Financial thoughts

China will take measure to stabilize its exports and imports as slowing global growth creates a

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said executive-branch politicians will take a 25 percent pay cut amid labor union plans for a nationwide strike to protest scrapping of fuel subsidies that more than doubled gasoline prices.

The government will reduce overseas traveling and all ministries and departments must cut costs in 2012, Jonathan said, adding that he won

The Walt Disney Co. said Wednesday that it reached a long-term agreement with the nation’s largest TV signal provider, Comcast Corp., that extends their partnership into the next decade.

The deal covers major pay channels ESPN, Disney Channel and ABC Family and the retransmission of free ABC broadcast network programs through seven ABC TV stations. It allows Comcast subscribers to gain greater access to shows on demand over the Internet on multiple devices.

Terms were not disclosed.

The deal comes as TV distributors and content owners continue to spar over fees to carry programming.

In the New York area, a dispute between Time Warner Cable and The Madison Square Garden Co. has left some cable subscribers without access to Knicks basketball or Rangers hockey games since early in the new year.

Disney and Comcast agreed on the package covering 70 channels or services even though only a few agreements covering ABC Family, Disney Channel and Disney XD had expired at the end of 2011. The companies agreed that a long-term comprehensive deal was in both their interests.

Comcast and Disney called the scope and range of the deal “unprecedented cheap business cards.”

“It reinforces the value of the multichannel subscription and takes full advantage of new technologies, which serve all of our viewers,” said ESPN executive chairman George Bodenheimer in a statement.

The deal incorporates Comcast’s Xfinity TV online suite of programs and gives its 22.4 million video subscribers online access to services such as ESPN3, which offers live feeds of games that are sometimes not on the television network. Comcast subscribers will also be able to watch ABC shows such as “Castle” and “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand, but they won’t have the option of fast-forwarding through commercials.

Comcast also agreed to carry the pay TV channel Disney Junior, a rebranded network focused on children up to age 7 that will replace the SOAPnet channel in February.

Disney shares rose 49 cents to $38.80 in afternoon trading. Comcast shares rose 10 cents to $24.59.

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Valley Beef LLC, a franchisee of five St. Louis area Lion’s Choice restaurants, has filed for bankruptcy.

Clayton-based Valley Beef, led by Thomas Ginos, filed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition Thursday in St. Louis federal court and listed between $500,000 and $1 million in liabilities and assets of $50,000 or less. Its largest creditors holding unsecured claims are US Foods, which is owed $117,850, and Pulaski Bank, which has claims totaling $195,205.

Valley Beef’s Lion’s Choice locations in Chesterfield, St. Louis, Fenton, Wentzville and on Mid Rivers Mall Drive in St. Peters have 84 employees. Valley Beef shuttered a Lion’s Choice in downtown St. Louis in 2009.

Ginos became a franchisee of the restaurant chain that specializes in roast beef sandwiches in 2001. He plans to keep the five remaining restaurants open during the bankruptcy reorganization, according to his attorney, Robert Eggmann of Clayton-based law firm Desai Eggmann Mason. Eggmann said his client filed the bankruptcy to restructure debt and expects to emerge from bankruptcy within six months.

Lion’s Choice was founded in Ballwin in 1967 as Brittany Beef and has 15 company-owned restaurants in the St. Louis area that are not included in the bankruptcy. Jim Tobias, president of Lion’s Choice Restaurant Corp., said he did not expect the bankruptcy filing to interrupt operations at the five St. Louis area franchise restaurants. “We don’t expect any change in business,” Tobias said.

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Thailand

For the St. Louis economy, this year looked a lot like the previous 20 or 30, and it’s a rut we really need to get out of.

Job growth lagged the nation. Well-known local companies succumbed to takeovers, without enough new businesses to take their place. Officials argued about strategy while failing to address the region’s deep-seated problems.

Denny Coleman, the president of the St. Louis County Economic Council, has been sounding the alarm about these issues recently, ever since the council commissioned a report on the region’s economic strategy.

One headline from the report, written by consulting firm AECOM, is that within two decades, because of slow population growth, we’ll no longer be one of the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. We’re currently No. 18.

That top-20 ranking automatically confers big-city status. National retail chains want to have a presence in the top 20 markets; advertisers target their messages there. Cities in the next tier are important, but they have to fight harder for attention.

Coleman believes AECOM’s warning should be a wake-up call.

“We have been living off the wealth creation from select legacy companies here for some time,” he said. “While we’ve created some new, significant wealth, the competition in other metro areas is outpacing us.”

Want to talk legacy companies? Savvis, Smurfit Stone Container, LaBarge and Rehabcare were all acquired this year. St. Louis ranks poorly on indicators of the entrepreneurial activity that can replace them with new firms.

