Financial thoughts

Hawker Beechcraft Corp. has sent out 130 layoff notices, according to paperwork filed with the Kansas Department of Commerce.

Shelly Thompson, adult services coordinator with the department, says the state received the paperwork Friday, but that it was dated Thursday. That means, she says, the 60-day notices will take effect August 31 cash advance flexible payments.

Hawker spokesperson Nicole Alexander confirmed that WARN notices had gone out to hourly employees, but said the company would not offer further details.

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EarthLink, Inc. has filed at the Federal Communications Commission a petition to oppose the proposed $30 billion merger of Comcast Corp. and NBC Universal.

The Atlanta-based Internet service provider argued the merger would lead to Comcast getting involved in anti-competitive actions that would reduce consumer choice, restrict content diversity and interfere with Internet competition.

EarthLink (NASDAQ: ELNK) proposed the FCC adopt a condition requiring Comcast to offer wholesale standalone broadband access to independent Internet service providers.

"The access condition that EarthLink proposes today for the Comcast-NBCU merger will be a win for consumers and a win for online competition," said EarthLink Chairman and CEO Rolla Huff, in a statement. "The condition essentially enables Comcast customers to 'break the bundle' and purchase only the services they need or want. We look forward to working with the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure the transaction results in greater consumer choice and competition."

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AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, once the world’s largest carrier by traffic, may pursue alliances to win more passengers as rivals’ mergers erase its advantage, analysts said.

Possible alliance partners include US Airways Group Inc. and JetBlue Airways Corp., the sixth- and seventh-largest U.S. airlines, said Jeff Straebler, a fixed-income strategist at RBS Securities Inc.

Alliances such as AMR’s Oneworld let members sell seats on each other’s jets, a benefit in an industry where the breadth of airlines’ networks attracts corporate fliers. American, now the second-largest U.S. carrier, would be No. 3 under the United-Continental merger, and said Monday that it is studying a "range of alternatives."

"American helped originate the whole idea of alliances and partnerships," said George Van Horn, an analyst at IBISWorld Inc. "If somebody should be good at it, you could make the argument they should be."

Straebler and Van Horn said an alliance might appeal to AMR by providing many of the benefits of a merger, such as adding passenger revenue and avoiding flight duplication, without the risks and expense of meshing fleets and unions. Ties to US Airways or JetBlue might help American in New York, the world’s busiest travel market, they said.

AMR was under pressure even before the United-Continental deal emerged. The company is the only major U.S. airline that may lose money in 2010, and has the lowest margins and highest costs among its peers, according to Jamie Baker, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst. American and unions representing about 77 percent of its work force are in contract talks, with the pilots’ negotiations dating to 2006.

American’s last merger came in 2001, when it bought Trans World Airlines for $2.8 billion.

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Southwest Airlines Co. — the third-largest carrier at Denver International Airport by passenger count — has announced that parents of minors traveling alone will have to pay $50 to fly their children in the airline's "unnaccompanied minors" program. That is up from the previous price of $25 per child.

Southwest (NYSE: LUV) plans to use funds generated from the added cost to help pay for expenses associated with caring for an unaccompanied minor.

In addition, the Dallas-based airline has plans to roll out a section on its website where parents can book their unaccompanied minors online. This is intended to save parents time by eliminating paperwork at the airport. The online service will be available April 23.

"We continuously evaluate our UM process to ensure that we deliver the best possible service to our young customers who are traveling alone," said Teresa Laraba, Southwest's senior vice president of customer services. "During a recent audit, we identified several opportunities, including the creation of an online booking tool for UMs and an enhancement in the employee training that comes along with handling our young passengers who are flying solo."

Unaccompanied minors on Southwest flights are children ages five to 11 who are traveling without an adult passenger.

In other Southwest news, the airline said it has terminated its codeshare agreement with WestJet, nixing a deal that had promised Southwest its first taste of international business.

