Finance and Economic

Riverview Bancorp Inc. wants to raise as much as $23 million in a stock offering, according to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchanged Commission.

The Vancouver-based bank (NASDAQ: RVSB) will issue 6,896,552 shares, bringing its outstanding number of shares to 17,820,325.

The money will be used to support growth and meet the bank’s capital needs. The bank is under an order from the federal O

The bank’s shares fell 4 percent Friday to $2 .39. They had a 52-week range between $2.13 and $4.39.

Riverview Bancorp Inc. is the savings and loan holding company of Riverview Community Bank.

The bank had $838 million in assets as of March 31. It lost $5.4 million in fiscal 2010.

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The Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism has nearly $3 million of available grants for business and nonprofits to install electronic vehicle charging equipment.

DBEDT anticipates awarding between two and seven grants throughout the state ranging anywhere from $30,000 to $2 million each.

The money is coming from federal stimulus funds that are allocated for Hawaii’s energy program.

In 2008, the Lingle administration committed to reducing dependence on oil in the islands to 30 percent by 2030 and electric vehicles is one means of realizing that goal payday advance online.

The application deadline is July 26 and the funds must be expended by March 30 of next year. Announcement of the selected recipients is scheduled for Aug. 31.

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Wise readers don’t want to overpay when investing in mutual funds. Here’s a typical question on the subject: "You wrote about paying attention to mutual fund expenses but never said what are acceptable expenses or how much is too high. Can you elaborate?"

Fund expenses include many things, such as commissions or "loads" when you buy a fund and/or redemption fees or "back-end loads" when you sell it, as well as ongoing operating expenses, including a management fee to the people who manage the fund’s portfolio.

Funds sold by brokers typically charge commissions when you buy and/or redemption fees if you sell before a certain time. Commissions for large purchases tend to be lower in percentage terms. Or, in lieu of a commission to buy, you may pay higher ongoing "service" or "distribution" fees on top of the management fees and other operating costs.

Different "share classes" of broker-sold funds reflect these different cost structures. The one that’s best for you will probably depend on how much money you invest and for how long.

I make my own investment decisions and buy only direct-marketed "no-load" funds that do not charge any commissions or loads. If you need professional advice, consider a fee-only adviser who is free to recommend any fund, including no-load funds. If you use an adviser who can recommend only from a list of load funds approved by his firm, I suggest you favor those with low ongoing operating expenses.

That way, at least your costs are low once you pay the initial load. For example, the class A shares from the American Funds Growth Fund of America, a fund with a strong long-term record, impose an upfront sales charge or load as high as 5.75 percent. But annual expenses are just 0.76 percent, about one-half the industry average for stock funds.

Ultimately, a fund’s annual operating expenses — the so-called fund’s expense ratio — may have a much greater impact on your wallet than the initial load.

Not all funds charge loads, but all funds ding you for operating expenses that subtract, dollar for dollar, from your returns.

Therefore, I will not buy a fund with an expense ratio so high that it makes it very difficult to achieve the returns I could more easily obtain with another fund.

For index funds that simply track a broad market benchmark, I want annual expenses no higher than 0.20 percent. With actively managed stock funds, I generally avoid those with an expense ratio of more than 1 percent, and for actively managed bond funds, of more than 0.50 percent.

That doesn’t mean I will never buy a fund with higher expenses, but there has to be an overriding factor, such as a consistent investment approach with a record of solid returns in good times and bad despite the higher costs.

Even then, I’ll try to find a cheaper alternative.

I have used — and can recommend — a fund analyzer tool at the website of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (www.finra.org/fundanalyzer) that lets you screen for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds based on factors such as investment objective, expense ratio and ratings by the fund analysis firm Morningstar.

You can compare as many as three funds side by side and see how their expense ratios stack up against the industry average of similar funds.

Other newly added features include one-click access to a fund’s prospectus and other disclosure documents, and a report in portable document format that you can print or save.

