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Alpha Natural Resources Inc. is buying Massey Energy Co., the operator of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed last spring.

Alpha is paying $7.1 billion in cash and stock for Massey, the nation’s fourth-largest coal producer by revenue. Massey has struggled with two money-losing quarters since the explosion in the Upper Big Branch mine. It operates 19 mining complexes in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Alpha is offering 1.025 share of its stock for each share of Massey, plus $10 per share in cash. Together, that represents a bid of $69.33 per share, a 21 percent premium over Massey’s closing share price Friday.

A sale of Richmond, Va.-based Massey was expected after the retirement last month of Don Blankenship, the company’s CEO. He was the strongest advocate for remaining an independent company on Massey’s board.

Recent reports have suggested that Massey was also being sought by global steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal SA.

Abingdon, Va.-based Alpha is the leading U.S. producer of metallurgical coal used to make steel, while ArcelorMittal already owns several metallurgical coal mines in Appalachia flexcheck cash advance.

The April 2010 explosion is the subject of civil and criminal investigations. On Friday, Massey rejected nearly every part of the federal government’s theory on what caused the deadly explosion. The company doesn’t believe that worn shearer bits, broken water sprayers or an excessive buildup of coal dust contributed to the blast.

Instead, Massey continues to argue there was a sudden inundation of natural gases from a crack in the floor that overwhelmed what it insists were good air flow and other controls that should have contained the blast. It acknowledged the shearing machine that cuts the coal may somehow have ignited the gas but said the company’s own investigators haven’t determined how. Massey won’t issue its own report on the explosion until after state and federal investigators release theirs.

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Honeywell International Inc. said Friday its fourth-quarter profit more than doubled, mainly due to accounting adjustments, and disclosed it has agreed to sell its automotive group that makes Fram oil filters and Prestone antifreeze for about $950 million to the private equity firm Rank Group.

The company said market conditions have improved and raised 2011 financial guidance.

Its shares slipped 92 cents to $55 in pre-market trading.

The technology and manufacturing company reported net income rose to $369 million, or 47 cents per share, in the last three months of 2010 from $163 million, or 20 cents per share, a year ago.

Excluding a hefty accounting adjustment related to pensions, earnings were 87 cents per share. That beat 86 cents per share expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue rose 12 percent to $9.04 billion from $8.07 billion a year ago and handily beat the $8.84 billion analysts expected.

The company expects to close its CPG automotive group sale in the third quarter. The business, based in Danbury, Conn., has more than 2,000 employees and revenue of about $1 billion in 2010. Its other brands are Autolite spark plugs and Holts car care products.

“While CPG is a good business, it doesn’t fit with our portfolio of differentiated, global technologies,” said Chairman and CEO Dave Cote, in a statement.

Meanwhile, Cote said market conditions improved during the fourth quarter and full year, with investments contributing to growth, along with new customers and new products.

The company’s aerospace unit saw a 6 percent boost in revenue to $2 paydayloan.83 billion because of higher commercial volumes, along with military and government sales.

The automation and control solutions unit saw a 15 percent boost in revenue to $3.91 billion during the quarter, citing general industrial recovery and new product introduction. The company said it introduced new products including a wireless gas detector, services that enable video viewing on smart phones and barcode scanning technology.

Meanwhile, transportation system revenue rose 18 percent to $1.15 billion while specialty material sales rose 12 percent to $1.15 billion.

For the full year, the company reported net income of $2.02 billion, or $2.59 per share, up from $1.5 billion, or $2.05 per share, in 2009. Revenue rose to $33.37 billion from $30.91 billion.

“The year saw progressively improved market conditions, with great execution across our businesses resulting in robust sales growth and record segment margins and cash flow,” Cote said

He said the company is seeing a boost in orders along with a boost in the global economy and is confident for more than 20 percent in earnings growth in 2011.

In 2011, the company expects profit between $3.60 and $3.80 per share, up from prior guidance of $3.50 to 3.70 per share. It reaffirmed sales guidance of $35 billion to $36 billion. Analysts expect profit of about $3.77 per share on $35.74 billion in revenue.

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The Swiss franc’s ascent leaves the country’s ski resorts bracing themselves for the worst season in almost a decade as leaders gather in Davos for the World Economic Forum.

“We are way beyond the critical threshold” with the franc, said Gaudenz Thoma, who heads Graubuenden Tourism, which promotes the region hosting the annual meeting of global executives and world leaders. “We have fewer guests and those who visit stay for a shorter period.”

