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Tsingtao Brewing Co., one of China’s largest brewers, agreed that the 27 percent stake in the company that is currently held by Anheuser-Busch Cos. will transfer to InBev of Belgium when InBev finalizes its proposed takeover of Anheuser-Busch. A short notice about the agreement was filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

InBev hopes to take over St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch by the end of the year in a $52 billion buyout. The Tsingtao deal would give the combined company — Anheuser-Busch InBev — control of roughly one-fifth of the Chinese beer market, the world’s largest.

Anheuser-Busch said it first invested in China in 1993, when the company acquired a minority stake in Tsingtao cash advance in one hour. In October 2002, Anheuser-Busch and Tsingtao formed a strategic alliance to share best practices in areas such as production technology, marketing, sales and management. In 2005, Anheuser-Busch increased its investment in Tsingtao to 27 percent.

jmcwilliams@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8372

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You can’t walk within shouting distance of the Pepsi Center here without sighting Ben Affleck, Eva Longoria, Stephen Spielberg or Melissa Etheridge creditscore.

After Hillary Clinton’s speech Tuesday, reporters lurched after passed canap

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that the problems in the nation’s financial markets persist and still threaten the economy.

Bernanke said that the financial woes, coupled with record oil prices and the weakening economy, had created "one of the most challenging economic and policy environments in memory."

In prepared remarks at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Bernanke also said he is encouraged by the recent oil price decline, which may signal that inflationary pressures are on the wane.

"Although we have seen improved functioning in some markets, the financial storm that reached gale force some weeks before our last meeting here in Jackson Hole has not yet subsided," Bernanke said.

"Its effects on the broader economy are becoming apparent in the form of softening economic activity and rising unemployment," he added.

Bernanke’s comments seem to signal that the central bank will keep its key interest rate at 2%, rather than raise it an attempt to keep prices in check.

"The commentary tells me that rates are on hold until they see some blue skies through this financial storm," said John Silvia, chief economist for Wachovia.

The Fed cut interest rates seven times from September through April, but left them unchanged at its last two meetings.

Earlier this summer, investors and economists were widely expecting the Fed to start raising rates as early as this fall. But there is now widespread agreement that rates will remain on hold at its next two meetings in September and October and some economists are predicting rates will stay at current levels into next year.

Silvia said the Fed had little choice but to focus on upheaval in the credit markets rather than on inflation as it cut rates. And while he agreed that financial market woes are not behind us, he said the Fed faces a risk of inflation getting out of hand the longer it keeps rates on hold.

"Inflation is not out of control, but it’s clearly drifting away," he said.

Bernanke’s remarks come more than a week after the Consumer Price Index, the government’s key inflation measure, rose to a 17-year high, gaining 5.6% over the previous 12 months. The Producer Price Index, a measure of wholesale inflation, also rose this week to a 27-year high.

Still, Bernanke reiterated that the Fed expects an economic slowdown to cause "inflation to moderate later this year and next year." And while he added that the "inflation outlook remains highly uncertain," Bernanke appeared to downplay inflation risks relative to other challenges facing the economy and global credit markets.

The discussion of inflation pressure was only a brief part of the speech, which focused on the need for stability in financial markets absolutely free credit report. Bernanke defended actions by the Fed over the past year. And he said that the Fed and regulators needed to be on the lookout for other threats to financial markets.

Bernanke offered one of the most detailed and strongest public defenses of the Fed’s role in preventing a bankruptcy at Bear Stearns in March. He argued that while Bear Stearns was not that large in comparison to other Wall Street firms, its failure would have had severe ripples throughout the financial system that the Fed could not risk.

"With financial conditions already quite fragile, the sudden, unanticipated failure of Bear Stearns would have led to a sharp unwinding of positions in those markets that could have severely shaken the confidence of market participants," he said. "The broader economy could hardly have remained immune from such severe financial disruptions."

His speech did not make any reference to Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500) or Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500), the two troubled mortgage finance firms who have seen their shares battered this month on fears that the government will be forced to take them over.

But his defense of the Bear Stearns action and his discussion of a doctrine of rescuing firms deemed too big to fail seemed to signal his approval of the Treasury Department taking action if either firm were to face problems covering rising losses from the trillions in mortgages they own or guarantee.

In another comment that could be read as addressing the problems facing Fannie and Freddie, he said that regulators of financial institutions had to be careful not to force troubled firms to cut back on their lending at times of economic stress.

He said mandating tighter lending standards might help the "safety and soundness of a particular institution" that such "excessively conservative lending policies could prove counterproductive if they contribute to a weaker economic and credit environment."

He also said that it is important that Congress take steps to spell out more explicitly what steps could be taken by the government to help rescue other financial institutions whose failure would pose a risk to the broader economy. He said that the Treasury Department is probably the agency best suited to perform those rescues. 

