Starbucks Corp. has opened its first store in Hungary.
The Seattle-based coffee giant (NASDAQ: SBUX) created a joint venture with Amrest, a restaurant operator in in Central and Eastern Europe, to manage the store, located in Budapest.
“We have great respect for the longstanding and colorful Hungarian coffeehouse culture and are excited to become a part of the community,” said Vladan Armus, Starbucks Brand President for Central and Eastern Europe, in a statement.
Full Starbucks press release below.
BUDAPEST, Hungary–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Starbucks Coffee has opened its first store in Hungary in the lively and popular WestEnd Mall.
AmRest Kavezo KFT, a joint-venture company between Starbucks Coffee International, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starbucks Coffee Company (NASDAQ: SBUX), and AmRest Sp. z o.o., a wholly-owned subsidiary of AmRest Holdings S.E. (AmRest, WSE: EAT), will manage the daily operations.
“We have great respect for the longstanding and colorful Hungarian coffeehouse culture and are excited to become a part of the community,” said Vladan Armus, Starbucks Brand President for Central and Eastern Europe. “Over the past few years, coffeehouses have regained their popularity in Hungary, and we look forward to introducing our customers to our high quality coffees and the unique Starbucks Experience.
“WestEnd Mall is a vibrant and dynamic location in the heart of Budapest where people love to shop and meet,” continued Armus. "We think it will be an ideal location for people to enjoy a place where they can rest, relax and chat with friends over a great cup of coffee.”
Starbucks and AmRest have worked together since 2008 opening stores together in the Czech Republic and Poland. They now operate 16 stores across the three markets.
“We are excited to open our first store in Hungary and are committed to being part of the community, a good neighbor and a force for bringing our partners (employees), customers and their communities together,” said Buck Hendrix, president of Starbucks Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Our expansion into Hungary with our trusted partner AmRest is another positive step forward in growing our presence in markets that have a longstanding coffeehouse tradition throughout Central and Eastern Europe.”
Customers in Budapest will be able to enjoy Starbucks full range of offerings including hot and cold beverages made from 100% Fairtrade certified espresso, brewed coffee, and a full range of Tazo Teas. Starbucks will also offer a selection of 16 different varieties of the world’s finest whole bean arabica coffees sourced from farms across Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific.
Starbucks will offer traditional coffeehouse fare like cakes, muffins, donuts, sandwiches and salads. Exclusive to Starbucks Hungary will be a selection of local favorites including Reform Triangle Sandwiches, Sausage Sandwiches and Pick Salami Sandwiches. Starbucks Hungary is very proud to feature Cheese Pogácsa and Almond Nougat Cake baked by the treasured local patisserie, Gerbeaud Confectionery.
Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company has been committed to ethically sourcing and roasting the highest quality arabica coffee in the world. Today, with stores around the globe, the company is the premier roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in the world. Through our unwavering commitment to excellence and our guiding principles, we bring the unique Starbucks Experience to life for every customer through every cup. To share in the experience, please visit us in our stores or online at www.starbucks.com.
AmRest is the largest independent restaurant operator in Central and Eastern Europe. It manages KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, Applebee’s, freshpoint and Rodeo Drive sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia. The company will operate Starbucks coffeehouses in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. For more information, please visit www.amrest.eu.
No faxing fast cash advance gets you cash fast and easily.
BERLIN — A dark cloud has settled over the world’s financial markets, as growing numbers of people conclude that the debt crisis in Europe could hammer global growth — and even bring back recession barely a year after a patchy recovery took hold.
Government officials — whose job it is to boost confidence — downplay that risk, but many economists are warning that a much-feared "double dip" recession could be starting from Europe.
It would be the next ugly chapter in the global financial and economic turmoil that began three years ago. And now as then, what is striking is the inter-connectedness of everything — how near-default in Greece and weeks of dithering in Germany have affected commodities such as oil and gold and, with demand and confidence waning, have bludgeoned stock markets around the world in a way that rattles ordinary people saving for retirement from Korea to California.
In 2007, the bad debt connected to repackaged subprime mortgages started undermining banks and hedge funds, and by early 2008 confidence in the system was slipping fast. This time it is the exposure of banks everywhere to sovereign debt — the IOUs of governments — whose value has been falling for months.
The sheer size of the European economy is a factor, said Mauro F. Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania. "If European demand goes down, global growth will slow down," he said.
