When A.C. Moore Arts & Crafts Inc. announced on June 10 that its chief financial officer had resigned, the retailer said only that Marc Katz would be pursuing a "career opportunity in the private equity sector."

Thanks to a regulatory filing today, we know what that job is.

Katz has been named executive vice president and chief accounting officer of Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp., the South Jersey-based retailer of outwear and other apparel. He joins the company July 9.

How is that a job in the private-equity industry?

Well, Burlington Coat was taken private in April 2006 by Bain Capital LLC in a deal valued at $2.1 billion. Based in Boston, Bain Capital is a big private equity and venture capital investor with more than $78 billion in assets under management.

Katz will earn a base salary of $400,000 and receive a "repair bonus" of $300,000. That's money to compensate Katz for bonuses being forfeited from A.C. Moore.

In addition, Katz is eligible to get a bonus of $200,000 for its fiscal year ended May 30, 2009.

At A.C. Moore, Katz earned cash compensation last year consisting of a base salary of $280,833 and a bonus of $42,500.

As for Burlington Coat, the retailer operates 379 stores under its parent company's name, 15 MJM Designer Shoes locations, two Cohoes Fashions and one Super Baby Depot. For the nine months ended March 1, the company narrowed its net loss to $442,000 from $9.01 million for the previous year.

On June 10, the company said net sales from continuing operations were $3.39 billion for its fiscal year ended May 31, compared with $3.40 billion.

A former Bell Atlantic executive who served on the boards of several local companies died over the weekend.

Airgas Inc., Charming Shoppes Inc. and Triumph Group Inc. all issued press releases today expressing their sorrow over the unexpected death of William O. Albertini on June 28. He was 64.

Albertini, who'd been chief financial officer of Bell Atlantic from 1991 through 1997, had joined the board of Bensalem-based Charming Shoppes in 2003. He'd been a director at Triumph, a Wayne-based maker of aircraft components, since 1999.

Triumph president and CEO Richard C. Ill had this to say about Albertini:

The company has benefited significantly from his business and financial insights, probing questions and attention to detail, and he will be greatly missed. Our thoughts today are with his wife, Kate, and his family. To them we extend our deepest condolences.

Albertini joined the board of Airgas in 2003.

He was also a member of the board of BlackRock Inc., the New York asset management firm that has been mulling a possible move of operations to Philadelphia.

Bala Cynwyd-based vodka maker Central European Distribution Corp. has been in high spirits lately.

As the fiercely bearish Dow shed another 107 points on Friday, shares of the company, which distributes 700 brands of alcoholic beverages in Poland, rose nearly 7 percent, to close at $74.72.

The stock has returned 117 percent in the past 12 months. There’s something for shareholders to drink to.

This follows something of a binge of buying by Central. A month ago, the company took a $181.5 million equity stake in Russian Alcohol Group, the Ruskies’ top vodka producer.

In February, Central European Distribution took 75 percent ownership in another Russian wine and spirits distributor, Whitehall Group.

And now the company has a boosted its cash stash. Last Thursday, it priced a public offering of 3.25 million shares at $68 per share, for a total $221 million.

Listen up, boss
A new study says managers need to listen more to their underlings.

Mostly, employees think the changes they see on the job are managed well, and work out for the best, according to the study by Opinion Research Corp.

But relatively few of 1,437 respondents sense strongly that they’re part of the change process.

That goes especially for workers in Northeastern states including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to the survey released last week.

The results showed just 17 percent of Northeastern workers, compared with 23 percent in the South and West, strongly agreeing with the statement, “I have the opportunity to contribute my views before changes are made which affect my job.”

About half of employers have ever conducted an employee survey, according to the workers. And among those who had been asked about job conditions, only half said they had seen any changes as a result.

Overall, 84 percent said those changes were positive. But in the Northeast, only 77 percent — the lowest regional result — said the changes were to their personal benefit.

After yesterday’s 358-point haircut on the Dow, how low can the stock market go?

Economists answer as follows: Much lower. No lower. Impossible to tell.

Take your pick. It all depends on who’s talking.

The Dow Jones industrial average, Nasdaq composite index, and Standard & Poor‘s 500 index each fell about 3 percent yesterday. For the year, the Dow is off 13.7 percent, the Nasdaq is down 12.4 percent, and the S&P has fallen 12.6 percent.

William Dunkelberg, economics professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, said the Dow has about a 25 percent chance of falling another 500 points before a turnaround.

Or maybe it’ll be a 1,000-point slump. Hard to tell, he said.

But, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, said he feels that the brakes already are on.

“I think we’re there. This is the bottom, roughly speaking,” Zandi said.

The bad news, from Zandi’s view, is that it’ll be another six to nine months before a recovery kicks in.
Until then, the market will have “good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks, good months and bad months.”

David Shaffer, finance department chairman at the Villanova University School of Business, said he doesn’t know how low to go.

The credit crisis, continuing uncertainty over how the Federal Reserve is going to react, and the volatile energy markets are fueling relentless market turmoil, he said.

