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The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago Inc. said today its business barometer fell to 62.2 in March from a 10-month high of 64 in February. Readings greater than 50 signal growth.
Economists forecast the gauge would fall to 63, according to the median of 58 estimates in a Bloomberg survey installment payday loans. Projections ranged from 59.7 to 67.
Missouri Employers Mutual Insurance Co. plans to pay about $2 million in dividends to 11,033 policyholders this spring, the state-sponsored workers’ compensation company announced today.
It will be the company’s first dividend since its creation by the Missouri Legislature in 1993 to encourage competition and lower workers’ compensation premiums for employers, particularly small businesses.
“It took many years of successful operation before we established the financial strength needed to pay a dividend,” Jim Owen, the insurer’s president and chief executive, said in a written statement.
The dividend recognizes members whose policies were effective in 2009, company officials said. Policyholders at all premium levels will receive a percentage of the premium they paid based on their loss ratio results. Dividends will not be paid to policyholders whose policies had too high a loss ratio.
MEM’s decision to pay a dividend occurred a month after Missouri state auditor Tom Schweich issued a report that criticized the firm for giving out huge severance checks to former executives and hefty bonuses to other employees.
His audit also found that the firm had bankrolled business jaunts to Hawaii and Mexico, along with sports tickets and suites for its board members, executives, employees and guests payday loans for self employed.
The insurer operates like a private entity, while enjoying federal tax-exempt status and other advantages that its private competitors lack, the audit found.
As an “independent public corporation,” the firm has avoided about $50 million in federal taxes since 1993, enabling the firm to build a $163 million surplus and increase its market share to 16 percent, the largest in the Missouri’s workers’ comp insurance market.
Schweich undertook the audit after the Post-Dispatch raised questions last year about MEM’s policies and expenditures.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jim Lembke, R-Lemay, who held a hearing on MEM last year, has introduced legislation that would require the insurer to sever its close ties to state government, which could threaten the firm’s nonprofit status and its lucrative tax breaks.
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Unions have warned General Motors that they won’t engage in restructuring talks on the auto group’s Opel and Vauxhall plants in Europe on a local level.
GM is reviewing how to fix its lossmaking European business. Union contracts rule out any plant closures up until 2014, and the company has said it intends to abide by that.
Union leaders issued a one-sentence open letter to Opel chief executive Karl-Friedrich Stracke saying “we will not negotiate with you on local level same day payday loans.”
The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a bill that makes it illegal for lawmakers and their staffs to make Wall Street trades based on insider information.
The bipartisan measure, which already passed the House, would immediately go to President Obama, who is expected to sign it. Obama called for the law during his State of the Union address in January.
While insider trading is already illegal, there’s some question as to whether current laws that focus on Wall Street apply to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers and staff are encouraged to discuss pending legislation with firms that might be impacted.
The bill would clarify that lawmakers and staff can’t use special information about pending or potential federal government activity to trade stocks.
However, Congress passed a weaker bill than some have advocated.
A Senate bill passed in February would have also required those research firms that gather intelligence to help predict Washington policy for Wall Street to register and disclose fees in the same way lobbyists do. The Senate bill also would have also more clearly defined public corruption, giving the Department of Justice stronger tools to go after bribery in Congress.
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he didn’t have enough support to move quickly on the the registry or the strengthened public corruption laws, a move that angered Iowa Republican Charles Grassley.
"It’s another example of Wall Street being heard in Washington and the common person in the United States not having its will expressed," Grassley said. "If you seek information to trade stocks, Congress, the executive branch and the American people ought to know how you are."
The congressional ban on insider training was some six years in the making. But momentum came from a CBS "60 Minutes" piece last year, which suggested a few lawmakers had made money from inside political knowledge from the financial crisis.