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Right now, there is one thing St. Louis needs more than anything: jobs.

The recession destroyed more than 75,000 of them. We weren’t creating so many before it started, either.

And where do jobs come from? Small business.

Despite their headline-grabbing nature, big companies have been shedding workers in St. Louis for decades. Since 1993, the region’s net job generation has come from firms with fewer than 100 employees. They have generated 114,000 jobs, almost as many as the big companies have cut. And it’s not just jobs. Increasingly, small firms generate the ideas and innovations that power our economy.

Yet we’re not launching as many small businesses as we ought to be. St. Louis continues to lag behind the nation in the establishment of new companies. During the past decade, the metro area has remained in the bottom quarter of big cities. On its index of entrepreneurial activity over the last three years, the Kauffman Foundation last week ranked Missouri 45th out of the 50 states. People here are half as likely to be self-employed — a key sign of startup activity — as in leading states such as Georgia and Arizona.

"We’ve been low in this regard for a long, long time," said Jerry Katz, a professor of entrepreneurship at St. Louis University.

And there’s good reason to believe this is holding St. Louis back. Look at faster-growing regions, such as Denver, say, or Dallas. They grow more companies and more jobs. Research earlier this year from Kauffman found that new firms — those less than five years old — have accounted for all new jobs added since 1980.

Growth isn’t so much from the big boys’ getting bigger, as the little guys’ growing up. And the places where they grow up will benefit.

Too often, that’s not St. Louis. But it hasn’t always been this way.

There was a time when this city was a leader in innovation and entrepreneurship. Jason Hall, director of the Missouri Technology Corp., points out that seven of the state’s 10 biggest companies — such as Emerson Electric Co., Monsanto, Leggett and Platt — were founded by individual businessmen, most of them more than a hundred years ago.

"We’re still living off them today," Hall said.

Indeed, big companies launched a century ago have sustained St. Louis ever since, and spread their wealth around the region. They funded its universities and museums. They founded Civic Progress to help tackle St. Louis’ problems. They built this city into a prosperous big-company town, a hub for the Fortune 500, flush with steady jobs.

But some say St. Louis got too comfortable, too reliant on its stable of hometown corporate icons.

"We had solid businesses making solid profits, and everyone was pretty content," said Katz. "St. Louis’ culture didn’t really support innovation."

And then, as we know, those icons faded.

Our global airline — TWA — disappeared. Local stalwarts from Purina to May Department Stores to A.G. Edwards were taken over by bigger competitors with a different hometown. Even Anheuser-Busch is not what it was, as the company has cut jobs under new ownership.

St. Louis does have its next-generation success stories — such as pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts and Enterprise Rent-a-Car — but they have yet to fill the big shoes of their predecessors. And that has local leaders looking for answers. The trouble, some say, is that those answers too often revolve around luring other big companies.

Alan Richter has been beating the drum for entrepreneurship for years, including nearly a decade running the region’s Small Business Development Center. Most of that time, he has watched civic leaders in St. Louis and state officials in Jefferson City spend their energies, and their resources, trying to land the big fish from someplace else cash advance companies.

Look at all the big incentive programs, Richter says, the tax breaks for big job generation, the credits for real estate development. Such economic tools are designed to make Missouri attractive to the big employer, not to grow the small.

"It runs through our entire economic development strategy," Richter said. "We’re not as committed to growing small businesses as we are to stealing from somewhere else."

That’s starting to change, local economic development officials say. They realize that attracting big companies to the region is a tough, expensive, often fruitless game, and they say they’re bulking up their small business development efforts to provide more balance.

"It’s not an either/or situation. You want a balanced portfolio," said Denny Coleman, president of the St. Louis County Economic Council. "You want diversity of size and kind of companies."

And it’s not as if there’s a shortage of people with good ideas that could lead to good business.

Coleman’s agency recently partnered with Edward Jones to launch a business plan competition, to find the best entrepreneurs with the best ideas and help them grow. And by "help," they mean award $100,000 in prize money and top-flight consulting help to three winners.

