Greek PM Lucas Papademos is set to meet the party leaders of his coalition to try and win support for a proposed 130bn euros ($171bn; £108bn) EU rescue.

Mr Papademos wants their backing for reforms demanded by the IMF and EU as a condition of the bailout.

Eurozone ministers had hoped to meet on Monday to finalise the bailout, Greece’s second, but that meeting has now been cancelled.

The money must be in place by mid-March if Athens is to avoid a debt default.

It is hoped Mr Papademos can reach a deal with party chiefs by Sunday night.

“The moment is very crucial,” said finance minister Evangelos Venizelos on Saturday.

“Everything should be concluded by tomorrow [Sunday] night.”

Athens faces loan repayments to private lenders of 14.4bn euros ($19 billion) on 20 March.

The BBC’s Mark Lowen, in Athens, says Greece cannot afford to lose the bailout package and a lot now rides on these talks.

But, our correspondent says, that with potential elections in April, the parties in Mr Papademos’ coalition are wary about being seen to be associated with the austerity measures being demanded by the EU.

Read Full Article in BBC.CO.UK.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Airline business: Mere oxymoron or investor death wish? Cumulatively, America’s airlines have lost $34 billion since 1947. In the last decade, five legacy carriers landed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy—US Airways twice. “How do you become a millionaire?” mused Warren Buffett, who had an unhappy dalliance with US Airways. “Make a billion dollars and then buy an airline.”

The commercial jet came of age in Seattle, yet when Bill Ayer quotes another Buffettism at a business conference here—”If a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down”—the audience erupts in laughter. Mr. Ayer knows his gallows humor. He runs America’s seventh-largest carrier, Alaska Airlines.

Based along Angle Lake in southern Seattle, Alaska is an oddity—a smallish, specialized, regional airline in a world of global giants. It shuns cross-continental alliances and mega-mergers. It doesn’t make a priority of “market share” or “capacity discipline,” the industry buzz words. It’s also unusual, in an era of wrenching change at airlines, that Mr. Ayer has worked at the same company for 30 years.

Alaska is unique in other ways. “They seem to be running a business, rather than an airline,” says analyst George Hamlin. Take any industry metric—on-time arrival, customer satisfaction, full planes, consistent profitability, passenger growth—and you’ll find Alaska at or near the top.

Alaska shares rose 30% last year, making it the only major airline to show a full-year gain. The industry was down 25% on average. Alaska’s market capitalization of $2.78 billion compares with $1.56 billion for US Airways, the fifth-largest carrier, whose revenues are three times those of Alaska. Yet, as Mr. Ayer half-jokes at the luncheon talk, “airlines are not a great benchmark” against which to compare yourself.

Later in the day, at his office down I-5 from the huge Boeing plant, he says that airlines have gotten “really good at making excuses.” The excuse list is long: Few businesses are as vulnerable to fluctuating fuel costs and customer-demand shocks (think Great Recession, terrorism). Few are so dependent on union labor. Few are—since deregulation in 1978—as volatile and competitive.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Micron Technology Inc. named Mark Durcan as its chief executive today, replacing Steve Appleton, who died yesterday after crashing an experimental plane.

Durcan, 51, who had been planning to retire in August, was appointed by the board of Boise, Idaho-based Micron after agreeing to fill in temporarily. Robert Switz will become chairman of the board, and Mark Adams, head of sales, was named company president, Micron said in a statement.

“I have provided the board my ongoing commitment to work with the management team and continue to move the company forward,” said Durcan in the statement. “We are deeply saddened by Steve’s loss and will miss his hand at the helm.”

Durcan, who joined Micron in 1984, had been scheduled to hand over his role as chief operating office to Adams in August. Adams joined Micron in 2006 as part of Micron’s acquisition of Lexar Media Inc. They will pick up where Appleton left off, navigating the sole U.S. maker of computer memory through a period of volatile price swings that left Micron unprofitable eight of the past 14 years.

Micron’s board met today following the death of Appleton, who took charge of Micron at the age of 34 and went on to become the memory-chip industry’s longest-serving chief executive officer. He was 51.