If the agreement had withstood the test of time, it would have landed Southwest a link to international status by connecting the airline's service to WestJet flights heading to Canada.

DIA low-fare competitor Frontier Airlines offers service to Mexico and Costa Rica.

Southwest said WestJet had asked to modify its initial 2008 agreement with Southwest, and the airline could not “agree with the modifications to the confidential agreement.”

The Southwest-WestJet deal went sour earlier this month when WestJet announced it could be entering into a codeshare agreement with Delta Air Lines. At the time, Southwest sounded the alarm, saying it had heard that Delta, as part of the deal, might transfer slots at New York’s LaGuardia to WestJet.

Southwest indicated that an agreement with another carrier could hurt the deal Southwest and WestJet had in place.

"We prefer the existing terms of our agreement with WestJet,” said Southwest’s executive vice president of strategy and planning Bob Jordan. “Upon reviewing the number of changes that WestJet has requested, we have decided that it is in the best interest of both parties to move forward independently.”

Southwest added it’s still interested in exploring opportunities to enter into the Canadian market, adding that partnerships with other Canadian carriers remain a possibility.

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Devereux Kids has been awarded $200,000 in federal funds for its community-based education, support and reunification program aimed at increasing the safety and well-being of children.

The funds will be used to expand the organization’s child abuse and neglect prevention programs in Marion County, but may be expanded to other areas, according to a Devereux release.

Devereux Kids, established in 1999, is a program of Orlando-based Devereux Florida. Devereux Kids works in 10 counties in Florida and reached more than 1,100 children in 563 families in the 2009 fiscal year. The foundation supporting the organization was founded in 1912 in Pennsylvania and created Devereux Florida in 1987. Devereux Florida helps more than 13,000 children annually.

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Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features widely seen as endangering privacy while announcing product changes to address those concerns.

Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to alter one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail. Instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest to new users a group of people they may want to follow or be followed by, he said.

Jackson, who said that the auto-follow feature had been designed to make it easy for people to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that was heaped on Google in the last few days.

“We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Jackson wrote. “We’ll continue to do so.”

The startup for Buzz, which Google introduced Tuesday as its answer to Facebook and Twitter, drew angry responses on technology blogs and beyond, as users feared that the names of their e-mail correspondents would be publicly exposed. A set of changes that Google announced Thursday failed to quell the uproar.

Some critics said the latest modifications to Buzz, which is tightly coupled with Gmail, appeared to have addressed the most serious privacy concern.

“Turning off the auto-follow was a huge improvement,” Danny Sullivan, a longtime Google analyst and the editor of SearchEngineLand, said in an e-mail message.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said his organization was still intending to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission this week pending its review of Google’s changes.

“Even with these changes, there is still the concern that Gmail users are being driven into a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for,” Rotenberg said in an interview on Sunday.

The privacy concerns about Buzz, and Google’s rapid efforts to address its critics, echo incidents that have bedeviled other social networks, most notably Facebook personal business card. None of those incidents have slowed the growth of Facebook, which recently said it had reached more than 400 million users. Gmail has 176 million users, according to the research firm comScore.

“I think the privacy issues earlier this week with Buzz will blow over and not harm the product in the long term,” Sullivan said. But privacy will continue to haunt Google, he said, and many people will point to the release of Buzz as an attempt by Google to overreach and a reason that the company could not be trusted.

The change in the enrollment of new users of Buzz was the most significant of a series of modifications that Jackson announced on Saturday.

Google also said that it would create a new Buzz tab in Gmail’s settings page to allow users to hide Buzz from Gmail completely. The page gives users the option to disable Buzz, deleting their posts and removing their Google profile, which in many cases listed publicly their circle of contacts in Buzz.

The new feature could address concerns that disabling Buzz and removing a public profile was a multistep process that confused many users and that some described as a game of whack-a-mole.

Google also will no longer automatically connect public Picasa albums and items shared on Google Reader, another feature that had been widely criticized by some users and privacy advocates.

