November 15, 2024

Layoffs and Cutbacks at ‘PBS NewsHour’

Because of declines in support from corporate sponsors, the show’s producer, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, will close the two offices it has outside of the Washington area — in Denver and San Francisco — and lay off most of the employees there. The company, which is based in Arlington, Va., will also eliminate several of what it calls “noncritical production positions” at its main office.

The cuts were described in an internal memorandum on Monday from Linda Winslow, the executive producer of the “NewsHour,” and Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., the chief executive of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. They said the reorganization, coming at a time of tightened purse strings for public media, would “improve the long-term sustainability of the ‘NewsHour.’ ”

Some other savings will be achieved by leaving positions unfilled and by streamlining technical operations.

Reaction to the plan was mixed, both among “NewsHour” staff members and viewers on social media Web sites. Many expressed sadness about the layoffs and concern about the quality of news coverage, while others suggested the “NewsHour” producers were right to trim excess spending.

Earlier this year, public television employees who were not authorized to speak publicly told The New York Times that the production company was facing a shortfall of up to $7 million, a quarter of its $28 million overall budget, in the fiscal year that ends this month. The company’s budget outlook for the next fiscal year is unknown.  But a spokeswoman for the “NewsHour” acknowledged that the reorganization, which will take place over several months starting in July, would help balance the budget.

The spokeswoman said that about 10 employees, of 100 in all, would be affected.

Ms. Winslow and Mr. Jones said in their memo that the cuts were a result of, among other things, “a steady drop in corporate revenue.”

The shuttering of the offices in Denver and San Francisco will end an era for the “NewsHour,” which long ago also had offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. To make up for the loss of reporting staff outside the Washington area, “along with sending our own teams in the field, we anticipate building new relationships with a variety of locally based freelance video journalists around the country,” Ms. Winslow and Mr. Jones wrote. “Under no circumstances do we intend to abandon the minidocumentary reports that have become so critical to our broadcast. The ‘NewsHour’ remains committed to delivering the same kind of in-depth reporting our viewers and supporters expect from us.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/media/pbs-newshour-plans-layoffs-as-it-closes-offices.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Chinese G.D.P. for First Quarter Shows Signs of Slowdown

HONG KONG — The Chinese economic recovery lost some of its momentum during the first quarter of this year, official data released on Monday showed, surprising analysts who had expected growth to accelerate on the back of ample credit, strong infrastructure spending and firm exports.

The economy expanded by just 7.7 percent during the first three months of the year, compared with a year earlier, short of the 8 percent that economists polled by Reuters had projected, and slower than during the previous three months, when gross domestic product rose 7.9 percent year-on-year.

Industrial output data for March also underlined the fading momentum. Growth dropped to 8.9 percent compared with March 2012, well below expectations.

The spokesman for the Chinese statistics bureau, Sheng Laiyun, played down the shortfall.

“Over all in the first quarter the economy had a steady start and has advanced in a stable way,” Mr. Sheng said at a news conference in Beijing. “Generally, it’s operating within the range of 7.4 percent to 7.9 percent — that is, steady growth.”

China’s industrialization and urbanization would remain powerful engines for relatively rapid growth, Mr. Sheng said.

Analysts had widely expected China’s economy, the world’s second biggest after the United States, to have picked up more steam during the first months of the year, as a tide of credit flowed into the economy, and government-mandated investment in infrastructure projects picked up.

In fact, the growing scale of credit has begun to worry an increasing number of analysts, who warn that the resulting buildup of debt bears substantial risks, including asset price bubbles and potentially destabilizing defaults.

Fitch Ratings last week expressed concerns about the long-term consequences for China’s financial stability over the country’s huge buildup in debt, particularly borrowing by local governments.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/business/global/chinese-gdp-for-first-quarter-shows-signs-of-slowdown.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bucks Blog: Many Relying on Home Equity for Retirement

A home for sale in Hollywood, Fla.Getty Images A home for sale in Hollywood, Fla.

Even though the housing market has not recovered, nearly half of older working Americans expect to use equity in their homes to help finance their retirement, a new survey finds.