Switzerland’s tourism industry is losing guests to neighboring Austria and France as the franc’s 14 percent gain against the euro during the past year makes overnight stays more expensive. The five-day meeting in Davos for about 2,500 participants, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann, means hotels are booked, while slopes and stores are empty.

“The SNB fears the strength of the country’s currency more than other central banks because it’s often a decisive factor for tourism,” said Thomas Flury, head of foreign-exchange research at UBS AG’s wealth-management unit in Zurich. “Visitors go to countries such as Austria instead because they get the same mountains, just at a cheaper price overall.”

Thirty-four percent of analysts surveyed by Credit Suisse Group AG between Jan. 12 and Jan. 17 said they expect the franc to strengthen further against the euro over the next six months, while 37 percent forecast a weakening. The franc had appreciated for seven straight weeks before the survey.

Ernst Wyrsch, head of the Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvedere in Davos, says he may offer fixed euro prices to make overnight stays more attractive. Still, the five-star hotel, which hosted actress Angelina Jolie and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch during past WEF meetings, is fully booked during this year’s summit, he said.

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U.S. West Coast ports are poised for two consecutive years of increased traffic for the first time since 2005-2006, a product of stronger global demand that will benefit America’s railroads and truckers.

Los Angeles, the busiest port, forecasts shipments to rise as much as 6 percent following a 16 percent jump in 2010 that reflected a rebound from the global recession, said spokeswoman Rachel Campbell. The Port of Long Beach, California, second behind Los Angeles, expects volume to grow further after last year’s 24 percent gain, executive director Richard Steinke said in an interview.

“The growth last year at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach was extraordinary,” said John Husing, founder of consulting firm Economics & Politics Inc. in Redlands, California, who has studied the state’s southern region since 1964. An improving U.S. economy “augurs very well for records at the two ports in the next two or three years, pretty much guaranteed.”

Port volumes are rising in response to stronger consumer demand, aided by rising incomes and stock prices. As goods are moved from ships to trucks and railways, companies like Union Pacific Corp., Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC and J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. stand to benefit, said senior transportation analyst Donald Broughton of Avondale Partners LLC in Nashville, who has covered the industry for 16 years.

Container volumes surged last year as the economy recovered from the worst recession since the Great Depression and companies including Target Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. rebuilt depleted inventories. Traffic moving through all six major West Coast ports rose 18 percent last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Truckers Con-way Inc., Schneider National Inc. and YRC Worldwide Inc. are among those that stand to gain from higher cargo volumes in Los Angeles and Long Beach us fast cash. They are “going to benefit as the economy picks up speed and goods move through the ports,” said Husing, who has studied such logistics for a decade. “If the supply chain is moving, they’re handling it.”

West Coast ports are the leading commercial gateways between the U.S. and Asia, accounting for about 70 percent of all containerized trade to and from the region. Long Beach is investing $3 billion in projects over the coming decade to modernize its infrastructure, create jobs and stay competitive.

Obama and Trade

President Barack Obama last year announced plans to double U.S. exports by 2015, a goal that he said would support 2 million new American jobs. Since then companies such as General Electric Co. and Boeing Co. have announced sales agreements with China, the second-biggest trading partner of the U.S.

Growing global demand is helping to boost overseas sales of everything from aircraft to cotton, helping the U.S. trade deficit shrink in November as exports climbed to the highest level in more than two years, Commerce Department data showed Jan. 13. The 18 percent rise in containers through the six West Coast ports — which also include Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington — last year followed a 16 percent slump in 2009.

“Transportation is an early cycle, canary in the coal mine for economic growth,” said Jeffrey Kauffman, managing director of transportation research at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. in New York, who recommends shares of Hub Group Inc., the freight- transportation manager based in Downers Grove, Illinois. He has buy ratings on 16 of the 19 companies he follows and said neither he nor Sterne Agee own Hub shares.

Long Beach container shipments plummeted by 11 percent in 2008 and 22 percent in 2009. They rebounded by 1.2 million units last year, the most of any U.S. port. One item that’s increasingly moving through Long Beach is furniture, which is finding its way to retailers such as Home Depot Inc., Target, and Wal-Mart, said Steinke of Long Beach, which reported the largest percentage increase in traffic last year since record- keeping began in 1971.

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Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., a local company that recently emerged from bankruptcy protection, has been acquired by RockTenn, a manufacturer of paperboard, containerboard and consumer and corrugated packaging, the companies announced Sunday.