“I don’t know what the bottom is. I’m stunned, day after day.”

“What we’re facing is just an enormous amount of uncertainty. … Every day we think we’ve cleared another hurdle, some more bad news comes,” Shaffer said.

Meanwhile, Dunkelberg — of the possible 500-to-1,000 point decline — has some advice for investors: Buy stock.
According to him, no matter how insane the economy looks, the old rules still apply. What goes down will come back up.

“Profits are the fundamental driver of share prices in the long run,” he said. “There’s tons of money sitting on the sidelines, and this is about psychology.”

Will rising material, energy and transportation costs undo the decades-long shift of manufacturing away from U.S. shores?

Some manufacturers are starting to think it’s happening — at least in some of the heavy-industry categories.

“You’re going to have another boom in the United States. It’ll happen no matter what people do, just because of the economics of it.”

That’s Art Mann Sr., chairman of Donsco Inc., a 102-year-old York County steel foundry.

Mann’s $70 million family business, which casts such items as gearboxes and pump housings for cars and trucks, could serve as an economic microcosm. It shed 250 jobs in recent years, largely as a result of Chinese competition.

Mann, 67, who holds an economics degree from Yale, said yesterday that many of the same companies that had been shipping work to China are again calling him.

“It’s coming through the windows,” he claimed. “You almost can’t keep up.”

Commodity costs and the ripple effect of $135-a-barrel oil are overwhelming the labor-cost advantages that China has enjoyed until now.

But it’s not clear how big a part Mann’s 500-worker company will have in the boom he predicts. Why? He said he is reluctant to expand capacity beyond his three Pennsylvania foundries.

In part, he’s looking for the government to take firmer steps toward reducing the soaring trade deficit, and to stop thinking that keeping manufacturing on these shores is a lost cause.

And, before investing the tens of millions of dollars it could take to build new facilities, “I’d have to have a long-term supply contract. Ironclad,” he said.

Oops

Yesterday’s column made an incorrect reference to the scale of regional bank deposits held by Wachovia Corp. The bank has a 21 percent share of deposits in the Philadelphia market.

Is Wachovia Corp. looking for a suitor?

That was part of the buzz yesterday as the bank — which holds the lion’s share of deposits in the Philadelphia region — acknowledged hiring Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for advice on its tattered loan portfolio.

The move could lead to a big loan mark-down and sell-off, but Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia was mum on details. Naturally, that left everyone free to speculate.

Wachovia is also hunting for a CEO, after this month’s ouster of G. Kennedy Thompson, who took the fall for the spectacularly ill-timed 2006 acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp., a California thrift heavy with toxic subprime mortgages.

By the first quarter, nonperforming assets had more than quadrupled from a year earlier, to $8.37 billion.

But analysts yesterday weren’t going for the takeover talk, even as it helped push shares up by as much as 6.4 percent.

Richard Bove of Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services Inc., for example, told investors that no viable buyer appears to be at hand. More likely, he indicated, the bank will have to reach for its own bootstraps.

Bove said it is time for Wachovia to “start relying on its internal strengths, articulate a definitive set of policies and get to the job of executing” them.

Willow cut

Speaking of banks, another shoe dropped at Willow Financial Bancorp Inc., the Wayne bank that lost count of $6.2 million and now is selling out to rival Harleysville National Corp.

In a government filing late Monday, Willow announced the resignation of Joseph T. Crowley, effective June 30.

Crowley, Willow’s former chief financial officer, was demoted to the rank of senior vice president in May, after the bank gave up trying to fix the $6.2 million out-of-balance condition.

Harleysville National agreed last month to pay $162 million in stock for Willow. The deal, unrelated to the missing millions, was expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Say “cybercities” and many folks imagine those goofy online worlds peopled by impossibly attractive and slutty cartoon avatars.

The thought of an offline cybercity seems quaint, like a concept from the roaring dot-com era of the 1990s.

But it pops up today in a report from New Jersey-based AeA, a technology industry association, on the status of the high-tech industry in 60 U.S. metropolitan areas — cybercities — including our region.

The report, the AeA’s first cybercities update in eight years, is based on 2006 figures, the latest available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Philadelphia makes a good, but not spectacular, showing.

AeA notes a 2.8 percent one-year gain (3,600 jobs) in high-tech employment in the region, for a total of 132,000 high-tech workers here. That made Philadelphia No. 8 among the 60 cities, both in total tech jobs and in jobs gained.

The top five were New York City; Washington, D.C.; Silicon Valley; Boston; and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Philadelphia did rank fifth in employment in high-tech research and development and testing labs, and seventh in employment in computer systems design and related services.

But, according to the report, high-tech firms here employed 57 of every 1,000 private-sector workers in 2006 — ranking Philadelphia at an anemic 33d among the 60 cities in that category.

Still, Peter J. Boni, AeA’s vice chairman, who is also president and CEO of Wayne-based Safeguard Scientifics Inc., says the report shows “great progress for the City of Brotherly Love … whose major innovation is not high tech, but the cheesesteak.”

The last cybercities report by AeA came out as the Internet bubble was popping, and before 9/11.