They were hoping for maybe 50 applicants, he said. They received 226.

That’s a good sign that there are many ideas out there, Coleman said. And a reminder that St. Louis needs to build on them.

"This region is being forced to think more entrepreneurially," he said. "Downsizing and right-sizing has forced out a lot of good people. But there are other opportunities."

Coleman has been watching this shift developing for 20 years. In the early ’90s, he chaired the region’s efforts to recover from the massive cuts at McDonnell Douglas, by far St. Louis’ biggest employer until defense cuts pulverized its work force. Twenty-seven thousand people lost their jobs. Suppliers and subcontractors lost their main client. Everyone had to think differently.

"For decades, some companies’ marketing strategy was to wait for McDonnell to call them," Coleman said. "That went away."

The county and others worked with these companies, to help them think anew about what kind of services they could provide and to whom; to become more nimble, more flexible, more entrepreneurial. They also launched retraining and placement programs for the laid-off, about 10 percent of whom decided to start their own businesses.

Indeed, a big chunk of the region’s small business infrastructure — the World Trade Center, its largest tech incubator, a key county loan fund — came out of the post-McDonnell adjustment period, Coleman notes.

Those resources are perhaps even more important today, as the region endures a transition that is at least as wrenching as those post-Cold War days. So many of St. Louis’ remaining big employers — from carmakers to banks to retailers — have been battered in the recession. And the big companies that are growing haven’t been able to make up for the losses.

That makes entrepreneurship even more important these days, said Dane Stengler, a senior research analyst at Kauffman.

If St. Louis hopes to build back the 75,000 jobs it lost, and give those who would build a new economy the opportunity to do it here, it needs to sharpen its focus on small business.

"It’s not a silver bullet," Stengler said. "But a strong and sustained recovery simply won’t happen without it."

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Portland’s City Council wants more time to study last-minute amendments to a long-developing plan to reform development rules along the Willamette River’s north reaches.

The council voted to further consider whether businesses could pay a set fee for developing river-area properties, instead of “mitigating” or making environmentally friendly improvements to as much as 15 percent of their land. The council also wants businesses’ consent on a plan that would allow for further review and amendments down the road.

The north reach Willamette plan is the first of three Willamette redevelopment initiatives. Businesses say the area generates an $871 million economic impact. The Portland Development Commission estimates the area employs some 38,000 workers.

Environmentalists want to protect the stretch of the river from further industrial damage while Portland officials hope to strike a balance between environmental and business concerns.

Eventually, business interests believe the final plan should give businesses full guidance as they work within federal, state and local environmental guidelines, groups such as the Working Waterfront Coalition have argued.

Environmental groups that support the so-called “River Plan” maintain that businesses are stalling in order to delay implementation of the stricter new rules. The groups, along with Portland Mayor Sam Adams, believe the city can back a plan that allows for future changes if the rules don’t work.

The council will take at least the next two weeks before reexamining the business amendments. Commissioner Nick Fish and Randy Leonard said the council needed to get a firmer grasp on the amendments. The changes were introduced, at the behest of business, between a Feb. 17 public hearing and Thursday’s council meeting.

The council had expected to give the final River Plan a first reading Thursday and vote on it next week.

In contrast to the February public hearing, all members of the public speaking on the River Plan at Thursday’s meeting encouraged the council to adopt it. Business interests from the Port of Portland and several riverfront operations had dominated testimony during the February meeting mainly because of several sidebars that caused the evening meeting to run very late.

The city and businesses have explored north reach river development reforms for longer than a decade.

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Mildred Elley, a two-year for-profit college, said Melissa Lurie, dean of academic affairs, has been promoted to a new post, president of the school’s Albany campus.

Lurie, who has a master’s from New York University in student personnel administration and a bachelor’s in communications from SUNY Oneonta, joined Mildred Elley in 2007.

