Grave business - my financial world

PayPal is throwing its full weight into the mobile payments market. To fill its vacant top spot, the Web payments giant is elevating David Marcus, who joined the company in August as its mobile chief.

EBay (, Fortune 500) said Thursday that Marcus, the former CEO of mobile payments technology developer Zong, will become the new president of its PayPal subsidiary. He takes the role left open by former PayPal president Scott Thompson, who departed in January to become Yahoo’s new CEO.

Marcus joined PayPal last year when it shelled out $240 million in cash to acquire his company. Founded in 2008, Zong lets users pay by smartphone for virtual goods. It’s a payments providers for Facebook’s digital currency, Facebook Credits.

Before launching Zong, Marcus started two previous companies: alternative carrier company GTN telecom, which was acquired by World Access, and Echovox, which helped media companies connect with audiences through mobile devices.

"He’s going to lead PayPal with that ‘founder’s perspective,’" eBay CEO John Donahoe wrote Thursday on PayPal’s blog.

PayPal is at a critical point: It wants to expand its Web dominance into the fast-growing mobile payments realm. The company is on track to process $7 billion in mobile payments this year. That’s 10 times its mobile volume just two years ago, when it handled $750 million.

In one of its latest maneuvers, it launched PayPal Here, a direct competitor to much-buzzed-about payments upstart Square.

But PayPal is just one of many players looking to crack the mobile payment space fast cash without a hassle. Everyone from carriers like Verizon Wireless and AT&T (, Fortune 500) to banking giants like Visa (, Fortune 500), Bank of America (, Fortune 500) and JPMorgan Chase (, Fortune 500) have been trying out mobile payments solutions.

In July, Google its mobile and web based payment system, Google Wallet, which allows users to make purchases through their smartphones.

A host of startups are also making waves, including Venmo, which lets users to send money to each other through text messages, and Square, which targets the small business market.

PayPal hopes to head off some of the competition by partnering widely with app developers. Those alliances stretch from big companies like Starbucks, which uses PayPal to power its pay-by-phone app, to small startups such as Tabbed Out, which taps into merchants’ point-of-sale systems and lets users close out their bar tabs on their phones.

One of PayPal’s partners, Bump, launched a new app on Thursday called Bump Pay, which lets users bump phones to transfer money using PayPal. That technology was previously embedded in Bump’s app, but the company decided it worked better as a standalone app.

"What we did with our app, and what a lot of apps are doing, are trying to boil things down to their essence," Bump CEO David Lieb told CNNMoney.  

Source

Stock opened mixed on Wednesday after the government said factory orders rose strongly last month, a sign that businesses continue to invest.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up two points at 13,199 as of 10:05 a.m. Eastern time. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell a fraction of a point to 1,412. The Nasdaq composite index, heavy with technology stocks, rose seven points to 3,127.

The Commerce Department said before the market opening that orders for durable goods, things expected to last at least three years, rose 2.2 percent in February. Orders for machinery, computers, autos and aircraft fueled the rise.

The solid report on factory orders relieved fears that demand might fall sharply because a key tax break expired. Businesses last year could deduct the cost of their investments from taxable profits before calculating their tax bills. That tax benefit has been halved since January.

The positive economic news reduced demand for U.S. Treasury debt. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 2.21 percent from 2.19 percent before the report. As stocks opened mixed, demand for Treasurys rose and the yield fell back to 2.20 percent.

The encouraging report on orders for durable goods came a day after an index of consumer confidence suggested Americans’ spirits are resilient despite skyrocketing gasoline costs.

Energy prices, another concern for economic policymakers, might be moving in a direction that would encourage growth payday loan lenders. Futures for crude, natural gas, heating oil and gasoline all fell early Wednesday, with gasoline leading the way.

Oil prices fell to near $105 a barrel Wednesday after a report suggesting a larger-than-expected jump in U.S. crude supplies, a sign that demand remains weak.

The American Petroleum Institute said late Tuesday that crude inventories rose 3.6 million barrels last week. That is a bigger jump than was predicted by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos. Platts expects an increase of 2.8 million barrels.

If consumers get a break on what they have to pay for energy, that could provide a bump for the U.S. economy.

In corporate news:

_ Shares of organic food maker Annie’s soared in the first 20 minutes of their trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, based in Berkeley, Calif., priced its shares at $19 late Tuesday. They were up 66 percent at $31.32 at 10 a.m.

_ Shares of Sealy Corp. rose 2 percent after the mattress maker reported a surprise profit in the first quarter of 1 cent per share. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected a loss of 2 cents per share.

_ Clothing brand powerhouse PVH Corp. rose 2 percent after its fourth-quarter profit jumped on gains from its Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands.

