Global finance blog - news, jokes, life…

EndoGastric Solutions has completed a $30 million round of financing led by Canaan Partners and Radius Ventures.

Existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, MPM Capital, Foundation Medical Partners, Chicago Growth Partners, and De Novo Ventures joined in the round.

EndoGastric is developing procedures for the treatment of upper gastrointestinal diseases business cards.

Brent Ahrens, general partner of Canaan Partners, and Kathleen Regan, venture partner of Radius Ventures, joined EndoGastric 's board of directors as part of the transaction.

Source

Free health insurance quotes from affordable health insurance companies. Low cost medical coverage on group, family, or individual.

More workers are satisfied with their pay, most likely because they feel lucky to have a job at all, according to Gallup poll results.

More than half of all U.S. workers — some 53% — believe they are paid an amount that is "about right" for their jobs, according to the poll, compared to 43% who said they’re underpaid.

The number of people happy with their pay has actually increased in the last two years, even as the job market has grown steadily worse. A 2008 Gallup poll showed that 46% of U.S. workers believed their pay was "about right," compared to 51% who said they were underpaid.

"U.S. workers’ heightened appreciation for their pay likely reflects today’s challenging job market," according to the report, which was released on Thursday.

Gallup noted that the nationwide unemployment rate of 9.5% is "significantly higher" than the 6 high risk personal loans.1% jobless rate when Gallup conducted the same poll two years ago.

Gallup also reported that about a quarter of workers are "worried that they could soon lose their jobs or see a pay reduction — nearly twice the August 2008 level."

"These findings help explain why workers may now be happier to hang on to their jobs they have than they were only two years ago, without looking for greater financial rewards," concluded the poll.

Bad news for the job market just keeps coming. On Thursday, the U.S. Labor Department reported that the number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance rose for the third time in a row, to 500,000 jobless claims for the week ended Aug. 14, the highest level in nine months. 

Source

Save up to $500 on your auto insurance! Compare car insurance rates, or get an insurance quote online.

Morgan’s Wonderland, PCI Education and WeAreTeachers have launched a national online contest for special education teachers and their students.

Starting Aug. 10, special ed teachers can nominate a student and his or her family for a chance to win a free trip to Morgan’s Wonderland, the world’s first accessible park for special needs children and adults. In addition, the five teachers whose students garner the most votes will receive free educational products from PCI Education. Nominations and votes will be tabulated through WeAreTeachers’ site (www.weareteachers.com). Nominations will be accepted through Oct. 1. Voting will begin Oct. 4 and close Oct. 20. Winning families can receive two-days admission to Morgan’s Wonderland, round-trip airfare to San Antonio and two nights hotel accommodations.

San Antonio-based PCI Education is the country’s leading publisher of learning materials for special needs students. Austin-based WeAreTeachers is a social and business community for educators, businesses, and education marketers Payday advance. Morgan’s Wonderland is a 25-acre park in San Antonio that has rides, playgrounds, gardens and an eight-acre lake. The entire park is geared toward individuals with disabilities and their families and is wheelchair-accessible.

“We’re delighted to be working with PCI Education and WeAreTeachers in spreading the word about our unique and colorful park designed with special-needs individuals in mind,” says Gordon Hartman, head of The Gordon Hartman Family Foundation and driving force in the creation of Morgan’s Wonderland. “The park opened just five months ago, and the response from guests has been overwhelmingly positive. We feel very confident the winning student will have a truly memorable experience at Morgan’s Wonderland.”

Source

Attending school in California and becoming an engineering major can really pay off for college graduates — by thousands of dollars a year.

According to a report released Thursday from salary-tracker PayScale.com, petroleum engineering majors and graduates of Harvey Mudd College are taking home the biggest paychecks.

While mid-career salaries fell 1.5% overall between 2009 and 2010, engineers, scientists and mathematicians continued to rake in the big bucks, as well as students who graduated from Ivy League schools.

"Our society values something practical — that’s why poetry isn’t popping up on the top of the list," said Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at PayScale. "As in the past, engineering and [similar] fields with a strong math component plus a physical world component remain on the top, with lots of money to be made in these fields."

The data in the report, collected from 999 bachelor degree institutions in the last year, track median starting salaries of employees who graduated in the last five years and median mid-career salaries of graduates with more than 10 years of experience in a given field.

Follow the money: So where are all the lavishly paid engineers bred? According to PayScale.com, it’s Claremont, Calif., where Harvey Mudd alums go on to earn a mid-level salary of around $126,000.

"Harvey Mudd is the nexus of all good places to be in terms of graduate earnings," said Lee. "Not only do engineering majors make good money and this happens to be a specialized school for engineering, but southern California is an area that tends to have some of the highest wage earners in the country."

Meanwhile, Dartmouth College, which claimed the title as the school with the highest paid graduates for the past two years, was knocked down the list to number two — tied with Princeton — with its graduates receiving a starting salary of $54,100 and a mid-career salary of $123,000.

