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Mark Tade, manager of employee relations for U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works, was elected as this year’s president of the Leadership Council Southwestern Illinois, a key economic development organization in the Metro East area.

Members also chose four other council officers for one-year terms:

— Council chairman, Vaughn Vandegrift, chancellor of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

— Council vice president, Gerry Schuetzenhofer, president of Coldwell Banker Brown Realtors
— Secretary, Richard Sauget Sr short term personal loan., president of East County Enterprises

— Treasurer, Dale Stewart, executive secretary/treasurer of the Southwestern Illinois Building and Construction Trades Council

The Leadership Council was organized to attract and retain jobs and stimulate capital investment in the Metro East area.

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The Boeing Co. announced Thursday that it has realigned its St. Louis-based Integrated Defense Systems unit and will operate under a new name.

The newly renamed Boeing Defense, Space & Security unit reflects part of the company’s "continuing effort to compete in a rapidly evolving global defense and security marketplace," company officials said in a news release.

"Boeing anticipated flattening defense budgets and shifting customer priorities for the past few years and has been taking aggressive steps to position the company for profitable growth in a challenging economy," said Dennis Muilenburg, president and CEO of the Defense, Space & Security unit fast payday loans.

It will retain its operating units — Boeing Military Aircraft, Network and Space Systems, and Global Services and Support. Boeing Defense, Space & Security will consolidate some divisions and make several leadership changes, Muilenburg said.

Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security unit is the second-largest employer in the St. Louis region with about 15,000 workers.

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Cincinnati–Swiffer kitties? Just attach little dusting pads to your feline’s paws, so they can help keep your floors clean while making their rounds. A bit far-fetched? Executives at consumer-products king Procter & Gamble Co. thought so, too, and sent the idea to the discard pile.

P&G also rejected pitches from outside inventors for a belly-button lint brush, a Knees and Toes body wash to complement Head and Shoulders shampoo, and a "man handle" to keep marital harmony in the bathroom by making it easier to raise and lower the toilet seat.

But there are success stories, too. The original Swiffer duster was developed by a Japanese company that P&G teamed up with to take it global. That’s why P&G keeps the door open to proposals.

The once-insular company is now considered a leader among the companies in many industries that are listening to outsiders they once might have shunned, including other businesses. "We don’t care where good ideas come from, as long as they come to us," said Jeff Weedman, a vice-president who helps lead P&G’s effort to solicit ideas online or from scouting by P&G employees around the globe.

"We’re not going to use everything that shows up, but we want to be the preferred partner."

Others noted for "open innovation" include IBM Corp., which runs online "innovation jams," and Eli Lilly & Co., which in 2001 created an InnoCentive branch to draw scientific help from around the globe.

Jeff DeGraff, a professor who focuses on managing innovation and creativity at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said P&G has helped popularize the approach.

"P&G was the poster child for this movement, showing large companies with growth challenges that this is not just for Silicon Valley or Ann Arbor (Mich business

Oil prices rose above $79 a barrel Monday for the first time in four weeks as an extended cold snap triggered an end-of-year rally in energy futures.

Benchmark crude for February delivery added 72 cents to settle at $78.77 a barrel in light, holiday trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices rose as high as $79.12 earlier in the day, the highest since Nov. 18.

Futures contracts for oil, natural gas and heating oil have all become more expensive this month as snowstorms blanketed parts of the country and a sharp drop in supplies of crude and other fuels surprised traders.

More frigid temperatures are expected, with up to 4 inches of snow forecast for New England, and up to 7 inches of snow along the eastern shores of the Lower Great Lakes.

Spot prices are starting to perk up as a result.

According to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration, natural gas prices jumped earlier in December to the highest levels since January, and heating oil prices climbed during the middle of this month.

Still, the winter chill hasn’t boosted energy demand above last year’s levels. The U.S. is consuming less petroleum than it did at the same time last year, when oil and gas prices were cheaper and the economy was in recession.

American refiners have cut back on oil imports, which has helped reduce supplies and increase prices. But analyst Andrew Lipow said that oil prices also are rising as China and India expand their petroleum imports.