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Marvel Entertainment Inc is expected to post a 26 percent rise in second-quarter profit on the strength of its licensing business, which is expected to benefit from merchandising related to its successful “Iron Man” movie.

Tuesday’s second-quarter report will be the first quarter after the comic-book publisher started releasing its first self-produced films.

But analysts are really tuned to the third and fourth quarters, when most expect Marvel to reap the rewards from its first movie titles, and will be looking for potential outlook comments.

Marvel is expected to possibly increase its outlook for the year and give more clarity about when revenue from its films will be reflected on its income statement.

“The story really is about the film business cheap payday loans. Everything else is the same old Marvel,” Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.

In April, Marvel entered Hollywood film-making with “Iron Man,” its first self-produced film, that had the second-biggest non-sequel box office opening in history.

“Iron Man,” which was distributed by Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures, has made $315.7 million in domestic box office so far, according to Box Office Mojo.

The movie was followed by “The Incredible Hulk,” far-less successful, but still expected to bring in a moderate profit. 

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Psst! Here’s one you can trade on: The Securities and Exchange Commission, buffeted on all sides from the great leverage collapse of 2008, is now going to get to the bottom of the age-old dilemma of the trading desk rumor.

In a press release Sunday night that coincided with the opening of Asian markets, the SEC announced it was conducting examinations at brokers and hedge funds to determine if false information is being deliberately spread by traders to manipulate stock prices.

Philosophically, there’s little argument against cracking down on those who knowingly develop or pass on bad info. After all, such bald attempts to manipulate the market have long been illegal.

But given that sharing of rumors and information - some of it good, some not - occurs constantly across trading desks, there appear to be some truly head-scratching aspects to the SEC’s move.

The first is that the agency’s overburdened enforcement unit is already looking into, to name just a few - mortgage originator fraud, investment dealer disclosure on auction-rate securities, and broker valuations of the arcane vehicle known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that has been the source of so much misery on Wall Street.

Now the watchdogs are going to chase down down trading desk rumors too?

The second is that much of the impetus of this investigation appears to have come from senior executives at several Wall Street brokerages outraged over the effect rumors are having on their companies’ stock prices.

Last week, for example, Lehman Brothers saw its share price hurt last Thursday when a story made the rounds - and was picked up by CNBC - that stock-trading giant SAC Capital and giant bond manager PIMCO had ceased trading with the firm.

A likely death-blow if true, but it was easily disproved. The stock, which closed at $19.74 on Wednesday, dropped to $15.79 before rallying to close at $17.30 on Thursday. Whatever the story is behind the origination of the rumor, shorting Lehman’s stock that day proved to be a pretty volatile - if not outright crummy - trade for those who piled on http://easy-quick-payday-loans.com.

More important, while Lehman chief executive Richard Fuld has a well-documented antipathy towards shortsellers who question his firm’s financial health, he and his deputies made decisions that have saddled the company with big losses and required it to make repeated trips to the markets to raise more capital.

So which has proven more painful for Lehman shareholders: the quick-buck artist who passes on some bogus tip - or Lehman’s decision to become the most aggressive investment bank to speculate on Southern California real estate?

Then there’s the case of Bear Stearns. A cottage industry of sorts, typified by a much-discussed Vanity Fair article, has developed that blames shortsellers for Bear’s near-collapse and subsequent fire sale to JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500).

It’s true there was no shortage of rumors swirling around Bear Stearns on the eve of its mid-March rescue. Like most trading desk rumors, they were easily disproved and immediately forgotten.

Ultimately, what allowed the run on the bank were the huge holes in Bear’s balance sheet. Alone among Wall Street’s big brokers, Bear Stearns had a nearly $33 billion gap between what it had borrowed short-term and what it had available to repay those loans. No other broker had anything like this exposure.

In the end, the people who did business with Bear Stearns came to see it as a highly-leveraged, mortgage-bond-centered hedge fund and wanted less exposure to it.

Veteran analyst Barry Ritholtz, in his "Big Picture" blog, put it well in a post Friday. "Why is it that all these rumor-mongerers and shorts are only bringing some firms to their knees? How come they always seem to be the over-leveraged, under-capitalized, unhedged, most poorly-managed companies?"  

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Confidence among U.S. consumers fell in June to the lowest level in 28 years as record-high gasoline and rising joblessness rattled Americans.

The Reuters/University of Michigan final index of consumer sentiment dropped to 56.4, the weakest level since May 1980, from 59.8 the prior month. The measure averaged 85.6 in 2007.