Source

Natural gas prices are falling again amid doubts that a huge surplus of the fuel will be depleted anytime soon.

Natural gas futures fell 2.9 cents on Tuesday morning to $2.197 after dropping 4.9 cents on Monday. That’s a 10-year low and half of what gas was fetching back in July. Oversupply and mild winter weather are behind the plunge.

Any savings on natural gas may be going into the gasoline tank. The national average for regular gasoline in the U fast cash loans.S. is $3.90 per gallon, up 17 cents in March and 62 cents since Jan. 1.

Meanwhile, oil prices rose slightly a day after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested that the central bank would continue its efforts to help spur U.S. job creation and economic growth.

Source

The CEO of BATS Global Markets issued a public note of apology on Sunday for withdrawing his company’s initial public offering after an embarrassing computer glitch.

“BATS experienced a serious technical failure Friday morning and I want to apologize for not measuring up,” said Joe Ratterman, CEO of BATS in a mass email addressed to customers and members of the trading community.

“On Friday we were under the brightest spotlight imaginable . opening our own stock on our own exchange for the first time ever. It doesn’t get much more public than that,” said Ratterman. “It shouldn’t have failed, but it did, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.”

Since its founding nearly seven years ago, Kansas-based BATS has been competing with much larger rivals Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange for a piece of the stock-trading business. On Thursday the initial public offering of its own stock priced at $16, the low end of where the company thought it would trade.

Shortly after it began trading on Friday, the share price plunged to just pennies. Trading in the stock was halted. By late afternoon BATS withdrew its public offering and said it had no plans to refile its IPO. All trades made were to be canceled.

Ratterman tried to explain what led to that spectacular failure. He said a system problem occurred as soon as the exchange tried to open the BATS ticker symbol, failing to roll into a continuous trading pattern as it was supposed to.

“In effect, our newly issued stock did not begin trading as it should and was halted before it ever started trading,” he said.

Ratterman said that the exchange fixed the failed software, but a precious two-and-a-half hours had passed by then.

“(It) had eroded investor confidence and made the timely resumption of fair and orderly trading unlikely. As a result, we pulled the IPO and unwound all auction executions.”

Earlier on Sunday, Dave Cummings, founder of the BATS exchange and its former CEO, said in another public email that the company should pursue an IPO in the second quarter.

A BATS’ spokesman said Cummings’ opinions are his own and the company has “absolutely no comment” on the email.

Cummings sits on the board of BATS and is the owner of electronic trading firm Tradebot Systems and technology investment firm Tradebot Ventures. He also owns a stake in BATS.

The botched IPO was a blow not only to the exchange, but to its own plans for the IPO business. In February BATS offered free listings to companies with shares that traded a certain amount each day, hoping to draw IPOs away from Nasdaq and the NYSE.

With about 12 percent of all U.S. stock trading, BATS is the third-largest stock exchange in the country behind NYSE and Nasdaq. The trading problems Friday brought comparisons to the May 6, 2010, “flash crash,” when a crush of electronic trading glitches caused a stomach-churning plunge in the markets of about 1,000 points in a matter of minutes.

Source

The number of Americans saying the U.S. economy is getting better rose in March to the highest level since 2004 as a decline in claims for unemployment benefits offered more evidence of a labor-market recovery.

Thirty-four percent of respondents to Bloomberg

The economic recovery will remain sluggish for years because many consumers have made little headway in paying down debt, according to new research from a former Federal Reserve economist.

Karen Dynan, now a fellow at Brookings Institution, argues that the process of reducing debt, which economists call deleveraging, has been far too slow to lay the groundwork for a more rapid economic rebound.

“The most indebted households appear to have made fairly limited progress repairing their balance sheets, suggesting that their consumption could be weak for some time to come,” Dynan said in the paper.

In particular, Dynan says some 14 percent of Americans would need to reduce their debt load by the equivalent of more than a year’s worth of pre-tax income - meaning they would have to curtail spending sharply.

“If this deleveraging were accomplished by saving alone, it could mean a fairly drastic cut in consumption for many years for a small but not negligible share of households,” she writes no fax payday loan.

The findings contradict some of the recent optimism on Wall Street, where stocks have rallied on hopes that a raft of better economic data might signal a more rapid growth spurt. U.S. gross domestic product expanded 3 percent in the fourth quarter but is expected to have slowed at the start of 2012.

But Dynan’s findings cast doubt on the chances of a swift near-term rebound for the consumer-reliant U.S. economy, particularly given ongoing headwinds from Europe’s own financial debacle.

The U.S. personal savings rate climbed as high as 5.8 percent as the recovery entered its second year in the summer of 2010, but has since waned to 4.6 percent. Data out earlier this month showed U.S. families took on more debt in late 2011 for the first time in 3-1/2 years.