"A European economy that lags is not necessarily enough to put the world economy back into recession," Nicholas Colas, ConvergEx Group chief market strategist, said. "But a European economy that cannot stabilize its currency and capital markets certainly will push the global economy back into the red.
"A double dip is a possibility."
It is a daunting prospect, because having already deployed their best countermeasures — stimulus spending and central bank interest rate cuts — governments everywhere may be out of ammunition.
Stephen Lewis, a London-based economist with Monument Securities, spoke for many of the pessimists Friday after a week of market turmoil in Europe when he saw "no guarantee that the upswing in the global economy from 2009’s low point will be sustained."
At the heart of the crisis are fears that indebted eurozone governments will be unable to pay what they owe. Those fears have sent the prices of government bonds — many of them held by big banks in Germany and France — plummeting. Europe also faces low growth prospects because governments must cut back on spending to pay down heavy debt loads payday loan lenders in states.
If banks in Europe and beyond suffer losses on marked-down government bonds, this would then make them afraid to lend the money that businesses need to operate and expand, choking off growth — a replay, in a sense, of the freezing of credit markets after the Sept. 2008 collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, which led to a worldwide recession. The global economy shrank by 0.6 percent in 2009, its first dip since World War II.
"If sovereign debt concerns are accompanied by worries over bank liquidity any more significant than those currently influencing the credit market, another dip in world economic activity would seem a sure thing," Lewis said.
As fear spreads, stocks and the price of oil, both signs of expectations for future economic growth, have been drawn into the downdraft. And gold, traditionally a safe haven, has hit ominous all-time highs.
Most of the world’s leading stock markets are below where they started the year as investors revise down their growth expectations for the global economy.
Reflecting the optimism that held sway until recently, the IMF slightly raised in April its 2010 global growth forecast to 4.2 percent, although eurozone growth was forecast at only 1 percent. Now even that looks optimistic.
World markets have always affected each other, but instant and constant connectivity and real-time trading and instant information have taken things to a new level; bad news in Milan can trigger instant selloffs in Tokyo or Chicago.
A sell-off in the stock market this week signaled, among other things, a belief that the economy is headed for a slowdown later this year, after having expanded by nearly 12 percent in the first quarter from the same quarter the year before.
Daniel Tarullo, a governor with the U.S. Federal reserve, said the direct effect on U.S. banks of losses on exposure to overextended governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy "would be small." But if problems were to spread more broadly through Europe, U.S. banks would face larger losses as the value of traded assets dropped and loan delinquencies mounted.
Neil Mackinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital in London, said it would be a mistake to think the problems on Europe’s periphery represented only a local crisis.
"The problems in the eurozone debt markets, which many people thought was a regional problem, has morphed into a major global problem," Mackinnon said.
Dr. David Poplack has been awarded a $953,000 grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Initiative of Texas to expand the Passport for Care program for pediatric cancer survivors.
Poplack, professor of pediatric oncology at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Texas Children’s Cancer Center, helped develop the web-based program designed to guide health care for pediatric cancer survivors.
He will use the grant to expand the program to 12 treatment centers in Texas, including in Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley and north Texas.
Launched in October 2008, more than 1,000 patients have been enrolled in the program, which is currently used at Texas Children’s Hospital’s Cancer Center.
The CPRIT grant also includes a research component. A series of studies will be conducted to examine the current standard of care and follow-up information survivors are getting, and how the implementation of Passport for Care will improve that low fee pay day loans.
More than 75 percent of pediatric cancer patients are cured; however many have late effects of their treatment than can be serious or even life-threatening.
“Passport for Care provides the physician with a detailed summary of the survivor's treatment and individualized guidelines for their follow-up screening. It essentially makes every physician a survivor expert,” Poplack said in a statement.
Passport for Care was also developed by Dr. Marc Horowitz, professor of pediatrics hematology-oncology at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Michael Fordis, director of BCM's Center for Collaborative and Interactive Technologies.
The percentage of workers with virtually no savings is growing, and the outlook for a financially stable retirement is dismal, according to a report released last week.
In 2010, 27 percent of workers have less than $1,000 stashed away, compared with 20 percent in 2009, according to the annual Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Of the workers with some form of savings, 54 percent said they had less than $25,000. The same percentage said they needed at least $500,000 for retirement. But just 46 percent have calculated how much they need in retirement.
The nonprofit institute, along with market research firm Mathew Greenwald and Associates, surveyed 1,153 U.S. workers and retirees ages 25 and up in January.