Or should we talk jobs? Metro St. Louis officially added 7,800 jobs between October 2010 and October 2011, an increase of 0.6 percent. Howard Wall, an economist at Lindenwood University, thinks that number will be revised to show a loss of 3,900 jobs make quick cash.

Either way, St. Louis is a laggard. Nationally, employment grew by 1.2 percent in the same 12 months, twice as fast as the optimistic St. Louis estimate.

“Don’t we have this conversation every year?” Wall said when I asked about the sluggish local job market.

Yes, we do. And how do St. Louis’ leaders try to break out of this rut? For one thing, they spent years pursuing the “big idea” of a hub for Chinese cargo planes, only to have the Missouri Legislature shoot down the incentives that the plan required. It’s not a good precedent.

Recently, other rifts have been exposed. Mayor Francis Slay called for the Regional Chamber and Growth Association, a private-sector group, to cede its economic development duties to a joint city-county agency.

Coleman hasn’t gone quite so far, but he does accuse the RCGA of “mission creep.” As he sees it, the RCGA should concentrate on marketing the region and recruiting companies that want to expand or relocate.

The jobs of retaining local employers, encouraging startups and improving the work force, Coleman believes, should fall to agencies in each city or county. He says he was surprised when those showed up as objectives in the RCGA’s latest strategic plan. Coleman says he’s encouraged by the appointment of Joe Reagan as the new RCGA president. The region’s economic development structure “can work, but it’s a matter of making sure you have a clear separation of responsibilities,” Coleman says.

Slay, Reagan, Coleman and others clearly have plenty to discuss. Let’s hope they quickly get beyond turf wars.

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India’s industrial production slid 5.1 percent in October, the first fall in over two years and one more sign of a reversal of fortunes for Asia’s third largest economy.

The decline from a year earlier was driven by mining and manufacturing, as well as waning consumer demand and lackluster investment, according to government figures released Monday.

Industrial output hasn’t fallen in India since June 2009.

Despite global headwinds, many economists say India’s troubles are largely homegrown, as the effects of 13 consecutive interest rate hikes begin to ripple through the economy. Political paralysis has also made it difficult to kickstart growth and investment in the face of a plunging rupee and two years of near double-digit inflation.

“This slowdown is clearly continuing and it may be intensifying,” HSBC chief economist for India, Leif Eskesen, said from Singapore. “What’s driving it is the lagged effect of monetary tightening and the high level of inflation that are causing uncertainty about the macroeconomic outlook. That hurts incentives to invest and spend.”

He said policy paralysis was also contributing to India’s woes.

With little scope for stimulus spending, India needs to enact difficult but crucial reforms to kickstart the economy and reassure investors, who are jittery from the dark global economic outlook, economists and businesspeople say.

The government’s humiliating U-turn on its decision to allow greater foreign investment in retail, however, suggests that the ruling Congress Party _ fractured by internal divisions and facing a revolt by opposition parties and coalition allies _ no longer has the leverage to push its reformist agenda.

Parliament has yet to address a slew of issues, which could help spur investment and kickstart growth, which slipped to 6.9 percent in the September quarter, the lowest in over two years.

On the table are a land acquisition bill, which advocates say would ease contentious land transfer policies and speed investment, as well as tax reform, new mining regulations and measures to allow greater foreign investment in defense and aviation.

Last October, industrial production grew by over 11 percent.

The fall was much sharper than expected and puts pressure on the central bank to arrest or start reversing a series of interest rate hikes when it meets this week.

A CNBC-TV18 poll of economists had forecast industrial production to contract 1.6 percent.

Mining activity shrank by 7.2 percent in October, constrained by bureaucratic bottlenecks. Manufacturing slid by 6.0 percent.

Consumer goods production dropped 0.8 percent, while capital goods output plunged 25.5 percent _ a sign of waning investment.

Headline inflation has averaged 9.6 percent since January 2010.

India’s benchmark Sensex index is down over 22 percent this calendar year, making it one of the worst performing in the region. The rupee is down about 14 percent this year and recently hit a lifetime low.

The Ministry of Finance last week trimmed its growth projection for the fiscal year through March to around 7.5 percent, down from an earlier forecast of 9 percent.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner got little down time during his three-day dash through Europe. But what sleep he did get was in some of Europe’s finest hotels.

U.S. officials justify the luxurious bookings by explaining that where Geithner stays is often dictated by security concerns. The U.S. embassy in each country recommends hotels considered acceptable for overnight stays by high-level government officials like Geithner who get Secret Service protection.

In Milan, the hotel of choice for Geithner’s stay was the Hotel Principe di Savoia. It’s a five-star hotel graced by a grand foyer.

