Finance topics

First-quarter profits more than doubled at M&T Bank Corp. on lower credit costs and wider net interest margin.

Net income totaled $151 million, compared with $64 million in the year-earlier quarter, the Buffalo-based company (NYSE: MTB) reported Monday. Earnings per share were $1.15, up from 49 cents in the comparable period of 2009.

Net operating income for the period ended March 31, 2010 rose to $161 million, up from $75 million.

At the end of the quarter, M&T had total assets of $68.4 billion, up 5.3 percent from $64.9 billion a year ago.

Source

Attorneys general from 11 states have joined a Missouri-led effort urging a bankruptcy judge to appoint an independent trustee to run US Fidelis, the Wentzville-based company that once led the nation in the sale of extended auto service contracts.

Last month, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Charles E. Rendlen III to appoint the trustee. Koster accused US Fidelis owners Darain and Cory Atkinson of plundering the company by illegally transferring the firm’s assets in order to put them out of reach of creditors, including several hundred consumers.

US Fidelis is now run by turnaround consultant Scott Eisenberg of Amherst Partners, based in Birmingham, Mich.

Eisenberg has said repeatedly that, since taking over last month, he has had no direct contact with the Atkinson brothers. Under Eisenberg’s leadership, the company has threatened to sue the Atkinsons to recover about $65 million that he believes they and companies they control owe US Fidelis.

Backing Koster’s accusations in court filings on Wednesday is Mary Lobdell, an assistant attorney general in Washington state who led a multistate investigation of US Fidelis that looked into widespread allegations of consumer fraud and telemarketing violations overnight pay day loans.

Lobdell noted in a filing that Darain and Cory Atkinson have not resigned from their executive positions — president and vice president, respectively — and that the brothers still could interfere with the running of the company.

"Given past business practices, the States have no confidence that the Atkinsons will keep the Debtor at arms length," she stated in the filing.

Also joining the call for the appointment of a trustee are attorneys general from Ohio, Iowa, North Dakota, Arkansas, Oregon, Maryland, Wisconsin, North Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. A hearing is scheduled for May 26.

Source

A new report from the measurement company Nielsen shows that ads on outside-the-house video screens — in places like health clubs, gas stations and elevators — can reach many more people than ads on prime-time television.

The report, called the “Fourth Screen Network Audience Report,” (Nielsen is calling it the “fourth screen” after television, the computer and mobile), is expected to be released on Monday. The company researched 10 screen networks, from companies like NCM Media Networks and Screenvision, which run ads in movie theaters, to Gas Station TV, which places screens on gas pumps.

“If you took the 10 networks that we measured and put a spot on each of the 10” for a month, “you’d draw more exposures than having a spot on every one of the top 20 programs in prime time” in a given week, said Paul Lindstrom, senior vice president of the Nielsen Co.

The screens are part of a phenomenon of place-based advertising that has gained popularity as consumers move away from traditional media. The networks try to capture people as they are about to buy something, or when they are bored and undistracted — waiting for a movie to start, for instance.

The networks have been pushing Nielsen to create a standard measurement so that they can better sell their ad time to agencies.

“The agencies ask, ‘Why are you better, why should I take some money and not run it on traditional television or somewhere else, and run it with you?’ ” said David Leider, chief executive of Gas Station TV. “If there’s no legitimate measurement behind it, there’s no point for an agency or client to look at it.”

“They were measured all differently by each of the venues, so there was no consistency in the marketplace and no third-party, independent view of it,” said Terrie Brennan, senior vice president for new business development at Nielsen.

To get the ratings, Nielsen looked at variables like how long people spent in front of the screens and the proximity to the screen — “so in the health clubs, it’s not going to be everybody who swipes in, it’s going to be people in that cardio room that can see those televisions,” Lindstrom said. It then interviewed viewers to get demographic information. The number of people interviewed per screen network was as low as 298, for the bar/restaurant TV network Zoom Media & Marketing’s Social Network, and as high as 26,052 for NCM and Screenvision.

Nielsen found that the screen networks reached a broad audience. For example, ads on Screenvision and NCM’s networks in October had 61.7 million exposures. That compared with an average of 3 million viewers 18 years and older for a typical prime-time commercial on broadcast television in the same period. So an advertiser could either take out a monthlong series of ads on the theater networks, or buy about 20 prime-time commercials, to reach the same audience size.

However, some agencies and networks raised questions about Nielsen’s approach. Jack Sullivan, senior vice president and out-of-home activation director at Starcom USA, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe, said he was not certain that Nielsen took into account all the differences in these networks.

“A doctor’s office is different than a grocery store is different than an airport is different than an elevator,” he said. “So the consumer is different in every one of those categories, and the screens are different sizes.

”There’s really no common denominator,“ he said.

By measuring out-of-home screens with the same tools it uses to measure television, Nielsen lets these networks try to be included among the big broadcast ad purchases.

”More and more, now that we have these results, at least in 2010, we’re starting to get looked at from a broadcast budget,“ said Scott Marden, research director for Captivate Network, which runs video screens in elevators. ”The budgets, and the dollars, are really in the TV world.“

Source

Federal Reserve policymakers are worried that the economic recovery may lose steam going forward, despite recent moderate improvements, according to minutes from their recent policy meeting released Tuesday.

Though the latest data suggest an uptick in economic activity, Fed members believe that some sectors of the economy could stifle overall growth, the minutes from the March 16 meeting said.

