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One of the St. Louis region’s highest-profile roof leaks is about to be plugged.

Leaders at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport said the roof covering the three busiest Main Terminal concourses — A, B and C — will be replaced at a cost of about $2 million in the first half of 2010.

"We’ve reached a threshold where we can’t do any more Band-Aids," said Lambert spokesman Jeff Lea.

For years, heavy rainfall has forced the airport to deploy plastic buckets throughout the airport to catch the dripping water. Not only is it a potential safety issue, Lea said, but it "doesn’t present a good image." The roof repairs aren’t part of the multimillion-dollar makeover of the Main Terminal, known as the Airport Experience, which began in summer 2008. Lea said it was just time to fix the long-standing problem. The project will be funded through the sale of bonds, which, Lea said, also will fund the Airport Experience projects.

Under the Experience project, the airport has replaced baggage carousels and resurfaced the dingy-white dome ceiling above the ticketing area. Soon, Lambert visitors will be greeted with easier-to-follow signs to guide them to parking lots, terminals and other key locations.

However, the roof repair project involves replacing the roof over three passenger concourses with a new rubber membrane, Lea said. It was pushed to the top of the list of needed airport projects, he added, because the leaking roof "has become a critical problem." The last time the roof was replaced was 1990 cash advance.

On rainy days, travelers have grown accustomed to sidestepping buckets in the long Lambert corridors.

"I have traveled significantly in Third World countries. I have seen a lot worse than leaking roofs," said Claudius Docekal of Creve Coeur, a businessman who has flown out of Lambert numerous times. "But is that the right image for the United States? No."

Lea said the airport already has made repairs to the domed roof over the Main Terminal ticket counters.

Business community leaders have been especially vocal about the perception of Lambert — from the appearance of its concourses to the proliferation of smaller regional jets in recent years.

"The business community cares mightily about Lambert as an economic development asset, and we certainly support the work that is under way right now to upgrade the facilities," said Richard Fleming, president and CEO of the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association. "For many of the people who come here from out of town, (the airport) is their first introduction to St. Louis."

In 2003, Fleming’s group along with the Regional Business Council and Civic Progress assembled a task force of business leaders to preserve the airport’s role as a regional economic engine.

The task force was created in response to American Airlines’ first major round of flight reductions at Lambert.

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Ameren Corp. will offer buyouts to 350 employees and will lay off an unspecified number of others as it responds to a sagging economy that has reduced electricity demand.

Buyouts are being offered to full-time managers and non-union employees who will turn 58 years old by Dec. 31. Senior executive officers and about 60 other employees are excluded from the program because of operational needs, the St. Louis-based company said Friday in a statement.

There will be additional job cuts depending on participation in the buyout program and for "other business reasons," the company said separately in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The job losses announced Friday by Ameren follow the elimination of 140 positions from the company’s merchant generation unit earlier this summer.

"We must build a more streamlined organization that can compete effectively in an environment where costs are rising, demand for energy has softened and prices for our merchant generation power have declined," Chief Executive Thomas R auto loan. Voss said in the statement.

The 350 positions being eliminated through buyouts would represent about 3.5 percent of Ameren’s 9,870-person work force.

Eligible employees were being notified this week and have until Oct. 22 to decide whether to accept buyout offers. Those who do are expected to leave by Nov. 1.

Employees who accept buyouts will receive Ameren’s usual severance package for managers — two weeks of pay for each year of service with a minimum of 13 weeks’ pay and a maximum of 52 weeks.

Most of the positions that are left vacant following the buyouts won’t be filled, the company said.

Ameren expects the buyout program to reduce earnings by as much as $30 million if all eligible employees accept the offers, the company said in the SEC filing.

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U.S. employers cut a fewer-than-expected 216,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high, the government said on Friday in a report showing a still fragile labor market.

The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent after dipping to 9.4 percent in July and the decline in payrolls was the smallest in a year. The department revised job losses for June and July to show 49,000 more jobs lost than previously reported.

Analysts had expected non-farm payrolls to drop 225,000 in August and the unemployment rate to rise to 9.5 percent.

The labor force increased by 73,000 in August, indicating the return of some jobless workers who had given up looking for work accounting for part of the rise in the unemployment rate.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the economy has shed 6.9 million jobs, the department said. Stubbornly high unemployment is wearing on consumer confidence and crimping domestic demand, pointing to an anemic recovery from the worst slump in 70 years business card. Consumer spending accounts for over two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.

