want to pollute as they did, but we have the right to pursue a better life.

The public relations efforts of developed nations on climate change are always more effective than ours, but it is more important to look at their actual actions. Overall, when you look at the facts, there is a huge difference between what is said and what is done.

Some EU nations have done well on emissions reductions, but the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Spain and Italy have not just failed to make cuts – they have significantly increased their emissions. And they do not seem to feel they have done anything wrong.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been in place for almost two decades, and it has achieved next to nothing. Traditional development aid has been repackaged as aid for climate change. Transfers of technology have not been effectively carried out, with some developed nations even hoping to use the technology they control to turn a profit.

Some ask why China cannot do more public relations work. I think there is a cultural difference here, a characteristic of the nation: we would rather get actual work done than make boastful statements.

 

[trysail]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=alVdxeOHHSJU&pos=11

Bombardier Inc. CRJ-200 50-seat
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=i64HbnpOYL6M

Airline Era Ends as Carriers Cull 50-Seat Jets ‘Nobody Wants’
By Mary Jane Credeur and Mary Schlangenstein

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The 50-seat jets once prized by carriers such as Delta Air Lines Inc. are being culled from U.S. fleets as higher fuel and maintenance bills make them too expensive to fly.

By 2015, U.S. airlines will have about 200 jets with 50 or fewer seats, down from about 1,200, said Michael Boyd, president of consultant Boyd Group International Inc. in Evergreen, Colorado. More than 80 have been scrapped in 2010, he said.

“These are litters of aluminum kittens -- nobody wants them,” Boyd said. Their only value is for recycled metal, he said. “The next stop is the Budweiser factory because that’s all they’re good for.”

Delta’s Comair unit underscored the turnabout with its Sept. 1 move to get rid of three-fourths of its 50-seaters after pioneering their use in the 1990s. Regional jets flew about twice as fast as turboprops, and crude oil at about $20 a barrel made them affordable to operate.

The drawback was spreading costs over about a third as many seats as in a Boeing Co. 737. With oil averaging $77.93 this year through Sept. 2, up 39 percent from 2009, airlines favor regional jets that can carry 70 or more people and fly less often, or new turboprops.

Comair’s move to shed 53 Bombardier Inc. CRJ-100 and CRJ- 200 jets is a “defining moment on the long road to 50-seat oblivion,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at consultant Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia.

‘Look Awful’
“The economics are awful, especially in a time of high fuel prices,” Aboulafia said. “It makes sense if you’re focused on market share, hub preservation and other really outmoded concepts. But if you’re focused on profitability, then 50-seats begin to look awful.”

Comair President John Bendoraitis told employees in a memo this week the Cincinnati-based carrier needed to “dramatically change course” with steps that include chopping the fleet to 44 planes by 2012. Before cuts in the 2008 recession, the total was 131. Comair’s oldest CRJ-100s average 14 years old, according to Ascend Worldwide Ltd., adding to maintenance expenses.

U.S. passengers and airlines embraced regional jets when Bombardier and Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica SA entered the market in the 1990s. Use of models with 50 or fewer seats peaked in 2007 at 1,420, up from 110 in 1997, according to London-based Ascend, which compiles fleet data.

‘Far Too Fast’
“The growth in this aircraft type was far too many, far too fast,” said Douglas Runte, managing director at Piper Jaffray & Co. in New York.

More-comfortable turboprops such as Bombardier’s Q400 and airline labor contracts favoring bigger regional jets helped erode the one-time advantages of the smallest planes, he said.

Embraer and Montreal-based Bombardier are now selling or planning models able to carry more than 100 people, part of what Bombardier predicts will be a $393 billion global market for jetliners with 100 to 149 seats in the 20 years ending in 2029.

Bombardier and Embraer, based in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, have gained 16 percent in the past year. Runte said a recent auction of used 50-seat jets posted sales of less than $3 million each for planes appraised for as much as three times that sum.