"That oil is finding a buyer somewhere," Lipow said.

At the pump, retail gas prices rose by less then a penny overnight to a new national average of $2.603 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service.

Gas prices have edged up for three consecutive days, albeit slowly, for the first time since the beginning of the month. A gallon of regular unleaded is 2.4 cents cheaper than last month.

In other Nymex trading in January contracts, heating oil climbed 3.79 cents to settle at $2.0735 a gallon while gasoline added 2.88 cents to settle at $2.0184 a gallon. Natural gas increased by 34.7 cents to settle at $5.99 per 1,000 cubic feet.

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Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann announced Wednesday that the city has closed a section of Kapiolani Park frequented by homeless people.

The area, a grass strip between Kalakaua Avenue and the sidewalk, will be closed for “ongoing maintenance and beautification work,” according to Hannemann.

It was unclear how long the city would cordon off the grassy border along the street, but the homeless population in Kapiolani Park has been a growing concern for the past several years. Over the past month, dozens of homeless have set up tents and belongings on the grass strip in an effort to get around the city’s closure of the park.

Currently, portions of the park on the mountain side of Kalakaua are closed from midnight to 5 a.m., while portions of the park on the ocean side of Kalakaua are closed from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.

Overnight camping is also not permitted in the park, but that hasn’t stopped a determined core of homeless who set up tents and move only when prodded by police.

“We are committed to keeping Kapiolani Park clean and safe for everyone,” Hannemann said in a news release.

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As I write this from real estate disaster-ridden but still-glorious Los Angeles, I read much speculation that the recession is over.

The stock market has rallied explosively. Foreign markets in both the developing world and the developed world have done spectacularly well. China is unbelievably up after an unimaginably gruesome crash.

Even the poor beaten-to-death REIT sector has gained dramatically lately. Credit is supposedly flowing to at least some sectors (barely mortgages and small business yet), and the big banks look incomparably more solid than we feared just a year ago. Retail is showing signs of life, and even home sales are up and prices look to have stabilized in many areas. Unemployment is still gruesome but it is always the last thing to improve.

So, now, beloved class, what can we say we have learned from this recession, its runup, and its aftermath, if we are in fact in the aftermath?

1. Economic forecasting is still an extremely difficult gambit and nowhere near a science. It is a lot more like astrology than mathematics. As the recession bore down on us, the great majority of economic seers said it was not going to happen or if it did happen, it would be mild.

In fact, the recession turned out to be long-lasting and severe. Not one person I know foresaw that the government would allow Lehman Brothers to fail and thus simply shoot investor, borrower, lender, consumer, and employer confidence in the head. As dismal as Henry Paulson appeared, no one dreamed he would be that foolish.

Perhaps more worrisome, as the recession ground on, the top dogs in economics said it would last indefinitely. Many truly big names said it would turn into a genuine Depression, with prolonged unemployment approaching depression-era levels of one in four or five workers. This now looks extremely unlikely.

Even the auto sector, consigned to the scrap heap not long ago, has rallied, although whether it has legs much beyond the incredible "cash for clunkers" boondoggle is still unresolved. Hardly any of this was foreseen by the powers that be. The realm of economic forecasting is still a murky, lawless place.

2. Financial market forecasting is even more troublesome than economic forecasting. Hardly anyone I am aware of got the recent stock market recovery right. No one saw a recovery of roughly 60% in broad indices in the span from early March to mid-November. To the contrary, even in the spring, I was getting e-mails from people "in the know" seeing a bottomless pit for the stock markets.

3. The amount of lying and deception by the financial sector of this country has been breathtaking. The banks lied about the risks they were taking on, about the amount of their exposure, about how well capitalized they were, and about their prospects for survival. Throughout the financial sector there was similar deceit.

The fact that so much fraud can go on with no one getting punished for it is terrifying to the investor. Major players in finance were playing a truly staggering game of deceit — selling pension funds CMOs while at the same time selling the same instruments or derivatives attached to them short. This is betrayal of trust on a scale that even I, as someone who looks at The Street with a gimlet eye, could scarcely have imagined.