Read more

EDITOR’S NOTE: Story was updated to correct identification of acquiring company.

Forsyth Capital Investors said Tuesday it has completed its purchase of Baldwin Technology Co. and is relocated the acquired company’s headquarters from Boca Raton, Fla., to Forsyth’s offices in downtown Clayton.

In December, Forsyth offered Baldwin shareholders 96 cents a share, or approximately $16 million, for the company.

Kyle Chapman, co-founder and managing director of Forsyth, becomes Baldwin’s president, chairman and chief executive. Baldwin’s outgoing president and chief executive, Mark Becker, is now an operating advisor to Baldwin and Forsyth no fax pay day loan. He also gets a spot on Baldwin’s board.

Baldwin Technology is an international supplier of process automation equipment and related consumables for print media. Forsyth Capital, at 8040 Forsyth Boulevard, is an investment firm focused on middle-market companies operating in the capital equipment and component manufacturing and insurance services sectors.

Source

Shares of publisher Scholastic Corp. spiked on Thursday, fueled by strong sales of its Hunger Games series ahead of the film version’s release next week.

Scholastic () released its quarterly results on Thursday morning, its $467 million in revenue marking a 22% increase from the same period a year prior. Excluding one-time charges, the company posted a loss of four cents a share, an improvement on its 64-cent-per-share loss a year ago.

Scholastic shares were up 13% in mid-day trading at around $36.50, having surged past $40 after the open before pulling back.

In a statement accompanying its results, Scholastic said the improved numbers were driven by "higher sales in children’s books and international, especially of The Hunger Games trilogy." There are more than 23 million copies of the series’ books in print in the U payday loan.S.

Scholastic CEO Richard Robinson called The Hunger Games "yet another Scholastic-published global phenomenon with a large crossover readership by adults." A film adaptation of the first book starring Jennifer Lawrence premieres on March 23.

Movie ticket sales hit 16-year low

Scholastic also publishes the wildly popular Harry Potterand Goosebumps series in the U.S.

The company raised its guidance on earnings and revenue for the 2012 fiscal year on Thursday, now projecting earnings per share between $2.60 and $2.90 on approximately $2 billion in revenue. Earlier 2012 guidance estimated between $1.75 and $2.10 per share on roughly $1.9 billion in revenue. 

Source

After a few months of relative peace on the budget front, Democrats and Republicans are readying for a party-defining, election-year fight over trillion dollar-plus deficits and what to do about them.

The focus in the week ahead will be on the conservative-dominated House, where the Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is fashioning a sequel to last year’s “Path to Prosperity” manifesto that ignited a firestorm over Medicare.

The upcoming debate gives Republicans a chance to show how they would tackle out-of-control budget deficits and rein in the cost and scope of government. Those are top issues for the conservative supporters counted on by Republicans to turn out in large numbers in the fall to maintain the GOP’s control of the House.

President Barack Obama played it safe when he released his spending blueprint last month for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. It calls for tax increases on wealthier earners and modest spending curbs. But it would not address the spiraling costs of Medicare and Medicaid, the health care plan for the poor and disabled.

Last year’s GOP measure proposed replacing Medicare fee-for-service payments to doctors and hospitals with a voucher-like program in which the government would subsidize purchases of health insurance on the private market.

Democrats said the subsidies would not keep up with inflation in medical costs and would shift costs to older people, and they accused Republicans of plotting to “end Medicare as we know it.” The uproar was an important factor in a special election in which Democrats seized a longstanding GOP-held House seat in upstate New York. Republicans showed less enthusiasm for the plan after that.

Ryan has since come out with a less stringent version of the measure, in concert with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that would keep the traditional Medicare “fee for service” program as an option along with private insurance plans. It features more realistic inflation increases, and less resulting savings for the government, than last year’s measure.

“This coming debt crisis is the most predictable crisis we’ve ever had in this country,” Ryan said in a video statement. “This is why we’re acting. This is why we’re leading. This is why we’re proposing _ and passing out of the House _ a budget to fix this problem: So we can save our country for ourselves and our children’s future.”

Ryan has yet to disclose the specifics of his plan. But the committee announced Saturday that Ryan would introduce the proposal Tuesday; that would allow his committee to sign off on it by the end of the week.

Pressure from conservative lawmakers has prompted GOP leaders and Ryan to reopen last summer’s budget pact and impose further cuts on domestic agencies such as the departments of Education, Energy and Housing and Urban Development.

Last year’s deal with Obama set a $1.047 trillion cap on the annual operating budgets of Cabinet departments and other agencies for the upcoming 2013 budget year.