Since a large chunk of Dartmouth students typically head into financial services post-college, many graduates felt a blow to their wallets in the last year as financial companies cut back on pay, said Lee.

Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Colgate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Duke and Bucknell rounded out the top ten list of schools with the highest-paid mid-career graduates no fax cash advance.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you choose Coker College in South Carolina — the worst-paying school on the list — be prepared for a starting salary of around $28,900 and a mid-level salary of $40,300.

Majors that pay: Topping the list of best-paying degrees this year, petroleum engineers earn a starting salary of $93,000 and a mid-level salary of $157,000.

That’s $49,000 more than the next most lucrative majors, aerospace engineering and chemical engineering, which both produce graduates earning a salary of around $108,000.

"Petroleum engineering has been an incredibly profitable sector for the last few years," said Lee. "It’s a very cyclical field and depends largely on the price of oil, and we’re very much on an up cycle right now."

Electrical engineering was the third-highest paying major on the list, with mid-level pay of $104,000 per year, followed by nuclear engineering, applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, physics and computer engineering.

But I don’t want to be an engineer! If science and math aren’t your thing, don’t worry. There are plenty of other majors — many you wouldn’t expect — that will put you on the money-making track.

"People always think they have to be an engineer if they want to make good money down the line, but there are a lot of other majors that will help you find good careers with salaries that anyone would be comfortable living on," said Lee.

A building construction major typically leads to a mid-career salary of more than $94,000, while mid-level government majors earn $87,300 on average. International relations, supply chain management and urban planning also boast average salaries of more than $80,000 a year.

Even majors like film production and zoology can help you land a good-paying job. While film-makers earn a starting salary of only $36,100 and recently-graduated zoology majors tend to make about $34,600, mid-level salaries come in at about $77,800 and $68,800, respectively. 

Source

Consumer confidence in the D.C. region has stalled, according to the results of the Greater Washington Board of Trade Mid-Year Consumer Confidence Survey.

Consumer confidence, which had been growing for the past year and a half is now stagnant, mostly because of concerns about the job market.

As measured by the biannual survey, consumer confidence has remained virtually unchanged over the past six months. Since the last survey in November 2009, the Consumer Confidence Index rose only two points. (The survey’s margin of error is +/- 2.83.)

Survey results show that concern about the employment market is holding back overall consumer confidence in the region, with 61 percent of the respondents saying that jobs in the area are “scarce” and hard to find.

When asked about the future, half the respondents predict that the job market will either stay the same or even get worse over the next six months.

“Consumer confidence in our region has barely moved since last November indicating that there is growing trepidation in the economy,” said Jim Dinegar, president and CEO of the Greater Washington Board of Trade bad credit payday loans. “There have been too many disruptions to the recovery to give people confidence through the recession, but confidence will return.”

The percentage of consumers saying it is a good time to make major purchases has remained the same as it was in November 2009, at 43 percent.

Data indicate that homeowners in the D.C. region are a little less optimistic about home values rising over the next six months, dropping from 33 percent to 30 percent.

In contrast to the Greater Washington Board of Trade’s Consumer Confidence Survey, the Business Outlook Survey, which is based on a survey of the region’s business executives, jumped a hefty 18 points, from 68 to 83, between December 2009 and April 2010.

Source

Wisconsin Power and Light Co., a subsidiary of Alliant Energy Corp., said Thursday it has priced a public offering of $150 million in debentures.

The debentures have an interest rate of 4.6 percent and will be due on June 15, 2020.

The Madison-based utility said it intends to apply the approximately $148.5 million in net proceeds from this offering initially to repay short-term debt, including that incurred to finance equipment purchases and construction expenditures on an interim basis. The net proceeds also will be used to invest in short-term assets and, thereafter, to fund capital expenditures principally consisting of wind farm and pollution control equipment, and for general working capital purposes no teletrek payday advance.

The offering was marketed through a group of underwriters, including RBS Securities Inc., UBS Securities LLC, Barclays Capital Inc., J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. and KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. as joint book-running managers.

Source

Employees on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded April 20 all had the ability to stop the drilling process at any time but ignored red flags, BP and Transocean executives told lawmakers Thursday.

"Any employee, anywhere at any level, if they have any concern about safety, has the ability and, in fact, the responsibility to raise their hand and try to get the operations stopped, whether that’s our operations or a contractor’s operations," Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America, told the House Natural Resources Committee.

Transocean president and CEO Steve Newman said his company - which owned the oil rig - gives all its employees "stop work authority" to call a "time out for safety." He said the company even takes pictures of employees and distributes them across the entire organization, to recognize those who have called so-called time-outs.

But why then did no one say "stop?"

Lamar acknowledged that hours before an explosion sunk the rig, killing 11 workers and sending oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, there were warning signs that went ignored.

"I do think there is a significant period of time where there were signals and there was a cumulative effect of those signals that were not recognized," he said.

Lawmakers questioned both McKay and Newman about an alleged argument that took place between BP’s site manager and the Transocean team over a procedure hours before the blast payday advance lender.

But both McKay and Newman said they didn’t know anything about the argument, other than what was reported in the press Wednesday.