The deal, worth about $3.5 billion, is half cash and half stock. It would pay $35 a share for Smurfit-Stone stock, a 27 percent premium over the closing price Friday. The deal would make the company a wholly owned subsidiary of RockTenn, based in Norcross, Ga.

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Ontario

Axel Weber’s candidacy for the European Central Bank presidency got a boost after two smaller countries laid claim to an ECB Executive Board post, saving the top job for one of the European Union’s powers.

Belgium and Slovakia nominated candidates for an ECB seat becoming vacant in May, clearing an obstacle to a bid by the German banker for the top job when Jean-Claude Trichet’s term ends in October.

“I still fail to see the credible candidate that would oppose Weber, or would be an alternative to Weber,” said Jean Pisani-Ferry, a former EU and French government economic adviser who runs the Bruegel research institute in Brussels.

Already unfolding behind the scenes, the campaign for ECB president runs in parallel with efforts to contain the debt crisis that last year forced EU-led emergency lending of 178 billion euros ($238 billion) for Greece and Ireland.

The race is to succeed France’s Trichet in the second-most important financial job in the world after the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman. The decision may turn on domestic political demands facing leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, efforts to balance regions and the influence of “big” and “small” states, and a desire for consensus.

The Bundesbank chief would also confront the curse of the frontrunner in becoming the first German to win a top EU post since Walter Hallstein, who served as the first European Commission president from 1958 to 1967.

Rompuy Beats Blair

EU history is littered with favorites who ultimately failed to get the top job, from failed bids to run the European Commission by Belgium’s Jean-Luc Dehaene in 1994 and Guy Verhofstadt in 2004 to Tony Blair’s campaign to be the first EU president in 2009. Weber himself drew fire from Trichet after he criticized the ECB’s decision to buy government bonds last year, a tactic that blunted the debt crisis’s impact. Weber’s view was “not the position of Governing Council,” he said in October.

Thirteen of the 17 politicians who will name the next ECB chief were in on the decision to snub the former U.K. premier in favor of Herman Van Rompuy, a haiku-writing former Belgian leader with a low profile even in his home country.

In Europe’s informal division between “small” and “large” countries, the smaller ones staked their claim to keeping the ECB board position that Austria’s Gertrude Tumpel- Gugerell, 58, will leave on May 31.

Belgium on Jan. 17 nominated central bank official Peter Praet, who turns 62 tomorrow, a past loser in ECB personnel sweepstakes. Slovakia, one of three eastern European countries using the euro, put forward Elena Kohutikova, 57, a former central bank deputy governor.

Gender Politics

Gender politics plays a role. Praet’s appointment would make the Frankfurt-based central bank an all-male club.

“We need the most competent candidate to fill the vacancy,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said after yesterday’s EU meeting in Brussels. “If the competencies are equal, then my choice is for the woman.”

Whoever wins, the appointment will keep two of the six board seats rotating among smaller countries, while the four biggest — Germany, France, Italy and Spain — claim permanent representation.

Under that logic, a Belgian victory might dim the chances that Luxembourg Central Bank Governor Yves Mersch, 61, will emerge as a compromise candidate for the top post. Luxembourg was part of Belgium in the 19th century and the two countries are often lumped together in EU personnel decisions.

The Belgian-Slovak jockeying will act as a prelude to the replacement of Trichet, whose eight-year term ends Oct. 31.

German Antidote

The campaign come as inflation accelerates a two-year high of 2.2 percent in December, shifting the ECB’s focus from the debt crisis back to its original, German-inspired mission of maintaining price stability. The ECB aims to keep inflation below 2 percent.

Weber, 53, could be the antidote to waning German enthusiasm for the euro as consumer prices rise and the bill for aiding debt-hit states threatens to mount, said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Group NV in Brussels.

“We could see fading euro support from the German public if inflation remains high,” said Brzeski, a German who once worked in the European Commission’s economics department. Weber’s appointment would “boost German confidence in the central bank, to have this guardian of price stability back.”

Here, EU politics and the voting math kick in. No deadline is set for a decision, the first time Europe has named a new top central banker since the ECB’s first two presidents were simultaneously selected at a dramatic summit in May 1998, eight months before the euro came into being.

Veto Club

At the time, Wim Duisenberg of the Netherlands, backed by Germany, faced a veto threat from France. A political deal was struck to give him the job, as long as he stepped down midway through his eight-year term to make way for Trichet, who will have served a complete mandate.

The EU has since dropped the policy of allowing lone countries to block high-level appointments. The voting formula now requires anywhere from two to six of the euro region’s 17 countries to band together to wield a veto, with bigger countries holding more sway.