However, the August report confirmed the pace of layoffs was easing from early this year, when nearly three quarters of a million jobs were lost in January.

Manufacturing employment fell by 63,000, with a total of 2 million factory jobs lost since the start of the recession. Payrolls in construction industries dropped 65,000 after falling 73,000 in July.

The service-providing sector purged 80,000 workers in August, while the goods-producing industries shed 136,000 positions.

Education and health services continued to add jobs, with payrolls increasing 52,000 in August after rising 21,000 in July. Government employment fell 18,000 after slipping 28,000 in July.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Neil Stempleman)

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Companies and investment banks are keeping their deep faith in China, viewing a recent plunge in the country’s stock market as a sideshow and its economic recovery as the real and more important story.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index is down 20 percent from its 2009 peak last month even after a slight rebound this week, sowing doubt in some minds about the solidity of the world’s third-largest economy.

But the Chinese stock market is notoriously volatile.

Just as its highs seem to defy reasonable valuations, so has its sell-off in recent weeks borne little resemblance to the robust recovery in the country’s factories, shopping malls and construction sites, speakers said at this week’s Reuters China Investment Summit.

“People must be pessimistic for the market to have fallen so much in one month,” said Chen Dongqi, vice-head of the macro-economic institute under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). “But this should not change the trend of the economic recovery.”

The government is committed to the “appropriately loose” monetary stance it adopted at the outbreak of the global financial crisis and will not make knee-jerk policy decisions in response to market movements, Chen said.

The trigger for the sell-off of Chinese shares was concern that the government had already begun an undeclared monetary tightening by leaning on banks to abruptly slow new lending.

Chinese banks lent 356 billion yuan ($52 billion) in July and are expected to have made even fewer loans in August, down from a monthly average of 1.23 trillion yuan ($180 billion) in the first half.

CHOOSY BANKS

Yang Zaiping, executive vice president of the China Banking Association, said the market had failed to appreciate the lending slowdown for what it really was: an attempt to ensure that bank credit goes where it is most needed.

“We have to be more choosy in our lending,” he said.

Loans should be targeted toward environmental and high-tech projects and consumption-oriented businesses, and steered away from sectors with over-capacity, he said.

Banks unleashed the record flood of loans at the start of the year to match the government’s front-loaded 4 trillion yuan stimulus plan, the crux of Beijing’s efforts to deliver 8 percent economic growth this year — a target that most analysts think is now well within its grasp.

Chinese banks typically issue the bulk of their loans in the first half of the year, leaving companies to draw on the credit over the subsequent months — a pattern that looks set to be replicated this year, albeit in slightly more extreme form.

“It will not affect economic growth,” Yang said. “There are a lot of irrational things in the stock market, like a herd effect.” 

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China is backsliding on reforms to open up its economy to foreign business, thereby hindering competition and imperiling its shift to a new model of sustainable growth, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said on Wednesday.

In its annual position paper, the chamber said government intervention in industrial policy and restrictions on foreign investment had been on the rise in the last three years, making China less and less attractive to European companies.

“The reform drive has to be kick-started again,” Joerg Wuttke, the group’s president, told a news conference.

The chamber said the 1,400 firms it represents remained optimistic about China and their own prospects.

“However, right across industries, European businesses are still impeded by issues concerning market access, legal and political transparency and the protection of intellectual property rights.

“The specter of protectionism has also appeared, and European companies are increasingly concerned by the tendency for local companies to be favored over foreign-invested ones,” it said.

The failure of the world’s top five wind operators to have a single national wind development project in China is just one example the chamber gives in arguing that foreign firms face discrimination.

Wuttke said foreign firms had been “systematically excluded” by a bidding process that is designed to favor domestic companies because it looks only at the initial cost of a turbine rather than the all-in cost over its 25-year life cycle.

By failing to create a level playing field, Beijing was hurting not just foreign business but its own prospects.

“European businesses remain convinced that the key driver of long-term economic development is the creation and promotion of freer and fairer market conditions for all companies in China,” the report said.

Sweeping measures to further reform and open up the economy after the 1997/98 financial crisis led to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, which had given a big boost to growth.