Gasoline at over $4 a gallon and rising costs for food are pinching household budgets, just as mounting job losses and falling home values raise stress levels. The report showed the inflation rate that Americans expect over the coming five years held at 3.4 percent for a second month, the highest since 1995.

“There's a whole list of headwinds facing consumers and they're not happy about it,'' Scott Anderson, senior economist in Minneapolis at Wells Fargo & Co., said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

The confidence index was forecast to fall to 56.7, according to the median of 55 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Estimates ranged from 55.9 to 60.0.

Earlier today, a Commerce Department report showed consumer spending in May rose 0.8 percent, reflecting rebate checks, following a revised 0.4 percent gain the prior month. Incomes grew 1.9 percent last month, the most since September 2005.

12-Month Inflation

Consumers polled by Reuters/University of Michigan said they expect an inflation rate of 5.1 percent over the next 12 months, compared with a 5.2 percent forecast in the May survey.

The survey's index of consumer expectations for six months from now, which more closely projects the direction of consumer spending, dropped to 49.2, also the lowest since 1980, from 51.1.

A gauge of current conditions, which reflects Americans' perceptions of their financial situation and whether it is a good time to buy big-ticket items like cars, decreased to 67.6 from 73.3.

Consumers are feeling pain at the gas pump payday loans. Regular unleaded gasoline prices reached a record $4.08 a gallon at the pump on June 15, up 34 percent from the start of the year, before dropping a cent in the last two weeks.

The employment outlook also has them uneasy, as the economy has lost 324,000 jobs in the first five months of the year, the worst showing since 2003, according to the Labor Department.

Tighter Credit

Credit is getting harder to obtain, subduing demand for items with bigger price tags. Industry figures showed cars and light trucks sold at an annual pace of 14.3 million in May, the fewest in a decade.

Michael Jackson, chief executive officer at AutoNation Inc., the largest U.S. car retailer, is forecasting weak sales through the end of the year.

“My expectation is we will see a bottoming out in sales later this year,'' Jackson said in an interview June 5 with Bloomberg Television from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Spending may grow at an annual rate of 0.8 percent this quarter, down from a 1.1 percent pace in the prior quarter and the weakest since the first three months of 1995, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News this month. For the full year, spending will grow at a 1.5 percent pace, the weakest annual rate since 1991, according to the survey.

The bulk of the tax rebates will probably be spent from July through September, giving third-quarter growth a lift, before the economy decelerates again in the last three months of the year, the poll also showed.

The final Reuters/University of Michigan consumer confidence report reflects about 500 responses, compared with 300 households for the preliminary survey published earlier in the month.

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Toyota is preparing to rev up production of hybrids, announcing Tuesday its third plant in Japan for producing batteries that are key components for the "green" cars.

Just last week, it announced that it was building a second such battery plant.

Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) has emerged the world leader in hybrids with its hit Prius, which has sold more than a cumulative 1 million vehicles over the last decade. Sometime after 2010, it hopes to sell 1 million hybrids a year.

For that, it needs to boost battery production as Honda Motor Co. (HMC) and other automakers aim to catch up with their new gas-and-electric hybrids - a technology that is growing in appeal for the world’s drivers as gas prices soar.

The $291 million plant in Miyagi prefecture, northern Japan, will be operated by Panasonic EV Energy Co., Toyota’s joint venture with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.

Set to be running by 2010, the factory will make nickel-metal hydride batteries, with production capacity at 200,000 a year, with start-up production at about half of that.

The latest move follows a similar announcement just last week about Toyota’s plans to build a $194 million plant in Shizuoka, in central Japan, also to produce nickel-metal hydride batteries for gas-electric hybrid vehicles.

Hybrids reduce pollution and emissions that are linked to global warming by switching between a gasoline engine and an electric motor to deliver better mileage than comparable standard cars.

Last week, Honda, Japan’s second-biggest automaker after Toyota, said it will boost hybrid sales to 500,000 a year by sometime after 2010 payday loans in 1 hour. Honda said it will introduce a new hybrid-only model next year for a lineup of four hybrids.

Nissan Motor Co., which still hasn’t developed its own hybrid for commercial sale, said it will have its original hybrid by 2010. Nissan says its joint venture with electronics maker NEC Corp. will start mass-producing lithium-ion batteries in 2009 at a plant in Japan.

Lithium-ion batteries, now common in laptops, produce more power and are smaller than nickel-metal hydride batteries. Toyota has said lithium-ion batteries may be used in plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a home electrical outlet, but it has not given details about a plant for such batteries. 

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The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that cities and states can keep offering special tax breaks on their municipal bonds, a decision that preserves a top incentive for investors in the $2.5 trillion municipal bond market.

