Finance Blog number 1

The Reserve Bank of India

Panera Bread Co. founder Ron Shaich will share the title of CEO of the chain of bakery cafes with Bill Moreton, the company announced today.

Moreton was promoted to president and CEO of the Sunset Hills-based company in May 2010, and Shaich took on the role of executive chairman of the board of directors.

The chain has more than 1,500 locations and operates locally as St. Louis Bread Co.  

Shaich’s new titles are co-CEO and chairman, and Moreton is co-CEO and president payday loans. 

In announcing the changes, Panera said in a statement that the switch to co-CEOs “formalizes a relationship that has evolved over the last year and is a reflection of the way in which Shaich and Moreton have been operating as partners.”

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President Barack Obama countered Republican attacks on his trade record with China by filing a complaint seeking to stop Beijing

PepsiCo Inc. revamped its management structure Monday in a move intended to strengthen its lineup of potential successors to CEO Indra Nooyi and leverage its scale as a global company.

The management restructuring puts John Compton, who heads the company’s Americas foods division, in charge of all the company’s global groups in the newly created role of president.

PepsiCo said Compton will also work with its regional groups for Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa to build brands, develop new products and cut costs. Compton, who is 52, started his career with PepsiCo when he was 22 and has been there ever since.

Brian Cornell, who was president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Sam’s Club division, will take over for Compton as CEO of PepsiCo Americas Foods. The unit includes the Purchase, N.Y.-based company’s Frito-Lay and Quaker foods and snacks businesses.

Cornell, who is 50, previously held management positions at Pepsi, including president of its Tropicana brand and its Europe and Africa beverage businesses, before leaving the company in 2004.

PepsiCo said the appointments are effective immediately.

John Sicher, editor of Beverage Digest, said the appointments were in line with PepsiCo’s focus on transforming into a more international company like its rival The Coca-Cola Co.

“They want to extract all the benefits they can from being as big and global a company as they are,” Sicher said.

The focus on international markets has become increasingly critical for beverage and snack food companies, given the flat growth at home in recent years.

PepsiCo in the past few years even created three new groups _ global beverages, global snacks and global nutrition. The company said the heads of each of those groups will now report to Compton.

The new management structure comes as PepsiCo, the nation’s No. 2 cola company, has lost ground in recent years to Coca-Cola and faced speculation that Nooyi would step down amid investor dissatisfaction.

In a note to investors, Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. analyst Mark Swartzberg said he considered the appointments positive for the company’s long-term fundamentals. Although he said he no inside knowledge of the situation, he said it was a “reasonable outcome” that Nooyi would soon leave her post as CEO, paving the way for Compton or another senior PepsiCo executive.

At its annual investor meeting last month, PepsiCo said it plans to focus on regaining market share in North America by rolling out new products and significantly boosting its ad spending. The company also said it would cut 8,700 jobs, or about 3 percent of its work force.

While PepsiCo is clearly focused on identifying its business fundamentals and identifying ways to strengthen its advantages, Citi analyst Wendy Nicholson also noted last month that it would be “a mistake to underestimate the chaos factor” at PepsiCo.

She cited the high level of turnover during the past year, including the company’s announcement that Massimo d’Amore, the president of its global beverages group, would retire early next year.

“While we believe change is good, especially for an organization that has underperformed, we also wonder how much more shifting of responsibilities is yet to come,” she wrote.

Shares of PepsiCo gained 32 cents to $63.47 in morning trading.

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Days after the Conservative government introduced its copyright reform bill in June 2010, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore spoke out in support of the legislative package by notoriously labeling critics as

New Zealand may for the first time since 1982 pick a central bank veteran to lead the institution, as the nation contends with slower global growth and the fastest exchange-rate gains among most-traded currencies the past year.

Reserve Bank of New Zealand Deputy Governor Grant Spencer, 59, has the best chance of getting promoted, nine of 10 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News said, with the analysts covering the RBNZ at three of the country

BlackRock president Robert Kapito is walking the firm’s talk.

Kapito, who helped found the world’s largest asset management firm, now has about 70% of his investment assets in dividend-paying global companies, and 30% in high-yield corporate bonds.

Those are both cornerstones of BlackRock’s new "Investing in a New World" initiative, which encourages investors to get out of idle cash and find assets that generate income in a slow-growth, low-rate environment.

Americans had a record $10 trillion deposited in their bank accounts at the end of 2011, noted Kapito. And with the Federal Reserve holding interest rates near historic lows, that cash is earning virtually nothing.

"People need to rethink the cost of cash, and think about income," said Kapito. "They’re worried they don’t earn enough and won’t have enough to retire on, but the longer they sit in cash, the longer they’ll have to work and they won’t be able to retire when they want to."