After that report, the Office of Congressional Ethics started looking at Rep. Spencer Bachus, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who acknowledged last month he is under investigation for possible violations of insider trading laws. The Alabama Republican maintains that he will be cleared.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission polices illegal insider trading. The current ban prevents the buying and selling of securities when trades are based on nonpublic information gleaned through a breach of a corporate officer’s responsibility to protect shareholders’ interests, known as "fiduciary duty."
Congress fell into a gray area, because lawmakers and staffers are expressly allowed and encouraged to discuss pending legislation or the political process that could impact private firms or Wall Street.
As it stands now, lawmakers don’t really have a fiduciary duty, because they viewed themselves as in the "public sphere," said Craig Holman, lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen.
"Insider trading has never been applied to Congress or staffers," Holman said. "This makes it very specific: Yes, it’s illegal to trade on information gleaned from the halls of Congress."
Premier Mario Monti’s government on Friday approved a long-awaited package of labor reforms, refusing to bend to union opposition and insisting the new rules will create a more flexible and inclusive labor market.
The measures are the third major initiative by Monti’s government of technocrats since it took office in November charged with overhauling the stagnant Italian economy to promote growth and reduce its national debt of a staggering 120 percent of its economic output.
The government said the measures, which were sought by the European Union, would encourage growth, create stable jobs and help businesses become more competitive.
A measure in the reforms that makes it easier to fire workers created the most serious challenge Monti has faced. He previously passed austerity measures _ mostly tax hikes _ and a package of measures to liberalize the market.
Italy’s largest major trade union confederation has pledged 16 hours of general strikes and demonstrations against the measures, while politicians with ties to unions say they would also seek changes to the plan as it goes through parliament.
Monti pledged to monitor for abuses, but insisted that companies would no longer be forced to rehire workers fired for economic reasons even if the employer’s case is ruled unfounded, as has been allowed under a decades-old statute. A judge instead can order damages _ even though these cases are relatively rare.
Monti left untouched rules allowing a court to order a company to rehire workers unjustly fired if discrimination is proven, or in some instances if a judge rules disciplinary action was not legal.
The reform also includes a new unemployment compensation system, limits on temporary workers to encourage permanent employment and help get more young people into the work force and measures to guarantee gender equality in the work place _ specifically outlawing the practice of having women sign open-ended resignation letters commonly applied in the case of pregnancy.
The government declined to make the measures effective immediately, leaving a vehicle for lawmakers to make changes.
Senate President Renato Schifani said the move was “appreciated” by Parliament.
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states cannot be sued under the Family and Medical Leave Act for refusing to give an employee time off to recover from an illness. One justice said the decision “dilutes the force” of the law that allows millions of working Americans time off to care for sick family members or to have children.
The high court refused to let Daniel Coleman sue the Maryland state Court of Appeals for damages for firing him after he asked for sick leave, blaming Congress for not equating family care and self-care when lawmakers wrote the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the controlling opinion, said Congress did not investigate self-care the way it did family care when it passed the FMLA, leaving little “widespread evidence of sex discrimination or sex stereotyping in the administration of sick leave.”
“Documented discrimination against women in the general workplace is a persistent unfortunate reality, and we must assume, a still prevalent wrong. An explicit purpose of the Congress in adopting the FMLA was to improve workplace conditions for women. But states may not be subject to suits for damages based on violations of a comprehensive statute unless Congress has identified a specific pattern of constitutional violations by state employers,” said Kennedy, who was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Coleman asked for a 10-day medical leave to deal with hypertension and diabetes in 2007, and said he was wrongfully fired after his request was denied. He sued for $1.1 million in damages under the Family and Medical Leave Act, but his lawsuit was thrown out, with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying states could not be sued under the FMLA.
The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act grants eligible workers up to a total of 12 weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for such things as caring for a newborn or a sick family member, or because the employee has a serious health condition. It generally covers employers with 50 or more employees, which means it covers just about half of the U.S. workforce. Seven million of the 77.1 million FMLA-eligible people took leave in 2005.