Roughly 47 percent of employed Americans ages 50 to 70 said they were relying on equity in their homes, the Retirement Check-In survey from Ameriprise Financial found. The finding is surprising, an accompanying report notes, because housing values in many parts of the country remain below the level they were before the recession. Also, 37 percent of homeowners say they’re not on track to pay off their mortgage before they retire.

More people said they were relying on home equity now compared with before the recession, the report finds. When participants were asked whether, before the downturn, they had expected to rely on home equity to help pay for their retirement, just 39 percent said yes.

While the reason for that shift isn’t entirely clear, the report says it is plausible that the loss in value of other investments during the recession may have been so steep that many older workers feel they have no other alternative, even if their homes are worth less than they used to be.

“My hypothesis is that people didn’t think they were going to need to tap into equity because they thought they would have sufficient assets,” said Suzanna de Baca, vice president of wealth strategies at Ameriprise Financial. “Now, despite the fact they have reduced home equity, the shortfall between what they’ve saved and what they need is greater.”

The finding is typical of a “perplexing disparity” between Americans’ emotional outlook for retirement and the reality they face, the report said.

For instance, nearly three-quarters indicated that their dream retirement included taking “really nice vacations.” Yet, when asked if they would be able to afford the essentials in retirement, fewer than half said they felt “extremely” or “very” confident. And just 38 percent said they were confident they could afford the extras they had been anticipating in retirement, like traveling and hobbies.

The telephone survey included 1,000 employed Americans age 50 to 70, with investable assets of at least $100,000 (including employer-based retirement plans, but not real estate) and who are planning to retire at some point. Koski Research conducted the survey on behalf of Ameriprise Financial from Oct. 31 and Nov. 14, 2012. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

What role does home equity play in your retirement plans?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/many-relying-on-home-equity-for-retirement/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Wealth Matters: In Commodities World, Safe and Secure Sometimes Isn’t

It wasn’t supposed to work that way. Commodities firms are required to keep clients’ money separate from the firm’s capital.

In the commodities world, these segregated accounts had been seen as stronger than the deposit insurance offered by banks that are members of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the protection on securities, like stocks and bonds, given by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.

But regulators suspect that MF Global did not keep its clients’ money separate in its chaotic waning days, using some customers’ money, they believe, to meet its own obligations. And if the firm violated the rule requiring segregated accounts, investors say they are now concerned about the viability of commodities trading as it has been conducted in the United States for more than a century.

“If they’re not going to uphold segregated funds, this can happen again tomorrow to anyone,” said Paula Pierce, a commodities lawyer in Virginia. “The question is whether anyone is going to do anything about it.”

R. David Gary, a spokesman for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which was MF Global’s main regulator, said the commission planned to review the rule governing segregated accounts at a meeting on Dec. 5. Michael Shore, a spokesman for the CME Group, which owns the main exchanges where MF Global traded, said: “It’s important to understand this was an unprecedented situation for our industry and that the shortfall in total customer segregated funds occurred at the firm level, not at the clearinghouse level.”

The regulators attribute some of the delay in returning clients’ money to what the court-appointed trustee has described as sloppy bookkeeping at MF Global, which has made it difficult to find what is left and where it is. But lawyers representing clients who have lost access to their money do not accept this argument. They say that segregated accounts are sacrosanct and that the money in them should have been immediately returned to their clients.

“It hasn’t worked out well for anyone yet, even the people who had positions move over early on,” said Timothy Butler, a partner at Tibbetts Keating Butler in Darien, Conn., who represents 10 clients with accounts ranging from $6,000 to several million dollars. “I had one person who got no margin transferred and was virtually wiped out. He had a $250,000 gold position, and he only got back $50,000 after it was liquidated.”

Nor are the issues raised by the MF Global bankruptcy simply about the safety and security of money in segregated accounts at commodities brokerage houses. They also raise questions about the safety of investments at other types of firms.

ARE YOU PROTECTED? Just because there is protection in place does not mean you will have access to your money quickly — or that anyone will care if this poses a hardship.

Jerome Beazley, president of TimeTech Capital Management, a commodities trading adviser in Esmont, Va., had all of his clients’ money with MF Global. He may eventually get his clients’ money back, but until then he is out of business.