Century-old IBM hits fresh all-time high

Kapito said investors are much better off investing in dividend-paying stocks, which return between 3% and 5% a year, and so-called junk bonds, which yield between 5% and 6%. Both offer better returns than Treasuries, he added. The 10-year government note currently pays only about 2%.

High-yield bonds have been extremely popular among income-hungry investors this year. BlackRock’s iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF () has raked in more than $3 billion so far in 2012, almost as much at the total amount of assets it brought in during all of 2011.

For dividend-paying stocks, Kapito said investors can gain exposure through individual companies, like AT&T (, Fortune 500), Pfizer (, Fortune 500), Verizon (, Fortune 500) and Johnson & Johnson (, Fortune 500), or buy shares of an ETF like the iShares High Dividend Equity Fund (), which launched last year and includes all of those companies and others like Procter & Gamble (, Fortune 500), Merck (, Fortune 500) and Intel (, Fortune 500).

Kapito said he also likes to invest in municipal bonds, particularly those issued in his current hometown of New York City, since those yield about 4% and are exempt from income taxes.  

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Oil prices hovered below $107 a barrel Tuesday in Asia after U.S. and Israel leaders met to discuss growing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.

Benchmark oil for April delivery was down 2 cents to $106.70 at midday Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 2 cents to settle at $106.72 per barrel in New York on Monday.

Brent crude was steady at $123.80 per barrel in London.

After a meeting Monday in Washington, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed no sign of give on competing ways to resolve the crisis. Obama urged pressure and diplomacy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb while Netanyahu emphasized his nation’s right to a pre-emptive attack.

The U.S., Europe, Israel and other nations fear that Iran may be building a nuclear weapon. Iran, the world’s third-largest oil exporter, denies the charge.

“The Iranian fear premium didn’t change in our view,” energy consultant Ritterbusch and Associates said in a report.

Crude has risen from $96 last month amid investor concern that a military conflict aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities would disrupt global oil supplies. Analysts say Saudi Arabia and other oil producers do not have enough spare capacity to quickly make up for Iran’s 4 million barrels a day of crude.

Analysts estimate crude would jump to $150 in the wake of an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear operations.

“The risk of a supply disruption due to geopolitical factors is uncomfortably high and increasing,” said Richard Soultanian of NUS Consulting.

In other energy trading, heating oil fell 0.6 cent to $3.21 per gallon and gasoline futures were steady at $3.26 per gallon. Natural gas fell 0.5 cent at $2.35 per 1,000 cubic feet.

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The chairman and chief executive of American Express Co. received a compensation package valued at $22.5 million for 2011, a 38 percent increase from a year earlier, according to an Associated Press analysis of a regulatory filing.

The company credited Kenneth Chenault and his management team for delivering revenue and profit growth, and gaining market share over the past two years.

The executive, who has been chairman and CEO since 2001, received $16.3 million in compensation in 2010.

Chenault, 60, received a base salary of $2 million, up 3 percent from the previous year, according to documents filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The executive also received a cash bonus of $2 million, unchanged from 2010.

But the bulk of Chenault’s compensation hike came in the form of stock awards, which were worth about $15.3 million at the time they were granted _ a sevenfold increase from $2.1 million worth of stock awards the year before.

Chenault also received option awards valued at about $2.2 million on the day they were granted, down 76 percent from $9.2 million a year earlier.

His other compensation declined 7 percent to about $1.02 million, and included $570,000 in company contributions to Chenault’s defined contribution plans; $395,439 for perks and other personal benefits; $53,458 in dividends and equivalents; and, $3,939 in life insurance.

Even with high unemployment and continued doubts about the strength of the economy, credit card use has been on the rise.

New York-based American Express, which caters to a more affluent customer than its peers, saw its 2011 profit climb to $4.94 billion, an increase of 22 percent from the year before. Full-year revenue rose 9 percent to $29.96 billion.

Shareholders saw the company’s stock price rise about 10 percent last year. The stock closed Friday at $52.99.

The Associated Press formula calculates an executive’s total compensation during the last fiscal year by adding salary, bonuses, perks, above-market interest the company pays on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock and stock options awarded during the year. The AP formula does not count changes in the present value of pension benefits. That makes the AP total slightly different in most cases from the total reported by companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The value that a company assigned to an executive’s stock and option awards for 2011 was the present value of what the company expected the awards to be worth to the executive over time. Companies use one of several formulas to calculate that value. However, the number is just an estimate, and what an executive ultimately receives will depend on the performance of the company’s stock in the years after the awards are granted. Most stock compensation programs require an executive to wait a specified amount of time to receive shares or exercise options.

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