Read Full Article in Washington Post.com/Bloomberg.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Israeli leaders on Thursday delivered one of the bluntest warnings to date of possible airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, adding to the anxiety in Western capitals that a surprise attack by Israel could spark a broader military conflict in the Middle East.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, speaking at a security forum attended by some of Israel’s top intelligence and military leaders, declared that time was running out for stopping Iran’s nuclear advance, as the country’s uranium facilities disappear into newly constructed mountain bunkers.

“Whoever says ‘later’ may find that later is too late,” Barak said. He switched from Hebrew to English for the last phrase: “later is too late.”

The language reflected a deepening rift between Israeli and U.S. officials over the urgency of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, which Western intelligence officials and nuclear experts say could soon put nuclear weapons within the reach of Iran’s rulers.

Although accepting the gravity of the Iranian threat, U.S. officials fear being blindsided by an Israeli strike that could have widespread economic and security implications and might only delay, not end, Iran’s nuclear pursuits.

Full Article in Washington Post.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Warren Buffett spends one weekend a year meeting with thousands of shareholders at the annual meeting of his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. But several Fridays a year, Mr. Buffett entertains business students from all over the country who descend on Omaha, Neb., to pick the billionaire investor’s brain.

At these visits, students spend two hours quizzing Mr. Buffett on any subject they choose, tour local businesses owned by Berkshire and lunch with the investor at one of his favorite restaurants, with Mr. Buffett picking up the tab. At the end of the event, each attendee takes a turn getting Mr. Buffett to strike a funny pose for a picture, giving them a unique memento to take home.

Mr. Buffett is a busy man. So why bother?

“I’m training investors and managers,” Mr. Buffett said an interview. “If you’re 22 or 23, you’re forming ideas about what you want to do with your life. If I talked to a bunch of 60 year olds, they just want predictions and amusement.” He wants to help young people think about “how they want to live their lives,” he said, and show them they can have fun doing what they like.

Some 60 years ago, Mr. Buffett figured out how to think about investing after spending time with the late Benjamin Graham, a legendary value investor who taught a weekly class at Columbia University and detailed his investment philosophy in books. “Graham changed my life and if I [hadn't met] him, my life would probably be different,” Mr. Buffett says.

Since 1951, the year he took a Dale Carnegie public speaking class, Mr. Buffett has carved out time to teach in some form or other. He used to give speeches at colleges in Omaha and cities where he had business meetings. But when demands from schools piled up, he figured he could meet more students by having them come to him. In recent years, the trips have occasionally included groups from overseas, including China and India. More than 200 universities have requested visits, and some have waited years for a spot. Each school sends 20 students, and Mr. Buffett requires that at least a third be female. He typically takes eight universities per visit.

The students’ questions can be quite personal.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Even the year’s grandest TV event isn’t enough to get smartphone addicts to look up.

In what is being marketed as the first “second screen” Super Bowl, the game’s promoters and advertisers are offering interactive experiences aimed at getting people to spend more money and time on mobile phones and devices.

Roughly 60% of Super Bowl viewers will use their phones during the game, says a survey by Velti, a mobile marketing firm. An E-Trade survey says 31% of viewers expect to use Facebook, and 6% will be on Twitter. “This is the first year where you’ll see fans using the cellphone more often than the remote,” says Krishna Subramanian of Velti. “Advertisers are trying to figure out how to leverage the second or third screen.”

• MORE: How to stream the Super Bowl live

Some examples:

•Game streaming.Verizon Wireless and the National Football League are partnering to live stream the game. It’s the first Super Bowl to be broadcast live on mobile phones, Verizon Wireless says.

Public Knowledge, a communications advocacy group, warns that live video streaming can be costly, as much as $20 for a three-hour game if you’re over your data limit.

Read Full Article in USA Today.com

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Calvin Wilson
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For Greeks who have watched their taxes skyrocket, their wages plunge and their prospects flatline, news of the latest austerity demands from European leaders came like the punch line to a bad joke.