Fewer workers have saved at all — 69 percent, compared with 75 percent in 2009 — and even fewer said they were currently doing so. Just 16 percent of workers said they were very confident in their ability to save enough — the second-lowest level in the survey’s 20-year history.
But 32 percent of workers said they were very confident in their ability to invest their savings, up from 24 percent in 2009. More than half said they were somewhat confident. And with the struggling economy, unstable job market and roller-coaster stock market, 24 percent of workers said they had postponed their retirement age, up from the 14 percent in 2009. A third of workers now anticipate retiring after they turn 65.
Controversy has accompanied Verizon Wireless' latest Droid phone ad that mocks Apple Inc.'s iPhone, but never actually mentions its rival.
The ad starts with a group of mesmerized people looking at a phone that is behind a glass case and asks, "Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?”
Then it says the Motorola Droid, which uses Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system, is "racehorse-duct-taped-to-a-Scud-missile fast."
It also shows what some critics are portraying as an anti-gay image of a group of fashionably dressed (and partially undressed) male statues getting hit with tomatoes.
The ad can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here.
A post by Kara Swisher on the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog slams the ad and is headlined, "Is the new droid ad anti-women and anti-gay or just plain idiotic? Actually all three!
VentureBeat rated the ad "just plain clueless," especially for "likening the Droid phone’s speed to that of the Scud missile, a not-very-fast Russian rocket used by Saddam Hussein’s regime no faxing 1 hour payday loans. A Scud killed 28 Americans at an airbase in Saudi Arabia in 1991. Other Scuds have killed lots more civilians in the Middle East."
Not all of the reviews have been negative, with many focusing on the cool look and humor of the spot.
But while saying he liked the ad, Stuart Turton of PC Pro wrote, that "when stripped to its barebones (the ad) actually says that the Droid is uglier than an iPhone, and… erm… well, that’s it. Funnily enough, it appears that by criticising the iPhone for placing style before substance, Verizon’s done exactly that."
Verizon's other Droid ads resulted in legal challenges by the iPhone's exclusive U.S. service provider, AT&T Inc., which were recently dropped. In those, Verizon took aim at AT&T's service and likened the iPhone to a misfit toy in a holiday-themed video.
Shares in banks, builders and companies part-owned in the Middle East fell around the world on Thursday and investors sought safety in government bonds on worries about Dubai’s ability to pay its debts.
Sterling fell as exposure focused on UK banks, and euro zone government bond futures hit their highest level since late April, breaking out of the trading range that has been in place since June as risk aversion prompted by the crisis kicked in.
“The Dubai story is weighing heavily on stock markets and people are looking to safe-havens so there’s some flight to quality again,” said Charles Berry, a trader at LBBW.
The euro broke above 91 pence for the first time in a month to hit a high of 91.29 pence.
“There are concerns regarding the extent of the exposure of the UK banks to Dubai, hence sterling is coming under pressure,” said Ian Stannard, currency strategist at BNP Paribas.
European bank shares fell over 3 percent on concern about potential exposure. Dubai said on Wednesday that two of its key firms, Nakheel and Dubai World, plan to delay repayment on billions of dollars of debt.
Companies where Middle Eastern investors own big stakes, such as the London Stock Exchange were also hit by concern the holdings could be cut to meet obligations at home.
By 1020 GMT the DJ Stoxx European bank index .SX7P was down 3.5 percent at 221.7 points.
The fall was led by HSBC, Standard Chartered, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, whose shares all fell over 4 percent.
In Seoul, shares in construction issues fell, with Samsung C&T leading losses as investor concerns focused on Dubai’s once booming construction sector.
A Samsung C&T spokesman said that the company was currently working on a $350 million project awarded by Nakheel in 2007.
“So far, we have not had any problems with the project,” he said.
Shares in Hyundai Engineering & Construction were down 4.41 percent and Samsung Engineering fell 2.16 percent as of 0458 GMT.
Nakheel’s NAKHD.UL Islamic bond prices extended losses, falling 12 points to 72, their lowest since February, according to Reuters data.
DEBT DELAY
Efforts by US regulators to move privately traded derivatives to central clearing houses are unlikely to be a cure-all for the industry, and may increase systemic risk if exposures are dispersed among too many counterparties.