“However, in recent years, the European Chamber has noted a gradual slowdown — and in some cases a partial reversal — in the opening-up process,” the report said.

If China shuns the fundamental reforms needed now, its competitiveness would suffer and it could fail to reach its growth potential of 6-8 percent a year over the next decade, the chamber warned.

(Reporting by Alan Wheatley; editing by Ken Wills)

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U.S. consumers satisfaction with credit cards plummeted in 2009, driven by anger due to fees and higher interest rates, according to a J.D. Power and Associates poll released on Tuesday.

The poll showed around 20 percent of customers reported an increase in their interest rates since 2008, with the largest decline in satisfaction among revolvers, those card holders who carry a balance from month to month.

In addition, 18 percent of customers complained about various fees, up from 10 percent a year earlier.

The customer satisfaction index fell 7 points to 703 points in a 1,000-point scale, its lowest level since J.D. Power, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos, began conducting the survey in 2007.

The decline was “a little more than we thought,” said Michael Beird, director of banking services at J.D. Power and Associates. “Rates and fees clearly had the largest impact … We saw a decline in satisfaction among all types of cardholders in that category.”

Overall satisfaction among credit card customers remains the lowest across the financial services industries, including insurance, banking and investment services, he said.

In the last year, credit card companies have been raising fees and interest rates and slashing rewards to cushion record high loan losses paydayloans.

Those actions ignited public anger, as the same companies started receiving billions of dollars of taxpayer money in federal bailouts during the economic meltdown.

The moved pushed Washington to limit the ability of credit card companies to raise fees or interest rates from February 2010.

American Express Co, the largest U.S. credit card company by sales, ranked first in the satisfaction survey, helped by its rewards program, followed by Discover Financial Services.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, the largest issuer of Visa branded credit cards, was also above the industry average satisfaction mark.

However, Citigroup Inc, the largest issuer of MasterCard branded credit cards, Bank of America Corp, and Capital One Financial Corp ranked below the industry’s average.

American Express, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Capital One, and Discover make up around 80 percent of the U.S. credit card industry.

The poll, conducted in May and June, received responses from more than 9,000 credit card users.

(Reporting by Juan Lagorio; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett intends to raise his stake in Chinese electric car and battery maker BYD Co Ltd, BYD’s chairman said on Monday, sending shares in his company up 8 percent.

MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, bought 10 percent of BYD for $230 million or about HK$8 a share last September, sparking a massive rally in the stock.

“MidAmerican has always intended to raise its stake in BYD because it believes BYD has good prospects in the development of renewable energy, but we are still considering (whether to sell more),” BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu told reporters on Monday.

BYD, Hong Kong’s largest listed auto stock, also said it expects to sell its e6 electric car in the United States in 2010, a year ahead of schedule.

“BYD shares are not cheap at the current price level, but since the company’s strategy is in line with Beijing’s policy, and with the support of Buffett, the market is willing to pay a premium for that,” said Ben Kwong, the chief operating officer of KGI Asia.

China’s government has been encouraging local automakers to focus on more fuel efficient models and environmentally friendly technologies.

BYD shares rose 8 percent to close at HK$48.6 on Monday, more than six times what MidAmerican paid and valuing the company at about $13 billion. The benchmark Hang Seng index .HSI fell 1.9 percent.

AMBITIOUS PLANS

BYD has ambitious plans for its hybrid and rechargeable electric vehicles, aiming to sell as many as 9 million units by 2025 to take on heavyweights like General Motors GM.UL and Toyota Motor Corp.

It launched a gasoline-electric hybrid electric car, F3DM, in China last year and expects to sell its all-electric car e6 to the United States in 2010, a year earlier than its original 2011 target. BYD says the e6 is capable of driving 400 kilometers (249 miles) on a single charge.

“e6 will be launched in the United States by the end of 2010 and they are now being tested under U.S. regulations,” Wang said.

The electric cars will be sold in Shenzhen first in the fourth quarter of 2009 and will gradually expand to other cities in China, he added.

BYD has sold about 100 F3DM cars to governments and corporates and plans to sell to individual customers starting in September.

It sold a total of 180,000 vehicles in the first half of the year, up 1.5 times from a year ago, which helped nearly double its net profit to 1.18 billion yuan ($173 million) for Jan-June.

BYD said it now hopes to exceed its 2009 sales target of 400,000 vehicles. 

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