If the Mediterranean country does not receive another bailout, it will default on its debts by mid-March, potentially sending it spinning off the euro currency or even out of the European Union. But before Greece can get more money, Europe is asking it to take steps that threaten to aggravate an already biting recession.

Officials said Wednesday that they were within days of reaching a deal to reduce Greece’s crippling debt and to give it a second, $174 billion bailout.

As Europe starts to acknowledge that its austerity-driven policies elsewhere have not done enough to lift the continent out of its economic troubles, leaders have shown a new willingness to consider economic stimulus policies. But Greece, so far, remains an exception.

If Greece doesn’t lower its minimum wage, cut pensions and further slash spending on public health within days, European leaders have hinted that they are ill-inclined to keep loaning money to help the country pay its debts. They complain that Greece has fallen far short of meeting the financial promises that it has made over the past two years and has nearly run out of time to make up for it.

Read Full Article in Washington Post.com

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Calvin Wilson
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College graduates and advanced degree holders, once they are unemployed, are as vulnerable as high school dropouts to long-term joblessness, a new study has found.

Thirty five percent of unemployed college graduates and those with advanced degrees have been without a job for more than a year, the same rate as unemployed high school dropouts, according to a Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative study published Wednesday. In fact, the long-term unemployment rate, for those 25 and older without a job, is nearly the same across all levels of educational attainment, the report says.

“A slowly rising number of job vacancies…hurts people regardless of their educational attainment,” said Gary Burtless, labor economist at the liberal think tank Brookings Institution. Nonetheless, he added: “Relatively speaking, there’s still a payoff to going to college. The college degree still has some vaccination effects against becoming a long-term unemployed person.”

Indeed, getting a college degree is a good bet for avoiding unemployment in the first place. The unemployment rate of college graduates who are at least 25 years old is just 4.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In contrast, 13.8 percent of high school dropouts, 8.7 percent of high school graduates, and 7.7 percent of college dropouts are unemployed.

Read Full Article in Huffington Post.com

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Most of Facebook Inc. (FB)’s more than 800 million users are women. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the board, whose seven directors are all men.

The disconnect puts the social-media company at odds with others in the industry that have at least one female director, including LinkedIn Corp. and Google Inc., and from most big public companies in the U.S. Just 11.3 percent of the Fortune 500 had male-only boards last year, according to Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit that researches women and business issues.

“We’re long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better,” said Anne Mulcahy, former chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corp. and a director at Johnson & Johnson Co., Target Corp. and Washington Post Co. “It’s unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don’t reflect that in their boardrooms.”

A Catalyst survey of Fortune 500 companies found that those with three or more female directors outperformed those with fewer between 2005 and 2009, achieving on average 43 percent better return on equity. As Facebook prepares to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering, the composition of its board shows its business strategy is faulty, said Susan Stautberg, co-founder of New York-based Women Corporate Directors, which promotes female board membership.

“It doesn’t make sense for a company that claims to be so forward looking to not have any women directors,” she said. “If they just have an old boy’s network in the boardroom, they won’t have access to diverse ideas and strategies.”

Read Full Article in Bloomberg.com

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Calvin Wilson
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Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
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With home values still depressed—and likely to remain so in the coming year—many people who plan to start businesses won’t be able to leverage their personal properties to raise capital they need.

There are several alternatives, however, some newer than others.

Some 39% of business owners with less than $5 million in annual revenues said a bank loan would be the best way to raise capital in 2012, according to a survey of 2,851 owners of small businesses conducted by Pepperdine University in early January. Other top prospects were personal savings (36%), friends and family (19%), and credit cards (17%), according to the survey.

By contrast, only 11% said home equity would be the best capital source.

Despite significant funding challenges, including depressed home prices and a tight overall credit market, entrepreneurship rates have risen from 2006 through 2010, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a small-business research group in Kansas City, Mo.

The foundation has an annual Index of Entrepreneurial Activity but hasn’t yet measured the rate of new business creation during 2011, it says.

Here’s a look at some of your choices:

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

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Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation