Bell Nursery, Burtonsville, Md., says it's recruiting more than 900 drivers, loaders, display and plant care workers workers this Spring for seasonal tree and garden jobs at Home Depot stores in the Philadelphia area and nearby states. More at www.bellimpact.com.
The announcement comes as the Labor Department is tightening guidelines for foreign nursery workers and other labor imported under the H-2 visa program.
Vanguard Group has buried a 24-year attempt to pay humans to outguess securities markets.
Malvern-based Vanguard's Asset Allocation Fund, founded in 1988 (after a steep but temporary stock market blow-up weakened some investors' confidence in rigid index funds) allowed hired managers at Mellon Capital to move clients' money back and forth between S&P 500 stocks, US Treasuries and money-market funds. On Friday it was folded into Vanguard's Balanced Index fund (60%/40%, stocks/bonds).
Vanguard originally proposed the switch to the SEC last fall, and noted that investors will pay slightly lower fees as a result: The $11.1 billion Balanced Index, with its fixed stocks/bonds ratio, doesn't try to time the market; investors who let Vanguard make the switch are now on autopilot. like other index investors.
But that's not much compensation for the money Asset Allocation left on the table in the past few years due to its relatively poor performance, writes Daniel P. Wiener, publisher of the Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors newsletter:
Asset Allocation share values have yet to fully recover from the 2007-08 stock market collapse. That makes for a lame comparison to the much older Vanguard Wellington Fund, which also mixes stocks and bonds. Wellington also slipped in the crash, but recovered more quickly, and has lately been back at record highs.
Since 1988, "for every $100 that Asset Allocation turned into $691, Wellington was able to turn ($100) into $864," Weiner concludes. "Vanguard simply went with the better horse."
Chris Lencheski, president of Comcast/Spectacor's Front Row Marketing Services since October after Richard Sherwood retired, says Front Row has signed to market IndyCar team Sam Schmidt Motorsports to potential new sponsors for driver Simon Pagenund and Schmidt's Honda cars.
Competes with Roger Penske and other dominant IndyCar teams. "Sam is having an enormous success for a young organization" in Indy-affiliated races, Lencheski told me. "They're a good racing team" and have been moving up in qualifying races around the world toward the Indy 500 race. Lencheski's job is to sell more to high-end iPad-using, tech savvy Indy fans. Front Row parent Comcast's NBC televises Indy races. "That helps us," Lencheski said.
Lencheski, a veteran motorsports marketer and former owner of the Quad City Mallards hockey team, says this is Front Row's first IndyCar client. Front Row previously marketed title sponsorships for the Nascar 5-Hour Energy 500 at Pocono Raceway and other races at tracks in Dover, Del.; Milville, N.J.; Nashville; Memphis; and Talladega.
Front Row also says it got paid to sell marketing rights to parent Comcast Corp. at South Philly's new Xfinity Live development, and for Group Field in Winnipeg, Canada.
Money's tight for Pennsylvania colleges, public schools, developers, and disabled children, Gov. Corbett tells us.
But not for everyone. In January, a state agency went to Wall Street and borrowed $107 million to to finance a Harrisburg office building deal through the bailout of a county agency's defaulted bonds, thereby enriching the speculators who bought up those bonds at a discount: a California hedge fund, and one of the biggest Wall Street banks.
Owners of New York's highest remaining office tower, the 102-story Empire State Building, will try to raise $1 billion through an initial public stock offering (IPO), Bloomberg says here.
That's more than 17 times the $57.5 million investors led by Peter Malkin paid Donald Trump and Japanese investors when the Empire State changed hands in 2000.
Sounds like a fat premium. But back in 2000 the Empire State was hobbled by a master leasing agreement that locked in pre-inflationary rents. Since investor Malkin's group controlled that lease, since taking title it's been able to restructure rents to great advantage in New York's office real estate market, which has recovered farther from the mid-2000s slump than Philadelphia or other cities.
"The drama leading up to the real estate crash of the mid-2000s is becoming as familiar as the Wall Street crash that sparked the Great Depression used to be... Cornell University historian (and ex-McKinsey & Co. consultant) Louis Hyman has written a breezy book that goes deeper...
"An accessible and well-written primer on a vast history, with plenty of cautionary tales for those who would fix what's broken in our financial system."
Read my review of Borrow: The American Way of Debt here in Sunday's Inquirer
US Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., a banking-industry apologist who currently heads the US House of Representatives banking committee, faces a congressional investigation into possible insider trading, the Washington Post reports here. Excerpt:
"On Sept. 18, 2008, at the height of the economic meltdown, Bachus participated in a closed-door briefing with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.
"At the time, he was the highest-ranking Republican member of the Financial Services Committee. According to a book Paulson would later write, the topic of the meeting was the high likelihood of decline across the entire economy if drastic steps were not taken.
"The next day, Sept. 19, Bachus traded “short” options, betting on a broad decline in the nation’s financial markets, and collected a profit of $5,715. Also that day, he cashed out options in which he had bet that General Electric [a major consumer and commercial finance lender at the time] stock would rise, and collected a $12,713 profit, before GE’s stock price started to tumble, The Post found...
In a letter to the publisher, Bachus "said there was no inside information provided in the briefing by Paulson and Bernanke: 'The idea that I or anyone else needed this meeting to know our financial markets were in trouble is just laughable.'" Bachus added, "You would have to be living under a rock not to know by September 18, 2008 that the economy was in bad shape.”
-- Earlier: "Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter dabbles in Boeing, Comcast, Microsoft shares" after meeting with company executives in connection with Congressional business. My story from 2004.
Wells Fargo & Co., the dominant bank in the Philadelphia area, has told the Pennsylvania Department of Labor it is laying off 73 people at its Chester office, home to the company's home mortgage operations, which have shrunk with the fall in housing values.
Separately, Nokia's Navteq division, which sells map and traffic data to websites and broadcasters, has told Labor it plans to lay off 235. This follows Navteq's announcement last fall that the office would be closed; part of the operation would join the Utah company formerly called Matchbin, now known as Radiate Media.
Read the labor department's lists of mass Pennsylvania filings here.
PA General Assembly House Bill 2175 would limit the taxpayer-funded, debt-financed Redevelopment Capital Assistance Program matching grants for public and private developers, which spiraled to a cumulative total of over $4 billion under Gov. Rendell as they were used to help pay for the new Barnes museum, the Comcast center, hotels, public and private college buildings and hundreds of other projects, to a future cap of $3.5 billion, slowing the rate at which new projects can be added.
House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) was joined as sponsor by Rep. Mike Vereb (R-Montgomery) and at least one Philadelphia Democrat, Rep. Rosita Youngblood, who has criticized RACP use by the program's past master, Rep. Dwight Evans (also D-Phila.).
"The out-of-control borrowing and spending policies of the past just don’t work, and the growing RACP is saddling our kids and grandkids with a credit card bill which will last for at least 20 years to come,” Turzai said in this statement.
"Created in 1999 with an initial debt ceiling of $1.2 billion, the RACP debt ceiling has been raised six times since then, pushing it up to $4.05 billion. There are approximately 8,000 RACP projects that have been added to the program’s list since 1999 ...
"Turzai’s legislation would reduce the RACP debt ceiling, initially to $3.5 billion ... then, incrementally until it reaches $1.5 billion," and limits the program to “buildings and related infrastructure (i.e. roads, bridges, tunnels, waste disposal, storm water, sewage or water infrastructure; bridges or roads when part of an economic development project) projects with a total cost of $1 million or more (that) would generate or maintain substantial economic activity (e.g. substantial increases in employment or maintenance of tax revenues) and have a substantial regional or multijurisdictional economic impact."
Of course that's still pretty broad. Also, "projects on the current (RACP) list that have not been authorized as of December 31, 2011 would expire," though sponsors could re-apply. Plus the state budget office will develop a new "stringent review" for future RACP projects, which might trim the members-privilege character of wide-ranging RACP grants. Or maybe not.
Atlas Shrugged Part 2 Productions, Haddonfield, has raised $16 million toward the next installment of a movie version of the Ayn Rand capitalist drama, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
John Aglialoro, boss of exercise-equipment maker Cybex International, runs the production company, as my colleague John Timpane wrote around the time Part 1 was released on Tax Day last year. As he noted, Aglialoro's fellow libertarian Rand fans and movie financiers include Comcast-Spectacor boss Ed Snider, a prospective Inquirer owner.
The group had filed to raise as much as $25 million, according to the SEC. See the filing via Villanova-based FormDs.com here.
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