Coleman argued to justices that he and some 5 million state workers like him should be able to sue for money damages for FMLA self-care violations but Maryland and 26 other states disagreed cash advance in one hour. They acknowledge they’re bound by the Family and Medical Leave Act and must grant time off. But the states say that unlike private employers, states are protected by the Constitution from monetary damage suits that could drain a state’s finances.
Kennedy agreed. For states to be sued under FMLA, “Congress must identify a pattern of constitutional violations and tailor a remedy congruent and proportional to the documented violations,” Kennedy said. “It failed to do so when it allowed employees to sue state for violations of the FMLA’s self-care provision.”
Justice Antonin Scalia did not join Kennedy’s opinion but agreed with the judgment. The way the other justices made their decision “make no sense,” Scalia said, but he said failing to grant a state employee leave for self-care “or any other purpose, for that matter” does not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Four justices dissented, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in an unusual move read her dissent aloud in court. Ginsburg reiterated the Act’s intention was to end discrimination against women in the workplace based on their potential to become pregnant.
“The court’s judgment dilutes the force of the Act and that is regrettable,” she said. “But at least the damage is contained. The self-care provision remains valid Commerce Clause legislation and therefore applies, undiluted, in the private sector.”
Ginsburg also said employees can still ask a judge to reverse any potential violation. “And the Department of Labor has authority to sue a state employer for violating the self-care provision, and to gain monetary relief for adversely-affected employees,” she said.
Ginsburg said she would have also taken the opportunity in this case to conclusively overturn a Supreme Court position in 1974’s Geduldig v. Aiello decision that “discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not discrimination on the basis of gender.” “I would hold that Aiello was egregiously wrong,” she said.
The case is Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland, 10-1016.
UPDATED at 6:30 p.m. with additional details.
A development group is proposing to turn the Doe Run lead smelter property in Herculaneum into a $100 million facility that will have a port and additional commercial and industrial uses.
St. Louis-based Environmental Operations Inc. and J.H. Berra Construction Co. in St. Louis County have partnered to create a development group, Riverview Commerce Park LLC, to purchase 500 acres in Jefferson County that includes the Doe Run Co’s lead smelting facility and adjoining property in Herculaneum, the companies announced Friday.
The project is in an early stage and will undergo six months of due diligence before more details are announced in the fall, said Environmental Operations’ chairman and CEO Stacy Hastie.
“We’ve talked to two to three potential users for the site, and we think it has a lot of potential.”
Riverview Commerce Park LLC has signed a letter of intent to purchase the property for an undisclosed amount from Maryland Heights-based Doe Run Co.
The property has been used as a lead smelter for more than a century, and in recent years, Doe Run has come under fire because of environmental problems at the site.
In 2010, the company announced it planned to cease production of primary lead at the Herculaneum smelter. In a settlement with federal and state environmental regulators, Doe Run also agreed to pay for clean-up at the site.
Bruce Neil, Doe Run Co.’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the property has “infrastructure and environmental challenges.”
It chose Environmental Operations and J.H. Berra as buyers and developers of the property, he said, because of their expertise in handling similar challenges.
“We’ve been looking at how we could re-purpose the property and still provide some economic vitality for the area,” said Doe Run spokesperson Tammy Stankey. Doe Run’s smelter currently has 277 employees.
Doe Run is developing an alternative lead metal production process, called electrowinning, that uses a wet chemical process to dissolve lead that it claims reduces emissions.
The company is testing the process at a facility in southeastern Missouri and will decide this spring whether to make a recommendation to the company’s board to open a commercial-scale plant for the new technology.
If it moves forward, the new commerce center proposed at Herculaneum would be considered as a possible location, Stankey said.
Jefferson County officials have worked for years to get a port built along the Mississippi River to spur job growth, said Dan Govero president of the port authority.
“We have all this water frontage and we’re not using it,” he said. “The studies we’ve done show there’s an opportunity to ship grain, sand and other materials, and we have the highway and rail access.”
U.S. economic growth showed signs of becoming more self-sustaining as the number of Americans claiming new jobless benefits fell back to a four-year low last week and manufacturing activity in the Northeast picked up this month.