In the next two weeks, Buzz users will be directed to the new start-up to give them a “second chance to review and confirm” the people they are following, Jackson said.

The changes Google announced Saturday will be imposed in the next few days. While it is too early to gauge Buzz’s success, Google said tens of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours.

Sullivan of SearchEngineLand said that the level of activity on Buzz appeared to be significant. “I suspect Google might have a minor hit on its hands already,” he said.

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San Antonio area cable companies are gearing up for 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Starting Friday, Time Warner Cable and GVTC Communications will offer content from NBC Universal’s 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games.

The cable companies will show more than 835 hours of programming, the most ever for a Winter Olympics.

The games will be played between Feb. 12-28. On Time Warner Cable, NBC Universal will air a number of events on Sports On Demand Channel 950 and in HD on Showcase on Demand Channel 101.

Time Warner customers who are watching the Olympics on WOAI-TV will be able to press select on their remote when they see a Start Over prompt to restart a program in progress ay day loans.

Separately, GVTC customers also will have access to more than 1,200 hours of free online video content from the games not available on television. Subscribers will be able to visit MyGVTC.com and sign in with their GVTC e-mail account to access the content.

Also half the content will be exclusive online video unavailable on NBC and affiliate networks CNBC, MSNBC, USA and Universal HD.

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Starting Thursday, investors will be able to bet on famed investor Warren Buffett’s company without breaking the bank.

Shareholders of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, Fortune 500) met Wednesday to approve a stock split covering one class of Berkshire shares. Effective Thursday morning, the split will cut the price of these shares to around $66 each, from a recent $3,300.

The move, which was approved last year by Berkshire’s board, could attract some new investors by eliminating the sticker shock long associated with Berkshire shares.

It could also, some observers have suggested, pave the way for Berkshire to join the S&P 500 since it would increase the amount of shares outstanding. The people in charge of maintaining the S&P 500 have typically been wary of adding stocks with low levels of liquidity.

Berkshire has two classes of stock: Class A shares that recently traded for around $101,700 each, and the Class B (BRKB) shares that are to be split 50-for-1. The Class A shares won’t be affected by Wednesday’s vote.

Berkshire asked shareholders to approve the split so it could offer Berkshire shares to all investors in Burlington Northern (BNI, Fortune 500), the railway company Berkshire agreed in November to acquire in a deal valued at $34 billion in cash and stock. The deal is scheduled to close early this year.

Splitting the Class B shares will make it cheaper for investors to take Buffett’s side in the Burlington bet, which he called an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States."

The split would mark the second time in the company’s 45 years under Buffett that it has made some of its shares more affordable.

In 1996, Berkshire sold the cheaper Class B shares to the public for the first time fast cash. The company said it made the move in response to the plans of some investment companies to sell products that would let investors invest in Berkshire without paying the full price of a Class A share, then around $35,000.

At the time, the value of the Class B shares was fixed at 1/30th of a Class A share. That will change to 1/1,500th with Wednesday’s vote. Class B shares also carry reduced voting rights and can’t be converted into Class A shares.

Buffett warned in his 1996 letter to shareholders that the proposed "Berkshire look-alikes" from other investment firms would have tried to "entice naive small investors and would have charged these innocents high fees and commissions."

Buffett said that the 1996 offering, which raised $565 million for Berkshire, was "generally successful" in drawing in shareholders who would hold the stock for the long term. He said it added about 40,000 shareholders to Berkshire’s rolls.

Trading in the Class B shares was light initially, with daily volume rarely rising above a few thousand shares through 1997 — a fraction of the trading in the more expensive Class A shares.

But as Berkshire began using the Class B shares for acquisitions in the late 1990s, trading picked up. Average daily trading volume in the Class B stock has exceeded a million shares in every month since December 2005. Trading in the pricier Class A shares, by contrast, has only rarely exceeded 300,000 shares. 