The hearing was one of several oil-related sessions on Capitol Hill this week as Congress investigates the cause of the Gulf Coast spill.

At a news conference Thursday, President Obama said the government will extend a moratorium on permits to drill any new deepwater wells for at least six months. Offshore drilling permits have been suspended since April, after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Newman said he would support a moratorium for six months, calling it a "prudent" pause while investigators still search for the cause of the explosion, but he still believes in the long-term importance of offshore drilling.

The hearing comes a day after BP started a so-called "top kill" procedure aimed at plugging the leak. McKay said at Thursday’s hearing that he does not know whether the procedure is working, but the company will continue to report on its progress. 

Source

The Obama administration took the first concrete steps Thursday to make good on its pledge to halt new offshore drilling projects, suspending the approval process for new wells off of the Virginia coast.

The Minerals Management Service, part of the Interior Department and the agency charged with issuing new drilling leases, had scheduled three public hearings in Virginia this month to solicit public comment about new wells off of the state’s coast.

The agency said on Thursday that these meetings are now suspended indefinitely, pending a government safety review of offshore drilling.

The process was halted "so that information from the ongoing review of outer continental shelf safety issues that the President has directed can be appropriately considered in those meetings," according to an MMS statement.

Last week president Obama said all new offshore drilling will be halted until the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is identified.

But leases for new oil wells were not expected for at least a year, whereas the investigation should wrap up in months.

Thursday’s announcement is the first time the Obama administration has actually put the brakes on a plan to open up more areas of the country to offshore drilling bad credit pay day loans.

Obama has supported increased drilling in the past, and just a month ago opened up a few new areas for drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, off the East Coast and in Alaska.

That was the first offering of new leases in the Atlantic since 2008, when a decades-old ban on new offshore drilling expired.

Obama has emphasized he still supports increased domestic oil production, but says it needs to be done safely.

The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where an oil rig exploded last week, continues to unfold. Eleven of the rig’s workers are presumed dead, and oil is still leaking into the Gulf in what could be one of the worst spills in U.S. history.

The ban on offshore drilling and its subsequent lifting refer only to new drilling. A big swath of the Gulf of Mexico has always been open to oil production, and produces nearly a third of the country’s crude.  

Source

Emergency state legislation that will help Maryland health care leaders figure out how to put their share of $5 billion in federal money to use in a high-risk insurance pool has passed committees in both the House and Senate.

The bill, introduced last week after President Barack Obama signed the national health care reform bill, first paves the way for the Maryland Health Insurance Plan to continue operating as the state’s insurance pool for individuals with chronic and other costly health conditions who cannot afford to purchase coverage from a commercial carrier.

Money from the federal government — perhaps 1 percent to 2 percent of the $5 billion — would then enable MHIP to lower its premiums for coverage and eliminate a policy that denies coverage or makes it more expensive for individuals with pre-existing health conditions such as diabetes who previously were not covered by a private health plan.

The legislation — filed at House Bill 1564 and Senate Bill 1125 — passed the House Health and Government Operations Committee on March 27. It was approved by the Senate Finance Committee on March 25.

If the measure is passed by both sides of the state legislature and signed into law as expected, the benefits could take effect as soon as June, said Richard Popper, MHIP’s executive director.

“We could cut our premiums within 60 days,” he said bad credit pay day loans. “The national health care reform gives states the money to make it happen.”

Under the national health care reform, about 32 million more individuals will be required to have health insurance by 2014. In the meantime, the federal bill calls for the creation of a temporary national high-risk insurance pool that would lower the cost of coverage for millions of uninsured individuals.

Still, details regarding how Maryland’s 7-year-old high-risk insurance program will mesh with the new federal one need to be ironed out. Popper said eligibility requirements for the federal program may differ slightly from those imposed by MHIP.

As many as 70,000 uninsured Marylanders could benefit from the expansion of MHIP’s coverage, according to testimony Popper presented to members of the Senate Finance Committee on March 25.

MHIP already covers more than 17,000 Marylanders. Its enrollment grew about 15 percent in recession-soaked 2009, as more individuals joined the program after losing their job or their employer cut benefits.

Baltimore-based CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the region’s largest health insurer, administers claims for MHIP, which replaced the state’s Substantial, Available and Affordable Coverage plan in July 2003.

Source

Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust CEO and founder Steven D. Hayworth has replaced Adolfo Henriques as chairman of the Coral Gables-based bank.

In September, a group of more than 50 local investors led by Hayworth bought the bank from Boston Private Financial Holdings, where Henriques is a board member. During the negotiations to sell the bank to the local group, Henriques took over as chairman.

The former CEO of Florida East Coast Railway, Henriques remains on the board of Boston Private cash advance no fax.

“I will miss my friends on the Gibraltar Private board, but I leave knowing that Steve and his team have created a terrific private bank and wealth management company that will serve our community well in the future,” Henriques stated in a press release.

Gibraltar Private Bank lost $20.2 million in 2009 and ended the year with $1.5 billion in assets.

Source