Weber, a self-confessed non-diplomat, broke from the European consensus by opposing the ECB’s bond purchases that have helped at least three of the countries that will elect Trichet’s successor — Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

Merkel Lobby

While Bild newspaper reported Jan. 15 that Merkel has begun to lobby for Weber, she isn’t doing so publicly, partly because she still has to persuade French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy opposes a Weber candidacy, France’s La Tribune newspaper reported in October, without citing sources. He has not commented publicly on the matter.

Germany wants the discussions out of the public eye so that Trichet, the incumbent, “does not get weakened prematurely by such a debate,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said yesterday in Brussels.

France would need one other “large” country — Italy or Spain — to marshal enough votes for a veto. Even if Sarkozy backs Weber, Italy and Spain together could reject him. The only declared candidate for the top post is Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi.

Draghi “is not only technically prepared but he’s also a wise man,” former Italian Prime Minister and European Commission President Romano Prodi, who counts the central banker as a friend, said in a Jan. 17 Bloomberg Television interview.

The knock on Draghi is that, with the ECB’s vice presidency held by Vitor Constancio of Portugal, his selection would put two southern Europeans in charge of the bank. A third, Jose Barroso of Portugal, runs the EU commission. Draghi’s experience at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. might not also sit well with leaders who blame investment banks for the economic crisis.

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The airline Lambert officials will be negotiating with is an emerging player in the air freight industry flat irons. China Eastern is one of the country’s three major state-controlled carriers, and its freight arm

Discount broker The Charles Schwab Corp. says its fourth-quarter profit fell 27 percent because of charges related to a settlement over disclosure of the risks of a short-term bond fund.

The San Francisco company says its net income fell to $119 million, or 10 cents per share, for the three months ended Dec. 31. Without the settlement charges disclosed last week, Schwab said profit rose 33 percent. Revenue rose 14 percent to $1.13 billion.

Wall Street was expecting earnings of 10 cents per share on revenue of $1 saving account payday loan.11 billion.

Total client assets rose 11 percent to $1.57 billion. The company ended the year with nearly 8 million clients, up 4 percent from a year ago.

Shares edged up 12 cents in pre-market trading to $18.95.

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Shanghai, China’s financial center, will this year prepare for a trial property tax, becoming one of the first cities in the nation to introduce the measure aimed at curbing “speculative” investment.

Mayor Han Zheng announced the move in a speech to the Municipal People’s Congress yesterday, without giving details of how much the tax would be or when it would be implemented. Shanghai and southwestern Chongqing are the two cities that will begin trials of a property tax, according to a Jan. 10 report by Nomura Holdings Inc., which expects China to selectively introduce a tax rate of about 0.8 percent.

“We will step up macro-control measures, prioritize the supply of non-luxury residential units to be owned and occupied by ordinary citizens, and prepare for the trial reform on property tax as required by the central government,” Han said.

China has pledged to speed up property tax trials to rein in surging prices that have made housing too expensive for an increasing proportion of the population. Premier Wen Jiabao said on Dec. 26 that measures control housing costs weren’t well implemented and that he would introduce more policies to crack down on speculation. China has tightened rules on down payments, suspended mortgages for third homes last year.

“A property tax will definitely come but it’s not the best way to control prices,” Fu Qi, an analyst at China Real Estate Information Corp, said. “One of the major challenges in curbing prices is that incomes are on the rise and people have nowhere to invest their money.”

Shanghai will begin building 220,000 units of subsidized housing as it pushes plans to create affordable homes, Han said in a report to the congress in Shanghai. The municipality aims to add 1 million units of subsidized housing from this year to 2015, he said.

Ordinary Citizens

Shanghai and Chongqing are expected to be the first cities to roll out property taxes in China, according to the official Xinhua News Agency and Shanghai Securities Newspaper in reports on Jan. 10. Shanghai may introduce a tax on new homes in the first quarter while the southwestern city of Chongqing may impose a luxury-property tax at the same time, they reported.

Beijing won’t join the property tax trial, the Beijing News reported today, citing Deputy Mayor Ji Lin. The Chinese capital will try to finish 100,000 units of subsidized housing this year, acting “firmly” to curb rising property prices, Xinhua said, citing Mayor Guo Jinlong.

Price Jump

Home prices in Shanghai jumped 26.1 percent in 2010 and those in Chongqing surged 29.4 percent, according to Soufun Holdings Ltd., the country’s biggest real estate website owner.

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