4. The government has no special abilities to forecast or predict a darned thing. Alan Greenspan, former head of the Fed, a truly wonderful man and a smart economist, not only did not see the crash, but did not see the bubble preceding it. Not only did he not see it, he thought it was an economic impossibility.

Ben Bernanke, the current head of the Fed and a helpful man of immense goodwill, did not see the possibility of a housing bubble and a crash when he was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He also did not think the pre-retirees of this country were in any kind of serious trouble. This shows a genuine inability to see the obvious.

Once he got to be head of the Fed, he did not see the severity of the crisis. He especially did not see the disaster that would result from failure to rescue Lehman. This went beyond ordinary mistakes.

As to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, let us say a prayer for people like us who have rulers as arrogant and incompetent as he was. As to the current Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, he also failed to see the crisis coming and failed to see how vital it was to rescue Lehman. He has definitely gotten better on the job, but whether he works for the taxpayers or for Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) is extremely questionable in my little mind.

Lessons for the investor

There is much more that could be said about the lessons of the crash and the recession, but there are lessons to be learned about individual investor behavior that are critical, too.

One important one: liquidity in a very secure form is a beautiful thing. Those persons who had a lot of cash or Treasury bonds or otherwise insured savings had a much more restful and happier recession than others with almost all of their money tied up in stocks or real estate.

If I had only one lesson to offer investors, it would be to keep invested in both stocks and bonds and keep plenty of liquidity in good times and bad.

Secretary Geithner’s "stress tests" which reassured investors about banks, was a brilliant idea and has worked wonders. But the timing and efficacy of government bailouts is very much in doubt on any short-term basis, and brings up a final important lesson: It is up to the prudence and foresight of the ordinary investor to save the ordinary investor and his or her family. The government will not and cannot do it for you.

You must be diversified between different asset classes and you must maintain liquidity. And you have to assume that the worst can happen and plan accordingly, which means having not just a bare minimum but somewhat more. We have just had a scary episode and a close shave, and we do not know for sure that the nightmare is over.

Learn the lessons and act as if the worst could happen again at any time. It can and it will. Let us pray a recovery is happening — but let us also tighten our helmet straps.

And another little note … my much-missed father used to tell me with great approval Adam Smith’s famous quote regarding prophecies of doom for America, "there is a lot of ruin in a nation."

I was moved to recall this when I saw Warren Buffett’s optimistic read on the economy at a great ‘town hall" he gave with Bill Gates at Columbia recently. In answer to a query about the short-term future of the market, he waved aside "what’s going to happen tomorrow" and instead said, regarding America, something like, "If you have a good farm, with good crops and good soil and you know you’re going to have five droughts in the next fifty years, you don’t let it affect you that much."

I am paraphrasing here, because I saw it on CNBC while eating dinner, but perhaps Buffett’s meaning was, "Don’t sell America short." At least not for the long run.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, actor, writer, and economist, who also appears in commercials as a spokesman for various companies.  

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European oil trader Trafigura Beheer BV said on Thursday the worst of the credit crisis was over, but cautioned that the oil market was still grappling with severe oversupply and current prices were too high.

“As far as we can see, liquidity is back, and there’s a lot of appetite from existing banks and new banks. As they reposition their portfolios, commodities continue to feature quite highly on their agenda,” Trafigura’s Chief Financial Officer Pierre Lorinet told Reuters in an interview.

But he warned that given the ballooning stockpiles of oil products stored on ships, the current crude price of $80 a barrel was not justified cash advance today.

“The level today seems too high compared to the pure fundamentals. But it goes back to how oil is trading today, and oil is trading like a financial asset.”

The severe oversupply would keep the market’s contango structure in place “for a while,” he added.

(Reporting by Jennifer Tan; Editing by Ramthan Hussain)

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Gold is different from other commodities in many ways. Still, the price of the yellow metal depends on the same three factors as oil or wheat: supply, demand, and financial conditions. Put them together, and the 20% increase since August might only be the beginning.