Regulators around the world are pushing for the majority of contracts in the $450 trillion over-the-counter derivatives markets to be cleared through central counterparties, as futures and options contracts have been for years, in order to reduce the systemic risk posed by the web of connections between large financial institutions.
If there are too many clearing houses though, regulators run the risk of increasing the systemic risk posed by OTC derivatives trading, said Darrell Duffie, professor of finance at Stanford University.
“A clearing house through its opportunity to net across many asset classes and dealers can lead to a very substantial reduction in risk and also a very big increase in efficiency,” Duffie said.
“However, that only works if you have very few clearing houses,” he said. “Many clearing houses could be very bad. You would have increased counterparty exposure and excessive use of collateral, with multiple points of failure. This could add systemic risk.”
Clearing the majority of derivatives through one counterparty is advantageous as market participants can offset all contracts in which they owe or are owed money against each other, a process known as netting.
The amount of collateral needed to back their exposures would also be radically reduced in this scenario.
Creating too many clearing houses, however, increases the amount of exposure a participant could have to a failed dealer, as it would be spread across several entities payday cash loans.
There are currently at least five clearing houses in the U.S. and Europe that clear or plan to clear credit default swaps, contracts that are used to insure against a borrower defaulting on their debt.
Other clearing houses clear, or plan to clear, other derivatives, including contracts in the $414 trillion OTC interest rate derivatives market.
REDUCING RISKS
Debate has increased recently over whether central clearing will successfully reduce risk posed by OTC derivatives, as some participants fret that difficulties in determining appropriate capital requirements for certain contracts could make concentrating exposures in clearing houses risky.
To some, CDS contracts are too risky in or outside of central counterparties.
David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, said at a recent investment conference that CDSs cannot be made safer and should be banned, citing the “anti-social” incentives to let companies fail that may motivate protection holders who also own corporate debt.
“The reform proposal to create a CDS clearing house does nothing more than maintain private profits and socialized risks by moving the counterparty risk from the private sector to a newly created too-big-to-fail entity,” he said.
Dow Chemical Co and Shenhua Group, China’s largest coal miner, will reportedly move ahead with their planned $10 billion coal-to-chemical project in Shaanxi province after a delay of at least one year.
Top executives from the companies, senior officials in Shaanxi province and representatives from the U.S. Embassy in China attended a cornerstone laying ceremony on November 3, the China Chemical Industry News reported on Thursday.
The Yulin project in northern Shaanxi aimed to install 23 units that include a 3.32 million tonne-per-year methanol facility for ethylene and propylene, which are used for making various plastics and chemical products.
“The feasibility study of the project has entered the stage of applying for an approval from the central government,” the newspaper said, citing an unnamed local government official advanced payday loan.
The feasibility study was previously planned to be completed in 2008.
An assistant president with Shenhua who is based in Beijing declined any knowledge of the project, and officials at Dow Chemical in China could not immediately be reached.
Dow sold off $3.4 billion in assets this year to boost its bottom line and reduce debt. The chemical firm also cut costs by laying off thousands of workers and shutting several plants.
Shenhua is the parent of Hong Kong-listed China Shenhua Energy.
(Reporting by Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Ken Wills)
Last time we checked in with Debra Killian, the co-founder of Charter Oak Lending Group in Danbury, Conn. was fighting for her company’s life.
In 2004, 10 employees — or one-third of the mortgage broker’s staff — left to work for CTX Mortgage, a much larger rival. Killian claimed the employees stole 150 pending loans, worth nearly $1 million in fees, along with customer lists and boxes of confidential files. Between 2004 and 2005, Charter Oak’s revenues plummeted from more than $3.5 million to $300,000.
Charter Oak sued CTX and the 10 defectors, claiming conspiracy, unfair trade practices and misappropriation of trade secrets. Four years and some $500,000 in legal bills later, the verdict arrived in July: Charter Oak lost on all counts.
"It was a complete shock," says Killian. "We lost everything that took 10 years to build in one month, because one company stole it. How is that not illegal?"
In his opinion, Connecticut Superior Court judge Vincent Roche wrote that the individual defendants, "independent contractors and ‘at will’ employees not under any contractual restraints with the plaintiff, could seek whatever employment opportunities were available in the marketplace without being conspiratorial about it."
Killian claims that the defendants, who received W-2s and benefits and did not hold their own valid licenses or insurance, were employees, not independent contractors — a point that has driven Charter Oak to appeal the case payday advance.