But the impact of higher oil prices also was starting to be seen in data on Thursday. Producer prices racked up their biggest increase in five months in February, while manufacturers in New York state reported a surge in input costs in March.
The recent gains in oil and gasoline prices have raised concerns the higher costs could start to squeeze businesses and consumers and put a dent in the recovery.
Still, producer prices last month did not rise as much as economists had expected, and underlying inflation pressures were contained.
Thursday’s initial claims data for state unemployment benefits was further evidence of an improving labor market after the jobless rate held at a three-year low of 8.3 percent in February.
“This suggests that the recovery is firmly on track,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The Federal Reserve earlier this week acknowledged the recent improvement in the labor market, but remained concerned with the still-high unemployment rate. The central bank also reiterated its expectation it will keep interest rates at ultra-low levels through late-2014 as part of its efforts to support the economy.
Initial claims dropped 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 351,000 last week, the U.S. Labor Department said, taking claims back to a four-year low reached in February.
The four-week moving average for new jobless claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends, was unchanged at 355,750.
The firming tone in the job market was reinforced by the manufacturing surveys, which showed factories increased employment this month.
The New York Federal Reserve said its Empire State general business conditions index rose to 20.21 - its highest level since June 2010 - from 19.53 in February.
But the components were more mixed, with new orders easing and prices paid racking up their biggest monthly jump in 6-1/2 years.
That was in contrast to a report on factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region, where prices paid rose more slowly in March than in February. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s business activity index showed manufacturing also continued to grow in the region, rising to 12.5 from 10.2.
HOPEFUL SIGNS ON JOBS
Thursday’s reports were the latest to imply the economy was holding its own, even though the pace of growth was expected to slow this quarter from the fourth quarter’s 3 percent annualized clip.
The data helped Wall Street push higher in early afternoon trading, sending the S&P 500 over the 1,400 level for the first time in four years.
Economists are trying to determine how much an unusually warm winter has contributed to the recent string of positive data. Signs of a lull in the spring would suggest activity was not as strong as it looked and was simply pushed earlier into the year.
“We think the spring is an important test for not only jobs data, but for a wide variety of economic indicators,” Dana Saporta, director of U.S. economics at Credit Suisse, wrote in a note.
“If we don’t get a softer run of numbers for a few months, it would tell us that the economy is on much stronger ground, and the odds of (quantitative easing) or any other Fed stimulus would decline significantly.”
First-time applications for jobless benefits have been tucked in a tight range since mid-February, a hopeful sign for the labor market, which has enjoyed three straight months of employment gains above 200,000.
In a second report, the Labor Department said its seasonally adjusted producer price index increased 0.4 percent last month, quickening from January’s 0.1 percent gain, though shy of expectations for a 0.5 percent gain.
Wholesale prices excluding volatile food and energy costs rose 0.2 percent, moderating from January’s 0.4 percent increase. While that was in line with economists’ expectations, it was the third consecutive month of increases in core PPI.
Overall producer prices were lifted by a 1.3 percent increase in energy prices after a 0.5 percent drop in January. Food prices dipped 0.1 percent after falling 0.3 percent the prior month.
The Fed said on Tuesday the recent steep run-up in oil and gasoline prices would push inflation up only temporarily.
Reports on the housing market offered signals the backlog of foreclosures was starting to move, albeit at a slow pace.
Data from RealtyTrac showed the number of Americans receiving delinquency notices on their homes rose 1 percent in February from a month earlier, but overall foreclosure filings, which include default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, dropped 2 percent.
A separate report from CoreLogic showed more foreclosures were finished in January than the month before, but the amount was still short of levels seen a year ago.
The pipeline of foreclosures, which have been held up as banks sorted out legal problems with loan documentation, is one of the major challenges facing the housing market. Clearing this inventory could put further downward pressure on home prices, but eventually lay the ground for a healthier market.