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Information Technology Services Qualifications Center is spinning off from Carnegie Mellon University to become ITSqc LLC in order to extend research started at the university.

ITSqc started in 2000 as a consortium of information technology companies and university researchers to study best-practices within the information technology service provider industry. Since then, the organization has developed models and a certification process that can be used by clients and providers to ensure that the right expertise is brought on board and services meet client needs.

“The research was done and the models were created and focus shifted from creating and gathering, which universities are great at, we produced the models and now it’s a more commercial adoption issue,” said company director Jeff Perdue of the decision to spin-off.

The intellectual property was licensed in October and the new company started Jan. 1, Perdue said. The company has three employees: Perdue, an associate professor in the Institute for Software Research within the CMU School of Computer Science; Jane Siegel, senior systems scientist in the Institute for Software Research and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU; and Bill Hefley, faculty at the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh business card design.

Hefley was previously with the Institute for Software Research.

Some of the companies involved in the consortium include IBM and Accenture, Perdue said. ITSqc already has six organizations that have licensed the models and are working with clients, he said.

“The evolution of the Internet and the growth of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure now enables companies to seek out IT expertise from providers anywhere on the globe,” said Raj Reddy, chairman of the ITSqc Advisory Board in a written statement. “But without a set of commonly accepted best practices, many providers will routinely fail to deliver on their promises and potential clients will have no basis for comparing prospective providers. By establishing these best practices, the ITSqc has helped to bring order to the outsourcing marketplace.”

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National statistic agencies should have the same autonomy as central banks to avoid any attempts by government to influence economic data, said Enrico Giovannini, chairman of the Italy’s national statistics institute.

“Both the legal and financial independence of statistics should be guaranteed, as is the case for central banks,” Giovannini, 52, said in an interview. “Otherwise, there may always be ways to choke a statistics institute, such as cutting its funding, something which can’t happen with a central bank.”

For more than a quarter-century, independent central banks have been able to take painful and politically unpopular measures such as raising interest rates to restrain inflation. In the euro region, the European Central Bank and national central banks are banned by law to take or seek instructions from governments of the EU member states.

Officials in the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have repeatedly asked data agencies to stop spreading bad economic news and have questioned Istat’s methodology. In a June 24 speech, before Giovannini’s appointment, Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti criticized the Rome-based institute’s methods for measuring unemployment, saying the survey overestimated joblessness.

Giovannini was chief statistician for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for eight years before taking over the Italian agency in July. He said that Italy should consider legislating the independence of the statistics agency as part of a debate on constitutional reforms.

Revisions of Greek economic data in October that showed the economy had been in recession for more than a year, rather than expanding as initially reported, demonstrate the urgency for statistics agencies to be autonomous, he said.

“The current practices are apparently not sufficient and need to be strengthened further,” Giovannini said. The “institutionalization of statistics should be aimed not so much at increasing technical reliability, but in raising the integrity and independence from political pressures.”

The credibility of Greece’s data had been previously questioned after revisions to budget deficit numbers. The European Commission in 2004 launched an investigation into Greece’s deficit after a revision of data revealed that, contrary to previous indications, the shortfall had exceeded the EU’s 3 percent of output ceiling ever since the country switched to the euro.

“The Greek case is unfortunately a repeat of what happened in 2004, when deficit and debt figures were questioned to the point that the European Commission established a code of good practice for official data,” Giovannini said. “This took place again despite the efforts put in place then by the EU’s statistics office Eurostat to monitor the Greek data.”

Greece’s credibility was further damaged by the government revising forecasts. Within weeks of the October elections, Prime Minister George Papandreou’s new government, said the 2009 budget deficit would be an EU-high of 12.7 percent of economic output, about twice the outgoing government’s prediction. The revision contributed to Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings cutting the country’s creditworthiness, which sent Greek bonds and stocks tumbling this month.

Giovannini replaced Luigi Biggeri as Istat chairman in July.

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