The 7-2 high-court ruling reversed a Kentucky appeals court decision that said it was unconstitutional for the state to grant tax breaks on interest from bonds issued in Kentucky while taxing interest from bonds issued in other states.

The high-court decision was an important victory for municipal bond issuers in most states. Without the special tax breaks, municipal bond issuers would have to compensate investors with higher interest rates.

The decision overturned a Kentucky appeals court ruling that the state’s tax breaks violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, or an implied prohibition against states erecting trade barriers.

The ruling lifted a threat to an important segment of the mutual fund industry. The nearly 500 funds organized around bonds issued in a single-state would have had to disband or rearrange if the lower court ruling had been upheld. According to the Investment Company Institute, single-state funds had total assets of $155.83 billion in 2007.

“This removes a cloud of uncertainty that had been hanging over the market for at least six months cash advance usa. It will help heal the market,” said Bob Millikan, portfolio manager at BB&T Asset Management in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Many of the states that had been at risk of losing their specialty status will benefit. Their prices had been lower because of that risk.”

All told, 42 states follow Kentucky’s practice, and a Supreme Court ruling to uphold the lower court decision would have forced them to change their systems, with each state having to decide either to tax interest on in-state bonds or give breaks to out-of-state ones. Interest earned on municipal bonds is not subject to federal tax.

“We believe the court properly determined that municipal bonds are different with regard to the Commerce Clause,” said Tom Dresslar, spokesman for California Treasurer Bill Lockyer. “We’re not out to make a buck. When we issue these bonds it’s to provide a public service.” 

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Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research), whose shares fell as much as 20 percent on Monday after Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) dropped its $47.5 billion bid for the Web company, is likely to face pressure and possibly a proxy battle from activist hedge funds looking to revive the deal.

With billions of dollars in financial muscle, some activist hedge funds are already laying the groundwork for a campaign after the three-month talks between Microsoft and Yahoo collapsed last weekend. Microsoft walked away, saying it would not bid more than $33 per share for Yahoo, while Yahoo wanted $4 a share more to agree to the deal.

Experts say it would likely take one or more substantial, seasoned activists to buy a large stake in Yahoo and finance a credible multimillion-dollar proxy campaign. But at least one small firm, Ironfire Capital, is talking to other firms about running a director slate, according to Eric Jackson, who heads the firm.

“I’m mad,” said Jackson, who was involved in a successful campaign last year to have former Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel replaced. “Yahoo’s rejection was not in the best interests of shareholders, and the board needs to be held accountable.”

Jackson’s Naples, Florida-based firm has a minuscule holding in Yahoo, just 96 shares http://payday-z.com. But if other, larger hedge funds line up and buy at least 5 percent of the company’s now-discounted stock and run a slate of director candidates that would favor a sale to Microsoft, the move could gain traction.

With 1.25 billion Yahoo shares outstanding, a stake of 62 million shares, or around 5 percent, could cost more than $1.5 billion at today’s price of around $24 per share. That leaves such a campaign likely only for the largest activists, such as Carl Icahn, William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital, Nelson Peltz’ Trian Partners, Jana Partners and a handful of others.

“There are not a lot of activists who can invest $1 billion,” said Manny Pearlman, CEO of hedge fund Liberation Investment Group and veteran of numerous, smaller proxy battles.

Icahn, who led a high-profile campaign against Time Warner two years ago and has invested over $1 billion in Motorola in a current proxy campaign, is not currently a Yahoo investor and has no immediate plans to run a campaign, a person close to Icahn said. 

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) has shown it is not totally immune to the credit crunch as it makes deeper cuts in its business of arranging loans for leveraged buyouts, people familiar with the situation said.

Sources say there is a significant restructuring under way in Goldman’s leveraged finance business, reflecting the lack of big LBOs since credit markets seized up last summer.

These job cuts go beyond the 5 percent cuts Goldman acknowledged last month and the 1,500 across-the-board cuts stemming from year-end performance reviews.

Goldman declined to comment specifically on its leveraged finance business, but affirmed the firm’s total headcount will dip temporarily to reflect the current slowdown.

“Given market conditions, we’ve been looking at a number of areas where we believe we have too many people. We’ve transferred some people to other areas and other regions, while others have been asked to leave the firm,” spokesman Michael DuVally said payday advance online.

That said, Goldman maintains it will still end 2008 with its total employment rising by “low single digits.” Goldman had 32,000 employees at the end of November.

Goldman, the largest investment bank by market value, is by far the most active Wall Street firm in the realms of making private equity investments and financing deals struck by big buyout shops.

And while it avoided the crippling losses on subprime mortgages, it has recorded some of the largest write-downs on leveraged loan commitments — $1.4 billion in the first quarter and $1.7 billion in the third as the breakdown in debt markets created a logjam of incompleted deals. 

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