She began as dean of student services before being promoted to dean of academic affairs in 2008. The fast growth at the college at both its Albany and Pittsfield, Mass., locations has prompted a need to create a new campus president position, said spokeswoman Danielle Palermo.

Mildred Elley has seen enrollment grow from 1,154 to 1,398 over the past two years through the addition of health care programs including a degree for licensed practical nurses. A registered nurse program will be added soon and a third campus—to be located in Manhattan—is expected to open this spring.

As Albany campus president, Lurie will oversee academic, career services and enrollment staff.

Her promotion created a vacancy in the dean of academic affairs post, which will be filled by Stephen Quick, who had been the college’s chair of business management and information technology no teletrack payday loans.

Quick, who has a master’s from the University at Albany, will supervise all academic departments and develop plans to improve student retention.

Heather Chase, a senior business management instructor, has been promoted to chair of that department, filling the vacancy created by Quick’s promotion.

Chase, who has an MBA from University of Phoenix, will oversee all instruction offered by the business management department. She will be responsible for faculty recruitment, student retention and the department budget.

Mildred Elley is operated by the Empire Education Corp., a privately-held corporation, that also owns and operates Austin’s School of Spa Technology. The corporation’s sole owner is Faith Takes who purchased Mildred Elley in 1985.

Mildred Elley's staff of 215 people is expected to grow by 50 after it opens its new campus in New York City this spring.

The college generated $14 million in revenue last year and Takes expects that number to grow in 2010.

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The United States, which led the world into recession, may now see its fragile recovery stifled by events across the globe.

Dangerously high debt levels in Greece and some other European countries could trigger a wave of national defaults, undermining revival in Europe and probably in the United States as well.

And China’s recent steps to cool its economy also complicate President Barack Obama’s plan to attack high unemployment here by increasing U.S. exports. Financial markets have been whipsawed over concerns that debt problems in Greece — and perhaps also in high-debt Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy — might infect stronger European neighbors.

Euro zone countries are key U.S. trading partners, and the United States can’t meet Obama’s goal of doubling exports in five years — or reap the benefits in new jobs — if debt default contagion spreads throughout Europe.

China is also deemed an important growing export market for U.S. goods. But Beijing’s recent steps to curtail bank lending and its economic saber-rattling at the United States have increased trade tension between the world’s largest economy and a country poised to soon surpass Japan for second place.

The Obama administration says it wants to move away from an economy fueled by heavy consumer spending and reliance on imports toward what economic adviser Lawrence Summers calls "an economy that’s based on investment, that’s based on exports, that’s based on saving payday loans." Unfortunately, all the other major economies also are counting on digging out, at least in part, through expanded exports. For every nation to be able to meet such a goal, of course, is a mathematical challenge.

The financial turmoil in Europe does have one potential silver lining for the U.S.: The uncertainty has raised the value of the dollar as measured against the currencies of 15 of the nation’s 16 biggest trading partners.

But there’s a downside to that, too. A stronger dollar makes made-in-America goods more expensive in overseas markets.

The U.S. trade deficit surged to a larger-than-expected $40.18 billion in December, the biggest imbalance in 12 months.

The Commerce Department said the December deficit was 10.4 percent higher than November. It was much larger than the $36 billion economists expected, with much of the increase coming from a big jump in oil imports.

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The beleaguered auto industry is poised for a slow but steady turnaround in 2010 that will usher in an era of profitability and job growth after years of declines, according to a new industry forecast.

The Conference Board of Canada, a private-sector economic forecaster, said the auto sector isn't necessarily out of trouble but there are encouraging signs that profits will return in 2010 and strengthen each year through to at least 2014.

"The Canadian auto industry appears to have turned a corner in the second half of 2009 and is expected to return to profitability in 2010," economist Sabrina Browarski wrote in the report.

"However, production will remain below historical levels," Browarski added. "Manufacturers will have to make concerted and ongoing efforts to streamline product line-ups, control costs, and innovate to maintain profitability."