The top-of-the line Presidential Suite was featured in the 2010 movie “Somewhere” by director Sofia Coppola. The movie, set in Milan, also displayed the hotel’s opulent swimming pool.

Geithner’s digs were far less plush than the “Somewhere” suite _ just a standard room with a sitting area for meetings. And instead of a swim, he began his day in the hotel exercise room, walking on the treadmill while reading the morning newspapers.

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To meet with national leaders and financial officials in five cities in three countries in three days, you need a little help getting around. That’s where a police-escorted motorcade comes in handy.

Geithner’s caravan of limousines and vans for staff and reporters drew police escorts in each city he visited.

It all worked well until Geithner’s entourage hit Marseilles right at rush hour. The road from the airport to a downtown hotel where Geithner was meeting Spanish Prime Minister-elect Mariano Rajoy Brey was jammed.

Still, not to worry. The motorcycle escorts simply squeezed between the two lanes of cars headed into town. The cars were forced to both sides of the road, clearing a path in the middle for the motorcade.

Geithner’s meeting Wednesday night lasted about 40 minutes. Then it was back to the motorcade for the return to the airport. At least by then, the roads had cleared considerably, and the motorcycle escort had less work to do guaranteed payday loans.

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So much for legendary German efficiency. On Geithner’s three-country trip, it was the Italians who shined most in arranging a glitch-free meeting with reporters. The Germans and French ran into more difficulty.

Of course, the Italians had arguably more at stake. Geithner’s appearance with reporters in Milan on Thursday followed a meeting with new Prime Minister Mario Monti. By contrast, the sessions in Germany and France involved only finance ministers.

The Italians managed to position a crush of journalists and 15 television cameras well before the session began.

In France, Geithner and Finance Minister Francois Baroin made statements to the press in Baroin’s office. The French supplied no translator. After the session, non-French-speaking journalists found a kindly official who translated Baroin’s remarks by listening to a tape recording of it.

In Germany, reporters, TV crews and photographers crammed near a stage in the German Finance Ministry. Reporters had no chairs and instead crouched on the floor with laptops. When officials decided to move the crowd back and supply chairs, shouting and jostling erupted as photographers struggled to keep the prime positions they’d staked out.

Still, from reporters’ vantage point, the Germans fared best in one key respect: Alone among officials in the three countries, they allowed at least a couple of questions from journalists.

The French and Italian events were designed to have Geithner, Baroin and Monti give statements but take no questions. Given the sensitivity of the markets to Europe’s debt crisis, officials in France and Italy probably didn’t want to risk having an answer (or non-answer) to a question panic investors.

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Will the new voice of economic development in St. Louis be coming from a few hours’s drive east?

Louisville media are reporting this morning that Joe Reagan, chief executive of Greater Louisville, Inc., is telling people that he’s one of two finalists for the top job at the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association. Spokespeople for RCGA and GLI did not immediately return calls Monday morning, but Insider Louisville.com reports that Reagan recently e-mailed supporters about the news, and GLI confirmed it to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

News about RCGA’s search has been held close since longtime CEO Richard Fleming announced in January that he is retiring. Fleming is due to leave at year’s end, and presumably the RCGA board hopes to make a hire before then. Last week, people familiar with the search told the Post-Dispatch that the search committee was down to three finalists - one local and two from elsewhere - and that an announcement was expected soon.

Also last week, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay stirred the pot with a blog post calling for the RCGA’s economic development role to be joined in with the economic development agencies of St. Louis City and County and said he’d discuss such a move with whoever the new CEO is. The idea was met with a rebuke by RCGA’s two top board members and skepticism by other in the regional economic development world.

In Reagan, RCGA would be getting a new boss with experience running the same type of organization. Greater Louisville Inc. is both an economic development group and a Chamber of Commerce, funded mostly by private businesses with some public support. He has run GLI since 2005 and makes about $400,000 a year, according to Insider Louisville.

To get a sense of what he might earn running the $9 million-a-year RCGA: Fleming made $467,000 in base pay and bonuses in 2009, plus another $136,000 in benefits and retirement compensation and a $196,000 payout on a multiple-year retirement package, according to RCGA’s tax return. The website reports that some GLI companies are raising money to keep Reagan in Louisville.

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Don Buckley lost his job driving a Chicago Transit Authority bus almost two years ago and has been looking for work ever since, even as other municipal bus drivers around the country are being laid off.

At 34, Buckley, his two daughters and his fiancée have moved into the basement of his mother’s house same day payday loans. He has had to delay his marriage, and his entire savings, $27,000, is gone.

“I was the kind of person who put away for a rainy day,” he said recently. “It’s flooding now.”

Buckley is one of tens of thousands of once solidly middle-class African-American government workers