"The fact that the judge called them ‘at will’ employees and also ‘independent contractors’ — which are mutually exclusive — showed an analysis that was flawed," says New Haven attorney William Gallagher, who is handling the appeal.
A spokesperson for Pulte Homes, which merged with CTX Mortgage’s former parent company, told Fortune Small Business in an e-mail: "We are pleased the judge ruled in our favor in finding that there is no valid claim against CTX Mortgage under Connecticut law. We strongly believe we did nothing wrong and will continue to vigorously defend that position in court throughout the appeal process."
The lesson for other small businesses? Get your paperwork in order.
"Charter Oak didn’t have confidentiality agreements and noncompete contracts," says Milford, Conn., attorney Tim Bishop, who represented Charter Oak in the original lawsuit. "They were a typical small business that grew faster than expected."
President Obama has been steadfast in his pledge that he won’t raise taxes on those making less than $250,000. But that doesn’t mean only high-income households will be subject to higher taxes.
An increasing number of influential Democrats and fiscal-policy experts have signaled that lawmakers will have to get a handle on the deficit. And they recommend seriously considering the creation of a value-added tax (VAT) on top of the federal income tax.
That could mean more money out of everyone’s pockets when buying virtually anything — sweaters, school books, furniture, pottery classes, dinners out.
A VAT is tax on consumption similar to a national sales tax. But it’s not just paid at the cash register. It’s levied at every stage of production. So all businesses involved in making a product or performing a service would pay a VAT. And then the end-user — such as the retail customer — ponies up as well.
No one is suggesting raising taxes or creating new ones before the economy stabilizes.
But Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who heads President Obama’s tax reform panel, is advocating a little advance planning.
When it comes to getting control of the country’s debt burden, "I think if we can’t do it on the cost side, we’ve got to go on the revenue side. And it’s too early to do it, but it’s not too early to begin wondering," Volcker said Wednesday in an televised interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose. "You’ve got talk about some tax that hits consumption," said Volcker. "Value-added is one."
John Podesta, the head of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress who headed President Obama’s transition team, also raised the issue of a VAT this week. He noted that the only way to stabilize the debt situation is to reduce spending, reduce the growth in health care costs and add new revenue.
"As progressives we need to debate the policy merits and likelihood of enacting a range of options — including designing a small and more progressive value-added tax, changes to the corporate tax code, and taxing-upper income earners beyond reversing the Bush tax cuts," Podesta said in a statement.
Podesta’s organization, meanwhile, said in a report, "Responsible people know that additional revenue has to be part of the mix even if they believe in lower taxes in general. And those who believe that government investments and spending are critical to our economic and social well-being … recognize that tax increases on the wealthiest and corporations are not going to solve the whole problem."
Where things stand now
President Obama has proposed closing corporate tax loopholes and increasing the tax bite on upper-income households by letting most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire for families making more than $250,000.
He has also proposed making those cuts permanent for everyone else — which would cost federal coffers roughly $2 trillion in foregone tax revenue over 10 years.
Just how hard would it be to lean only on the top 5% of taxpayers to pay for everything the country has to do in the next 10 years?
"You’d have to hit them hard, raising their top marginal rates by as much as 30 percentage points," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. In other words, instead of a top income tax rate of 39.6%, it would have to kiss up to 70%.
Rather than such draconian measures, experts say the most effective way to attack annual deficits is through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes.
In theory, having a VAT might let lawmakers lower personal and corporate income tax rates.
But if the rate of the VAT is set relatively low — say at 5% — and if the rate of government spending continues apace, that might not raise enough revenue to make lower income tax rates a possibility, said Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, a public policy research group.
"If we vigorously control spending growth or are willing to tolerate a significant, although lower deficit, there would be something left over for tax cuts," Penner said.
Currently, the notion of a VAT is "a non-starter from a political perspective," said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, at a Center for American Progress conference this week.
Democrats say it’s regressive, meaning it would hit lower-income people hardest since they tend to spend all of their income on consumption purchases that could be subject to the VAT. Low-tax advocates, such as conservative Republicans, see a VAT — on top of the current tax system — as harmful.
But given the depth of the nation’s fiscal needs, there aren’t many attractive options.
"Tax rates could be raised in the existing system, but that would be extremely inefficient," said Penner in a paper about the VAT. "Tax reform might raise revenues more efficiently, but that is excruciatingly difficult politically."
"That leaves the possibility of a brand new tax, and a VAT is a very likely candidate," he added.
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