“With profits being as thin as they are, the cost of operating those airplanes is something that has to be overcome with high levels of traffic,” said David Swierenga, president of consultant AeroEcon in Round Rock, Texas. “We haven’t seen that.”

Comair’s Future
Delta sold regional subsidiaries Mesaba and Compass to Pinnacle Airlines Corp. and Trans States Holdings Inc., respectively, in July. A Comair spokeswoman, Kristin Baur, said Atlanta-based Delta continues to study options for Comair. Delta said a review was under way before its 2007 bankruptcy exit.

In June, American Airlines parent AMR Corp. said it would evaluate possibly divesting its American Eagle unit, whose 218- jet fleet consists mostly of Embraers with 50 or fewer seats.

Passengers probably won’t lament the vanishing of the smallest planes. The overhead bins typically can’t handle roll- aboard luggage accommodated on bigger planes, and window seats can seem cramped because of the curvature of a narrower fuselage, according to travel website SeatGuru.com.

“You feel like a sardine, and forget about trying to open your laptop and getting any work done,” said Pete Luttmann, a salesman at technology firm Dolphin Corp. in Cincinnati.

Luttmann, 47, estimated he flies 60 to 70 times a year, mostly on regional jets. “It’s very claustrophobic.”

If oil prices remain in the $75 per barrel range and businesses continue to be conservative with travel budgets, the retirement of 50-seaters may accelerate, said consultant Boyd.

“The small-jet airplane era is over because the economics simply are not there,” Boyd said. “They couldn’t make money with $50 oil, and they sure as heck can’t make money at $75 oil. The only people who love these 50-seaters are the chiropractors who have to fix what they do to peoples’ backs.”

 

[trysail]

The world votes on U.S. financial responsibility and the dollar as a "store of value" with its feet ( and it ain't a pretty picture ):

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?&chart_type=line&graph_id=30392&category_id=0&recession_bars=Off&width=630&height=378&bgcolor=%23B3CDE7&graph_bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&txtcolor=%23000000&ts=8&preserve_ratio=false&fo=ve&id=DEXSZUS,DEXCAUS,DEXUSEU&transformation=lin,lin,lin&scale=Left,Left,Left&range=Max,Max,Max&cosd=1971-01-04,1971-01-04,1999-01-04&coed=2010-10-08,2010-10-08,2010-10-08&line_color=%230000FF,%23FF0000,%23006600&link_values=,,&mark_type=NONE,NONE,NONE&mw=4,4,4&line_style=Solid,Solid,Solid&lw=1,1,1&vintage_date=2010-10-14,2010-10-14,2010-10-14&revision_date=2010-10-14,2010-10-14,2010-10-14&mma=0,0,0&nd=,,&ost=,,&oet=,,&fml=a,a,1%2Fa​

 

[trysail]

If you're a liberal, there's one thing we know for sure—
you want ( and should be forced ) to pay more taxes.




My god, you are an asshole. Where and how did you learn to be such a complete jerk? There must be an Asshole School somewhere. Clearly, you attended and were valedictorian.


You must work hard at being such a cretin. It requires a conscious, concerted effort to pull off such an unadultered display of narcissism, immodesty and obtuseness. With apologies to Churchill, you are "An immodest man with a great deal to be modest about." When combined with serious emotional issues and an immaturity that defies belief, you shouldn't be surprised that you are universally disliked. If you weren't such a complete fraud and braggart, your opinions might carry some weight. Unfortunately, it is well-known 'round here that you're a ginormous liar and a complete phony.


The depth and extent of your fundamental insecurity is evident in your truly pathetic habit of dropping names. First off, nobody believes you. Second, if you are who you claim to be, you'd have no need to engage in such an odious practice— only creeps do that sort of thing. Nobody around here gives a flying fuck if you were Richard Clarke's bedpan cleaner and shoeshine boy. You clearly haven't got a clue how much that sort of infantile practice reveals you as a fraud and a nobody.


shotgun