The frenzy of those days has not returned. But, says Boni, it is still critically important to tune up the schools in math and science for a 21st-century workforce.

“We need to make sure that we are adequately providing our children with a solid foundation for these types of jobs,” he says.

After all, we’re not talking avatars, or even cheesesteaks, anymore. With 7,100 high-tech companies and their combined payroll of $11 billion, we’re talking about a real-world cybercity.

Lithium Technology Corp., the Plymouth Meeting battery maker, boasted last week that a hybrid muscle car powered by one of its big vehicle batteries had “passed the finish line” at one of Europe’s most popular round-the-clock endurance races.

“Running on electrical energy alone in front of 200,000 spectators,” the company crowed, proved that “hybrid technology does have a future in motor racing.”

Not so fast.

One blogger reported seeing the sleek race car being hauled into the pit at the end of a tow rope.

Turns out the car, a modified Apollo made by German ubercar builder Gumpert Sportwagenmanufaktur GmbH, broke down just minutes into the prestigeous Nurburgring 24-hour race in May.

Repairs took some time — so much of it that the Apollo, owned by ex-Formula One racer Heinz-Harald Frentzen, returned to the track only for the last 90 minutes of the contest.

It was nicht gewertet — not rated — as a finisher.

Fortunately for Lithium Technology, the problem was in the vehicle’s transmission, not in LTC’s 90-cell, 420-pound, 9-kilowatt-per-hour lithium ion battery.

But it is hard to make a case for electric race cars based on an outcome like that.

Still, the time for electric cars, and maybe even for Lithium Technologies, at long last may be at hand, what with crude oil ending last week at about $135 a barrel, and $4 gasoline starting to look like a bargain.

Lithium Technology’s batteries won’t fit in your hearing aid or digital camera. They are large and industrial strength, described by the company as running from “10 times the capacity of a standard laptop computer battery to 100,000 times greater.”

And they’re being designed by the company for running vehicles of all sorts, from motorcycles to trucks, outfitted with electric motors.

In February, the company said it got a $4.7 million order to supply batteries for a demonstration program involving diesel-electric-hybrid transit buses in Flint, Mich.

That was rare good news for a penny stock company that lost $24.4 million last year on $2.6 million in revenue.
And, Lithium Technology in April made a deal with its largest shareholders and agreed to drop three sitting directors to make room on the board for two European investors. Chief executive officer Klaus Brandt said at the time that the company also had raised “in excess of $35 million” from investors in the last 18 months.

Maybe it’ll be enough to stay in the race.

Over the years, I’ve asked lots of companies how much money they make.

The publicly held ones have to tell you, but not the private firms. Most would rather not because they don’t want their competition to know.

A bill introduced into City Council June 12 would require all businesses that pay the business privilege tax to disclose all sorts of information, including their net income and taxes paid.

While I certainly want to know more about Philadelphia companies, this bill is a bad idea.

Backers say that they want to expose those who aren’t paying their fair share in taxes. Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez said 872 businesses reported annual receipts over $10 million in 2006.

About 300 paid an average annual tax bill of more than $470,000. The rest paid only $9,020 on average.

To which I say, if you flog those 573 businesses in public, they’ll probably hightail it out to Bensalem, Cheltenham, Upper Darby or beyond, taking their jobs and taxable income with them.

Still, Philadelphia isn’t alone in left field on this. There is a spirited debate at the federal and state levels over requiring more disclosure of corporate tax return information. Tax reform advocates think it would help lawmakers and the public understand how existing laws are working and perhaps lead to better tax policy.

Since early 2007, the Washington, D.C.-based Center of Budget and Policy Priorities has urged states to enact laws to do just that.

Five states require corporations to publicly disclose their state tax liabilities and other information: Arkansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. But the extent of the reporting varies.

For example, Wisconsin allows anyone to obtain records showing net-income tax for any corporation that does business in the state.

Since 1993, Massachusetts has required every corporation, bank and insurer to report on profits, taxes paid and tax credits received. But the state doesn’t release of the name or address of any company tied to that information.

Which brings me back to Philadelphia.

I don’t like the “let’s make a deal” game that persists between select companies and the city. Promises are made in return for subsidies, and often the employers don’t deliver the job creation. Meanwhile, the overall tax and regulatory environment remains thorny for businesses who don’t have a horse to trade.

It’s got to frustrate Council when it’s asked to rubber-stamp the latest sure thing in the name of economic growth without knowing how the deal will affect the tax burden on everyone else.

But the answer is not to pass a bill that forces all enterprises paying the business privilege tax to divulge their profits and what they paid in taxes. Companies uniformly despise having to pay this tax as it is. Making them pay it and disclose what they consider private information will drive them over the edge, or at least out of the city.

Unless Pennsylvania were to enact its own corporate tax disclosure measure, the city would be at a horrible disadvantage to its suburbs. Given how backward the Keystone State is in public disclosure of all kinds, the likelihood of that happening is never.

Council is in summer recess. I hope when it returns that it discloses that this bill is dead.