GOP aides say Republican leaders want to cut that figure by $19 billion, or almost 2 percent, leading to protests from Democrats that Republicans are going back on the deal. The move would make it more difficult to pass follow-up spending bills setting agency budgets for new fiscal year.

Tea party lawmakers on the House Budget Committee, such as Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., have pressed for even deeper cuts, leading to a push-and-pull match with the more pragmatic Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee.

The annual budget debate is conducted under arcane rules. The main budget document, called a budget resolution, is a nonbinding measure that sets the parameters for follow-up legislation on spending and taxes. Even though its broader goals usually are not put into place, it is viewed as a statement of party principles.

Democrats controlling the Senate do not want a budget debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said he will instead rely on language he inserted in a budget pact last year that allows for floor action on the annual spending bills without a budget resolution.

By avoiding a budget debate, Reid protects several vulnerable incumbent Democrats from politically dangerous votes.

Despite the GOP proposal’s sharp cuts to agency budgets and Medicaid, and its call to repeal Obama’s health care law, it is certain to leave substantial annual deficits over the next decade. That’s how bleak the nation’s underlying financial picture is.

Democrats and independent budget expert are sure to cite the resulting deficits as proof that new tax revenues are needed as part of any comprehensive answer to the fiscal crisis.

GOP aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss party deliberations, say the measure may include special instructions to other House committees to scrub the programs under their jurisdiction for savings that could be used to forestall about $100 billion in across-the-board spending cuts set to take effect in January.

Those cuts, including $50 billion in defense spending, are punishment for the failure of last year’s supercommittee to come up with a new package of $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade as part of the deal to let the government keep borrowing.

The GOP plan would bundle the new cuts from various committees and try to pass them as early as this spring. They might include various proposals discussed by the supercommittee and earlier spending cuts that the House considered as a way to pay for a Social Security tax cut without adding to the government’s long-term debt.

Source

As Americans, we’re used to contests that have a winner and a loser. Even when a soccer match ends in a tie, at least one side usually walks away disappointed.

Not so with one of the biggest trade disputes ever fought, a seven-year donnybrook over commercial aircraft subsidies in Europe and the U.S. After a final appellate ruling this week, both sides are claiming victory.

Measured in dollars, the Americans have a stronger claim. This week’s ruling by the World Trade Organization found the U.S. guilty of giving Boeing $5.3 billion worth of illegal help. Last year, the WTO said the European Union gave Airbus $18 billion of improper assistance, more than three times what Boeing got.

Money, though, isn’t the only way of keeping score. Airbus spokesman Rainer Ohler issued a statement saying that the U.S. subsidies had been declared “substantively illegal,” while Europe’s direct government lending “is legal and may continue.”

Boeing, not surprisingly, sees things differently. More than $2 billion of the illegal U.S. aid, it points out, came from an export tax credit that has expired.

As the case enters the compliance phase, then, the U.S. has only to address about $3 billion of improper subsidies. Of that, $2.6 billion came from National Aeronautics and Space Administration research programs and the rest from various state and local governments.

Tim Neale, a Boeing spokesman, says NASA has already wound down many of the programs in question. “There may not be a lot that the U.S. needs to do to comply with this ruling,” he said.

Europe’s path to compliance, he contends, is more difficult. Airbus still owes European governments about $4 billion it borrowed to develop the A380, a wide-body that it introduced five years ago. So-called launch aid was a major part of the WTO complaint against Airbus, and Boeing says the Europeans won’t be in compliance until the practice is discontinued.

The US and EU now have a few options: Both sides can eliminate the problematic subsidies, or they can negotiate a settlement that allows some of the payments to stay in place. If none of that happens, one or both sides can ask the WTO for permission to impose punitive tariffs on unrelated goods, like French wine or Florida citrus.

Daniel Ikenson, a trade expert at the Cato Institute in Washington, thinks that with both sides claiming victory, a negotiated deal seems likely. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we will see the end of subsidies for aircraft,” he said.

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., predicts that this epic dispute will have little effect on the market for airliners.

Today’s international aircraft sales, he explained, are dependent on government-provided export loans, a type of aid that wasn’t involved in the WTO case. The U.S. Export-Import Bank finances Boeing’s overseas sales; Europe has a similar program for Airbus.

“Both sides have ramped up so heavily on jetliner financing that this ruling is sort of meaningless,” Aboulafia said. “If there’d been a clear, lopsided victory, you would have seen some action taken. As long as both sides are convinced they’re in the right, that’s a recipe either for gridlock or trade war, and I don’t think either side wants a trade war.”

Let’s hope not. A trade war would devastate businesses and consumers who have nothing to do with the aircraft industry. After slugging it out for seven years at the WTO, Boeing and Airbus may have to settle for a stalemate.

Source