Regulators on Friday closed small banks in Iowa and Louisiana, lifting to 90 the number of bank failures in the U.S. this year.
The number of closures has fallen sharply this year as banks have worked their way through the bad debt accumulated in the recession. By this time last year, regulators had shuttered 149 banks.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Polk County Bank, based in Johnston, Iowa, with $91.6 million in assets and $82 million in deposits. It also closed Central Progressive Bank, based in Lacombe, La., with $383.1 million in assets and $347.7 million in deposits.
Grinnell State Bank, based in Grinnell, Iowa, agreed to assume the deposits as well as the loans and other assets of Polk County Bank. New Orleans-based First NBC Bank agreed to acquire all the deposits and $354.4 million of the assets of Central Progressive Bank.
The failure of Polk County Bank is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund $12 million; that of Central Progressive Bank is expected to cost $58.1 million.
Polk County Bank was the first bank in Iowa to fail this year, while Central Progressive Bank was the first Louisiana lender to fail this year.
In all of 2010, regulators seized 157 banks, the most in any year since the savings and loan crisis two decades ago. Those failures cost around $23 billion. The FDIC has said 2010 likely was the high-water mark for bank failures from the Great Recession.
In 2009, there were 140 bank failures that cost the insurance fund about $36 billion, a higher price tag than in 2010 because the banks involved were bigger on average. Twenty-five banks failed in 2008, the year the financial crisis struck with force; only three were closed in 2007.
From 2008 through 2010, bank failures cost the fund $76.8 billion. The FDIC expects failures from 2011 through 2015 to cost $19 billion.
The deposit insurance fund fell into the red in 2009. With failures slowing, the FDIC’s fund balance turned positive in the second quarter of this year; it stood at $3.9 billion as of June 30.
Patricia Ranzini was appointed executive director of St. Anthony’s Charitable Foundation at St. Anthony’s Medical Center.
She will be responsible for strategic direction, oversight and implementation of the foundation’s fund-raising programs and long-range planning.
Ranzini has worked for 12 years in the development field, most recently for the Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club payday advance online. She is a member of the Association of Hospital Philanthropy, the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Women’s Leadership Council of the Humane Society of Missouri.
UPDATED AT 6:50 p.m. with more details.
Die-hard bargain shoppers might want to opt for some coffee after Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Not only are a number of big box and department stores opening at midnight on Thanksgiving, but now most of the shopping malls in the St. Louis region are following suit as well.
“Everybody wants to join the party,” said Marshal Cohen, retail analyst with consulting firm NPD Group. “It’s going to be midnight madness.”
Chesterfield Mall, Mid Rivers Mall, South County Center, St. Clair Square, and West County Center will all open their doors at midnight to accommodate stores that have asked to open at that hour, mall operator CBL & Associates announced Monday.
Victoria’s Secret, Aeropostale, The Limited, Bath and Body Works, and American Eagle are some of the stores that have said they will open at midnight. It will put a complete list of stores that will open at midnight at area malls on its website next week, CBL said.
“It seems to be growing as time goes on,” Sean Phillips, CBL’s regional marketing director, said of the list. “I think everyone feels they need to be open at midnight to be competitive.”
The rest of the stores in CBL malls will open at 5 a.m. Friday - an hour earlier than last year. Some eateries and coffee shops may also open in the middle of the night, too. For example, the Starbucks at West County Center has already said it would open at midnight.
The St. Louis Galleria will officially open at 6 a.m. - also an hour earlier than last year, said Earl Dorsett, manager of the St. Louis Galleria. But the Galleria will unlock the doors and turn on the lights in the mall so stores that want to open at midnight can do so, which is a first for that mall payday loans.
The mall has never opened this early - or been open on Thanksgiving Day - with the exception of the movie theaters, he said.
In recent weeks, a number of big retailers such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, and Kohl’s have said they will open at midnight this year to kick off Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping events of the year.
Walmart will roll out its first round of doorbusters at 10 p.m. Thanksgiving Day. And Toys R Us, which is trying to stay ahead of the pack, said Monday that it will open its stores at 9 p.m.
However, the midnight openings are not sitting well with some employees. A Target employee from Nebraska has started an online petition that has garnered thousands of signatures asking Target to open at 5 a.m. on Black Friday instead of at midnight.
“A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,” the petition says.
But Cohen said he thinks that in this economy, there are a number of employees out there who would be willing to volunteer to work the extra hours to make overtime pay.
He expects the midnight opening to be popular among shoppers who would be up then anyway and would prefer to shop at that hour than to have to wake up before dawn to get the best deals.
Besides, he added, shopping is not necessarily at odds with the spirit of the Thanksgiving, which is a family-oriented holiday.
“Guess what - shopping to some people is a family-centric activity,” he said.
Disarming former Libyan rebels could take months and weapons will not be taken by force, Libya’s new prime minister said in an interview broadcast Friday, signaling a shift from previous pledges of quick action.
Abdurrahim el-Keib also acknowledged that the National Transitional Council, which is to lead Libya to its first free election within eight months, has not yet established full control over the country, but said it is making progress. The NTC declared Libya liberated on Oct. 23, three days after the capture and killing of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
The proliferation of armed ex-rebel militias in Libya and the NTC’s still shaky grip have raised concerns about growing instability during the transition period, which is to end with the election of a national assembly by June.
Thousands of civilians across Libya took up arms during the eight-month war that brought down Gadhafi. Some have returned to their pre-war lives, but others have remained in their fighting units, manning checkpoints and patrolling streets. In recent weeks, there have been reports of fighters using weapons to settle personal scores.
El-Keib, who will run the interim government for the next eight months, told France24 radio Friday that collecting those weapons “is going to take some time.”