Start with supply. Production from mines totaled 2,414 tons in 2008, worth $88 billion at the November 16 price. There will be more this year, but less from 2010 onwards. It will take years for new mines to come on stream. Recycling from scrap jewelry and official gold sales were worth $40 billion in 2008, but those sources aren’t likely to cough up much more.

One central bank has even become a buyer. India recently purchased 200 tons of gold from the International Monetary Fund. If China decided to put 10% of its $2.3 trillion of official reserves into gold, it would need to buy up almost three years’ worth of production, at the current price.

Such a big move isn’t likely, but smaller shifts from central banks — selling less — could be enough to move the price, as long as other demand keeps up loan till payday. That’s likely. The long period of ultra-easy money may not be undermining the monetary system, but many people fear it might. Some of them will buy some more gold, just in case. With yields on government bonds so low, gold looks like cheap insurance.

Indeed, financial conditions favor all commodities, gold included. Interest rates are low and banks are more willing to support investors and speculators than to lend to businesses and consumers. Besides, commodities look like a good store of value in the midst of unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus in a world of still significant imbalances.

When money is easy and demand moves much faster than supply, prices can explode. In 18 months from July 1978, gold went from $185 per ounce to $850. That’s $2,400 in today’s dollars. And interest rates then were much higher than now. A similar price rise from here would bring gold to more than $5,000 per ounce. 

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The euro zone economy jumped out of recession in the third quarter, data showed on Friday, but with slightly less spring than expected after the area’s top three economies fell short of market forecasts.

Gross domestic product in the 16 countries using the euro rose 0.4 percent quarter-on-quarter after five consecutive quarters of shrinking output, but was 4.1 percent lower year-on-year.

Economists polled by Reuters had on average forecast quarterly growth of 0.5 percent and a 3.9 percent annual decline.

Germany, France and Italy all reported a third-quarter increase in economic output, but the German 0.7 percent quarterly growth was below expectations of 0.8 percent, the French 0.3 percent increase only half of what was expected and the Italian 0 faxless payday loans.6 percent fell short of the 0.7 percent consensus.

The growth ends the deepest economic downturn in Europe since World War Two, brought on by a global financial crisis, but economists say recovery is likely to remain fragile.

The European Commission forecast on November 3 that fourth-quarter growth would slow to 0.2 percent quarter-on-quarter in the last three months of 2009 and then to 0.1 percent in the first two quarters of 2010.

Growth is seen accelerating steadily from the third quarter of 2010 to reach 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2011.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski, editing by Dale Hudson)

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Credit rating agencies would be more tightly regulated and more exposed to lawsuits under legislation approved on Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.

In another procedural step forward for the Obama administration’s and congressional Democrats’ push for financial reform, the committee voted 49-14 to send the bill to the full House for a vote, likely next month.

Credit rating agencies are widely blamed for failing to spot credit market problems, with securitized debt and other instruments, in the run-up to last year’s financial crisis.

President Barack Obama and Democrats have been working for months on a package of proposals to tighten bank and capital market regulation after the crisis, the worst in decades.

“The rating agencies really screwed up and now people are asking for us to put their heads in the guillotine … But what really needs to happen is to see what can be done to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said Representative Paul Kanjorski, author of the committee’s bill.

The agencies are viewed by critics as compromised by their prevailing business model, in which issuers of debt pay the agencies for debt ratings. Kanjorski said lawmakers explored ways to change that model, but found it was impractical no fax payday advances.

Instead, the bill imposes regulations on the industry intended to “close many of the weaknesses and the loopholes,” said Kanjorski, a Democrat.

Firms affected by the bill include Moody’s Corp, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings.

The bill would for the first time set up an office in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to oversee the agencies and their ratings and how they are determined.

It would also open the door to more lawsuits by investors against agencies over flawed ratings, a provision opposed by the agencies and likely to attract controversy as the bill works its way to the House floor and the Senate.

The bill also calls for removing some references in federal law that mandate certified agencies’ credit ratings as a way to reduce the pervasiveness of their use.

The committee, chaired by Democratic Representative Barney Frank, was expected to vote later on a bill to beef up the SEC’s budget and legal protection standards for investors.

(Editing by Dan Grebler)

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