"While participants saw incoming information as broadly consistent with continued strengthening of economic activity, they also highlighted a variety of factors that would be likely to restrain the overall pace of recovery, especially in light of the waning effects of fiscal stimulus and inventory rebalancing over coming quarters," the minutes said.

But Fed policymakers indicated that they could raise rates as soon as they see continued signs of life in the economy, according to the minutes.

The minutes indicated that Fed members believed the central bank’s policy of "exceptionally low rates" for "an extended period" is explicitly contingent on the evolution of the economy rather than on the passage of any fixed amount of calendar time." The central bank’s current guidance does not limit the Fed from tightening or maintaining its monetary policy, they said.

Fed members previously said that the use of "extended period" referred to three or four meetings, but the new explanation suggests that the Fed’s language "could legitimately be used until just before tightening is set to start, and thus does not convey much information about the likely start date of Fed tightening," said Barclays Capital economist Dean Maki in a research note.

At the meeting, the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee continued to hold the target for the key interest rate, the federal funds rate, between 0% and 0.25%, and repeated that economic conditions are likely "to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period." The key rate is used as a benchmark for how much banks charge consumers and businesses for loans.

For the second straight meeting, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig voted against the decision to use that language. In the minutes, he reiterated that it would be more appropriate for the Fed to promise "a low level of the federal funds rate for some time."

Such a change, Hoenig said, would allow the Fed to increase that benchmark rate modestly sooner rather than later and avoid "the buildup of future financial imbalances and increase the risk of to longer-run macroeconomic and financial stability."

But Hoenig was alone in his view of altering the language, and the Fed maintained a cautious in its view of the current economic situation.

"Nobody else jumped on the ‘We need to tighten’ bandwagon, and that says a lot," said John Canally, economist at LPL Financial. "There’s not a lot of energy on the committee to raise rates."

Since the last meeting, most economic data, with the exception of the reports on the housing sector, have met or beat expectations, and the Fed will have to acknowledge that, Canally said.

At the meeting, a number of policymakers "pointed out that the economic recovery could not be sustained over time without a substantial pickup in job creation, which they still anticipated but had not yet become evident in the data."

Last week, however, the Labor Department said the economy gained 162,000 jobs in March, more than any other month in the last three years.

Fed members also highlighted concerns about the housing market, where gains are "leveling off" despite government support such as the homebuyer tax credit, and said commercial and industrial real estate markets continue to weaken.

"The housing market is still tenuous. The last thing the Fed wants to do is torpedo any improvements," Canally said. "The Fed does not want to raise rates and be responsible for squashing the recovery and killing the housing market."

But Canally said the market will be listening closely to comments from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke set to be delivered Wednesday in Dallas and Thursday in Washington to understand how the central bank will weigh the recent firm economic data in future policy meetings.  

Source

Teen Xpress, a program offered by the Howard Phillips Center for Children & Families, will be awarded the 2010 Children’s Week Community Innovation Award in Tallahassee on April 12.

The Howard Phillips Center, an advocacy and outreach program, is part of Orlando Health’s Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.

Teen Xpress is a mobile health care unit bringing free physical and mental health care to teens and adolescents who may otherwise not have access to such resources.

United Way of Florida and The Lawton Chiles Foundation designed the Community Innovation awards program and luncheon at the capitol to recognize the collaborative work being done in communities across the state.

Four collaborative projects were reviewed and selected by the independent Southeast Evaluation Association from a statewide pool of applicants. The award winners consist of four or more organizations who worked together to address and solve specific problems in their communities.

The Howard Phillips Center is supported by the Arnold Palmer Medical Center Foundation and serves Central Florida through the following programs: The Developmental Center for Infants & Children/Early Steps, Healthy Families Orange, Orange County Children’s Advocacy Center, the Child Protection Team, the Healing Tree and Teen Xpress.

Source

Peabody Energy Corp. is taking its bid for Macarthur Coal Ltd. to the company’s major shareholders after the Australian coal producer’s board rejected a $3 billion cash takeover bid.

"Peabody’s proposal is highly conditional and does not fully value Macarthur and its significant growth prospects," Macarthur Chairman Keith DeLacy said Wednesday in a statement.

Peabody, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, has rapidly expanded operations in Australia since buying its first mine there six years ago. Last year, the company said it plans to double coal exports from the country by 2014.

The company on Wednesday said it is "disappointed" with the initial rejection and believes Macarthur’s assets and growth prospects are a good fit with its existing Australian operations.

Brisbane-based Macarthur produced about 4.6 million tons of so-called metallurgical coal last year from two Queensland mines and is in the midst of an expansion. The company, which owns 145 million tons of reserves, supplies coal to steel mills in Asia, Europe and Brazil.

Peabody’s offer values Macarthur at about $680 per ton of production and $21 per ton of reserves, according to Jefferies & Co. analyst Michael Dudas.

"We believe the initial bid is the first step in a long, complex negotiating process involving numerous players in the coal and steel industry," Dudas said in a research note.

Peabody said it is currently in discussions with Macarthur’s three largest shareholders, who collectively own 47 percent of the company.

Peabody said its offer is conditional on Macarthur calling off an earlier agreement to purchase rival Gloucester Coal Ltd., which is 88-percent owned by Asian commodities firm Noble Group Ltd.

Macarthur is holding a meeting on April 12 for shareholders to vote on whether to issue shares to complete the Gloucester deal.

Peabody said its bid is 34 percent higher than the price of Macarthur shares to be issued to Noble as part of the Gloucester agreement. It is also higher than a February valuation by an independent expert hired by Macarthur, Peabody said.

Source