The Conference Board said the industry will close 2009 with a $2.3-billion loss before taxes, but Canadian auto assemblers including the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda will have a collective profit of $100 million in the final quarter.

Still, the Conference Board expects Canadian production for all of 2009 to be about half of what it was in 2007, due to a halt in production by Chrysler and General Motors at the beginning of 2009.

"In fact, real production this year will fall below levels not seen since the 1992 recession," the report said.

The forecast for 2010 sees the industry returning to the black with before-tax profits of $263 million, a number which will rise to just under $2 billion in 2014.

The Conference Board indicated that conditions south of the border will determine the pace of recovery for Canadian auto producers because 84 per cent of production is destined for the U.S. market.

In the United States, vehicle sales are expected to edge up to 11.6 million units in 2010, with industry revenues rising by nearly 38 per cent.

Tony Faria, co-director of the automotive research centre at the University of Windsor, said the report is on par with analysts' predictions that the market is slowly returning.

"The expectation is that 2010 (and) 2011 will be rather slow growth years in the auto industry," he said.

Faria said the North American auto market demand will rise from 12.3 million vehicles in 2009 to as much 14 million in 2010. In the years before the recession hit, the market had called for about 20 million vehicles each year.

"It's going to be a slightly better market next year than this year, although the market's going to be well below the level that we became accustomed to from 1999 through 2007, which were nine extraordinarily good years."

Auto analyst Dennis DesRosiers was less optimistic than the report, saying there is too much competing information that makes it difficult to tell whether or not the industry is taking a turn for the better.

"My independent assessment is that this industry is still in a lot of trouble and a lot of denial…(as to) how serious the issues still are," DesRosiers said.

"I see all kinds of positives, but I don't know whether it leads to profitability or not, or whether it leads to these companies' long-term survival or not. But I see an equal amount of negatives."

The report said cost-cutting measures, such as labour agreements between the Canadian Auto Workers union and subsidiaries of Chrysler, General Motors and Ford (NYSE: F) will aid in the return to profitability.

General Motors and Chrysler have also reduced costs in other ways, such as cutting dealership networks, and reducing the number of shifts in operation. They also received a total of $13 billion in loans from the Canadian and Ontario governments.

"As of today, the outlook for the Canadian, Ontario and U.S. governments getting a good chunk of their loan money back is a lot more optimistic than it would have been six months ago," Faria said.

The Conference Board projects employment to rise 2.4 per cent to 53,200 workers in 2010 from 51,900 this year, after falling 19.4 per cent from 64,400 employees in 2008.

Next year's predicted employment gains would come after four years of steady declines.

Faria said there will continue to be job losses in assembly jobs for a short period of time, as the Detroit Three work to get production capacity in line with sales volumes.

But he added, some automakers are beginning to call employees back to work, and the trend will continue as production ramps up through 2010.

Toyota Canada announced Dec. 10 it is hiring 800 more people to raise production of a popular SUV built in Woodstock, Ont. by introducing a second shift.

GM Canada said last month it will recall 150 laid-off employees to its CAMI facility in Ingersoll, Ont., to meet strong demand for its 2010 Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain. The company will also bring back 600 workers to its Oshawa, Ont., plant in 2011 to begin production of the company's new Buick Regal.

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One in six companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index may raise its next dividend payment as a rebound in the global economy boosts cash earnings.

AT&T Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Raleigh, N.C.-based Progress Energy Inc. are among 79 companies in the index that may boost dividends, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An 80th company, Ecolab Inc., the world’s largest maker of cleaning chemicals for hotels and restaurants, increased its payout Thursday. About 2 percent of the members may reduce their next payment.

“The economic recovery is in place,” said John Crawford, chief investment officer of Crawford Investment Counsel Inc. in Atlanta. “With that you will see some improvement in dividends in an overall sense, but they, too, will be coming along at a slower pace.”