“We will not force people to take quick and hasty decisions and actions and come up with some laws that just prevent people from holding arms,” he said. Instead, the government will try to work with the fighters, by offering alternatives, including training and jobs, he said.
“Hopefully, before the eight months end, we will be able to have those armed freedom fighters lay down their arms and go back to their business,” he added.
The head of the NTC, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, said earlier this week that Libya’s interim leaders need quick access to billions of dollars in Gadhafi regime assets, frozen by a number of countries since the start of the war, to be able to disarm fighters and secure weapons.
Citing lack of funds, Abdul-Jalil said his government can’t do much in the interim period to secure weapons sites and munitions depots that were left unguarded and exposed to looting during the war. Libya border officials have reported heavy weapons smuggling into Egypt, and Israel has said some of those arms have reached the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Earlier this week, Libyan officials said they discovered chemical weapons that had previously not been declared by the Gadhafi regime when it pledged to abandon the pursuit of non-conventional weapons.
In the Netherlands, the organization that oversees the global ban on chemical weapons said it will work with Libyan authorities to verify and destroy chemical weapons. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it was told earlier this week of suspected chemical weapons caches beyond the stockpiles earlier declared by Gadhafi.
The organization said Friday that none of Gadhafi’s known chemical arsenal was plundered during the civil war. Libya declared in 2004 it had tons of sulfur mustard and other chemicals used to make chemical weapons.
A year has passed since entrepreneur Kim Harris concluded that the security of a paid professional position with health benefits outweighed the autonomy of operating a mobile dog grooming business.
Counting on the graduate degrees she earned in social work and criminal justice, the East St. Louis resident waded into the job market confident of a return to the full-time workforce.
Harris, 45, now realizes she underestimated the depth of the employment crisis.
“Even my undergraduate degree in education hasn’t helped,” said Harris, who supplements her business income with a part-time job as an aide at a Metro East health care facility. “They’re laying off teachers everywhere, too.”
Officials who track St. Louis economic trends are unfortunately unable to offer much in the way of hope to job-seekers such as Harris, one of 132,345 area residents who are jobless and don’t want to be.
Job creation, they say, has stalled on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the prognosis for early 2012 isn’t much better.
Hiring “is stuck on hold nationally and will probably continue to drift down a little,” said Howard Wall, director of the Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University. “We’re just along for the ride, and there’s not much we can do about it instant credit report.”
Vicki Niederhofer, an economic analyst with the Illinois Department of Employment Security office in Belleville, has seen the jobless rate in her state again creep into double digits after a solid year of improvement.
The Metro East lost 2,700 jobs in the year since September 2010 as the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.1 percent during the 12-month stretch. (Chicago, by contrast, added 17,000 jobs in the same period.)
“The national headwinds are difficult to fight,” Niederhofer said.
A Post-Dispatch survey of the region’s 40 largest employers seems to bear out Niederhofer’s belief that hiring won’t rebound until recession-weary consumers loosen the purse strings.
Less than a third of companies, government agencies and nonprofit organizations said they were planning to expand their workforce by the end of the year.
In employment economics, the past often serves as prologue.
Given that, Niederhofer cites a 2010 baseline survey conducted by her agency to forecast the Metro East jobs with the “highest projected demand” through 2018.
Health care tops the list, followed by office and administrative support, management, food preparation, transportation and production.
Experts say there are 72 million reasons
MADISON COUNTY
Premier Wen Jiabao has promised China’s struggling exporters a stable exchange rate in a move that might fuel tensions with Washington over Beijing’s currency controls as the global economy weakens.
Wen’s pledge, reported by the official Xinhua News Agency and state radio, comes after the U.S. Senate approved a measure to allow higher tariffs on Chinese goods that critics say are unfairly cheap due to an artificially undervalued currency.
Beijing’s exchange rate controls are especially sensitive at a time when other nations are trying to revive growth by boosting exports and complain that a weak Chinese yuan is widening the country’s swollen trade surplus.
Wen’s pledge Friday at a trade fair in southern China came after export growth suffered an unexpectedly steep decline in September, hurt by a fall in sales to Europe amid the continent’s debt crisis.
Wen promised a “basically stable exchange rate,” Xinhua said. He pledged to maintain export-related tax rebates and other support.
U.S. manufacturers complain the yuan is undervalued by up to 40 percent, giving China’s exporters an unfair price advantage and wiping out American jobs. Beijing has allowed the yuan to gain by about 7 percent against the dollar since June 2010 in tightly controlled trading, but that is not as fast as critics want.
The measure approved Tuesday by the Senate would allow Washington to raise tariffs on goods from countries that the U.S. Treasury concludes are manipulating exchange rates for a trade advantage. The bill is not expected to become law because it lacks the support of the leadership of the lower House of Representatives, which has yet to vote on it.
China’s government reacted angrily to the measure, dismissing it as protectionism at a dangerous time for the shaky world economy and warning that trade relations would be damaged if it were allowed to become law.
China’s economy, the world’s second-largest, is relatively robust, with growth forecast by the World Bank of 9.3 percent this year. But weakening exports by Chinese manufacturers that employ millions of people could lead to layoffs and social tensions.
September’s export growth fell to 17.1 percent over a year earlier, down from August’s 24.5 percent, customs data showed Thursday.
JEFFERSON CITY
Chemical manufacturer Solutia Inc. is buying Southwall Technologies Inc., a developer of films and glass products for the automotive and architectural industries, for $113 million.
Town & Country-based Solutia is buying Southwall for $113 million in cash, or $13.60 per share of Southwall’s common stock, the companies announced Friday. Solutia’s tender offer is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter this year. Southwall is based in Palo Alto, Calif.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I believe history will remember Steve Jobs as one of the greatest innovators of all time, the Thomas Edison of the 21st century one hour payday loan.”
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