He declined to give the exact amount at issue but said he had put it all into cash a few weeks before MF Global collapsed. But because only money backing open futures positions has been transferred so far, he has no access to the money.

He said he was upset that the trustee did not immediately move the commodities accounts to another firm, as happened when other clearinghouses he used went bankrupt. “There is a wall between the creditors and the segregated funds,” he said. “That’s like vault money. When you touch it, you’ve destroyed the credibility of Wall Street.”

Jack Lucentini, a science writer, has also been hurt by what he considered a safe play — having extra cash in his MF Global account. “I had this obsession with never having to get a margin call,” he said. “I thought I’d be able to sleep like a baby by having so much money in there.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e265946e69508b990260b854d7fdbd32

Modest Expectations Urged on Deficit Cuts

The report from the nonpartisan budget office underscores the high stakes for a special 12-member Congressional committee created to figure out by December how to achieve up to $1.5 trillion of the $2.4 trillion in maximum 10-year savings promised by the deal.

It comes as Mr. Obama and Democrats, like many economists, are calling for a mix of larger long-term deficit reduction measures with immediate additional job creation measures. While the latter would add to deficits in the short term, proponents argue that they would prevent another recession and avoid the associated costs in lost revenues and safety-net spending. But Republicans oppose any stimulus measures or long-term increases in tax revenues.

The budget office, in its annual summer snapshot of the nation’s fiscal health, projected annual deficits from the 2012 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, through 2021 totaling $3.5 trillion. That is just over half of the $6.7 trillion shortfall it forecast in March.

About two-thirds of the difference reflected projected savings from the bipartisan deficit deal; the rest was due to technical and economic revisions. The lower deficits would leave the nation’s accumulated public debt at $14.5 trillion in 2021, or 61 percent of the gross domestic product — a level that many economists consider the maximum level of debt that is sustainable in a growing economy.

But such projections “understate the budgetary challenges facing the federal government in the coming years,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the budget office, wrote on its Web site.

Annual deficits would be $5 trillion higher for the decade, or a total of $8.5 trillion, assuming the White House and Congress continue several policies as in years past — keeping the lower income-tax rates of 2001 and 2003, which already were extended by two years last December; adjusting the alternative minimum tax annually so it does not hit middle-class taxpayers, and blocking a mandated cut in Medicare payments to doctors. The result would be deficits averaging 4.3 percent of gross domestic product instead of 1.8 percent, the budget office said; economists generally say annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product.

The higher deficits would bring total public debt through 2021 to 82 percent of gross domestic product rather than 61 percent, higher than in any year since 1948 when debt peaked after World War II.

Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats have called for ending after 2012 the Bush-era rates on annual taxable income above $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals. That would save about $1 trillion over the decade, including interest. But they want to extend a one-year payroll tax cut, some business tax cuts and emergency unemployment aid.

The budget office as expected said the deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, would be $1.3 trillion.

At 8.5 percent of gross domestic product, it will be the third consecutive deficit exceeding $1 trillion; as a percentage of the economy, the three deficits spanning the end of the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration are the largest of the past 65 years.

That “stems in part from the long shadow cast on the U.S. economy by the financial crisis and the recent recession,” Mr. Elmendorf wrote. “Although economic output began to expand again two years ago, the pace of the recovery has been slow, and the economy remains in a severe slump.”

The current deficit could be the peak, but only for the short term. The budget office repeated a longstanding warning: While annual shortfalls will decline through the decade — presuming the economy recovers — deficits will climb after 2021 to unsupportable levels as the aging population and rising health care costs drive up spending for Medicare and Medicaid.

Each party seized on the latest report to buttress its position, evidence of the partisan divide facing the special House and Senate budget committee.

“The C.B.O. outlook underscores the need for the joint committee to propose a plan to help put America back to work, coupled with a blueprint to reduce the long-term deficit,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a Democratic member of the panel.

Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and the House majority leader, said, “Despite a nearly trillion dollar so-called stimulus program, this administration’s policies have resulted in anemic growth, record unemployment and underemployment, and millions of Americans remain out of work.” All the Democrats offer, he added, “is lofty rhetoric, tax hikes and more of the same stimulus spending.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1f1ef0054a34a539efc740ae4671cde7