Companies that have large market share, strong finances and pay above-average dividends are attractive for investors looking for safe returns as 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield less than 3.5 percent, said Crawford, who manages $2.5 billion in securities.

AT&T, based in Dallas, has a projected 12-month dividend yield of 6.1 percent, and Progress, the owner of utilities in three Southeast states, is expected to pay 6.2 percent.

Dividends tend to reflect the prior year’s profits and so won’t rebound for many U.S. companies until 2011, said Kevin Shacknofsky, who manages about $2 billion for Alpine Mutual Funds in Purchase, N.Y.

Some of the increases in dividends next year will be from companies that had cut payments or eliminated them this year or in 2008 because of “near-death experiences,” Shacknofsky said.

Thirty-three companies on the S&P 500 had lower dividend payments this year compared with 2008, Bloomberg data show.

Banks including Bank of America and Citigroup slashed dividends amid the deepest recession since the 1930s. Citigroup, which paid 32 cents a share, discontinued its dividend this year. Bank of America reduced its quarterly payment to 1 cent a share from as much as 64 cents last year.

“The biggest payers out there were the financials,” Shacknofsky said. “So in dollar terms, dividends are still weak.”

Companies are also beginning to use cash from rebounding profits to buy back stock. Chubb Corp., the insurer of commercial property and high-end homes, approved a repurchase program this week of 25 million shares.

General Dynamics Corp., the producer of Abrams battle tanks and Gulfstream business jets, this week announced plans to buy back as many as 10 million shares. The company is forecast by Bloomberg to raise its dividend in March by 2 cents to 40 cents a share.

Shacknofsky said companies should be raising dividends instead of buying back shares. “They should leave playing the market to investors, and they should rather give cash back as dividends,” he said.

Select companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and Wal-Mart have held up well during the recession and maintained dividend increases, Crawford said. Those companies are a safe haven during this period of low interest rates and slow recovery.

“That’s why AT&T and Progress and some of these names are attractive,” Crawford said. “You are just as safe, and you’re better off because you have higher yield.”

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China on Tuesday restated its long-standing policy to maintain the basic stability of the yuan at a reasonable and balanced level, after President Barack Obama said he would discuss the currency when he visits Beijing.

Asked about Obama’s comments, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China would keep improving the currency’s exchange rate mechanism with a view to gradually making the yuan more flexible.

Qin added that China hoped the United States, as the most important economy in the world, would pursue a stable fiscal policy to keep the dollar’s exchange rate steady and ensure its own growth and that of other nations.

“I want to make it clear that the United States is the number-one economic entity in the world,” he told a regular news conference.

“We hope that … the United States can overcome the difficulties brought by the international financial crisis and at the same time maintain the medium-term and long-term sustainability of its fiscal policy,” Qin said.

Obama told Reuters in an interview in Washington that he would raise the issue of the yuan, which many economists and U.S. manufacturers consider to be undervalued, when he comes to China next week.

But Obama also said the two countries share a common interest in helping to rebalance the global economy in order to deliver sustainable growth, a view echoed by Qin payday advance.

“If you ask me how relations between the two countries are right now, my first answer is: the economies of China and the United States are mutually related, integrated, dependent on each other and getting closer to each other day by day.”

But there are tensions between the two.

U.S. manufacturers complain that Beijing artificially holds the value of the yuan down to make its exports cheaper and American goods more expensive for Chinese consumers.

Economists say this has led to imbalances in the world economy by contributing to big trade deficits in the United States and trade surpluses in China.

Leaders of the Group of 20 developed and emerging economies have pledged to aim for policies to ease these imbalances.

But China has also been angered by recent controls slapped on some of its imports, and Qin issued a new warning against barriers to commerce.

“We urge the U.S. side to make positive efforts with China to resolve frictions and questions in trade, including acknowledging China’s status as a full market economy and halting some protectionist measures,” Qin said.

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison and Yu Le; Editing by Alan Wheatley and Ken Wills)

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