Assets

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

WASHINGTON -- His book sales may be slowing, but President Obama appears to be on solid financial footing.   The president reported assets that could exceed $8 million, according to financial disclosure forms released by the White House on Tuesday. Obama's precise net worth is impossible to discern from the forms, which require public officials to report assets and liabilities only within broad ranges. The forms showed assets of between $2.6 million and $8.3 million. Obama listed a JPMorgan Chase checking account valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, notable as the bank faces federal regulator scrutiny for a $2-billion trading loss.

The alarm over potential bank runs in Greece and Spain this week has highlighted an often-overlooked fact: Europe's debt crisis is also, in many ways, a major banking crisis. In capitals such as Athens, Madrid and Rome, large portions of the sovereign debt racked up by spendthrift governments are owed to the countries' own banks, locking governments and the banks in an embrace so tight that disaster for one would almost certainly spell doom for the other. International bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal have helped to keep not just their governments but also their banks afloat, as well as financial institutions in other parts of Europe with large exposure to those nations' debts.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A brazen daytime assassination on Sunday offered a grim reminder of stymied progress in a key part of NATO's effort to wind down the Afghan war: peace talks with the Taliban. Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan government body set up to conduct negotiations with the militant group, was shot and killed while traveling by car through the Afghan capital, police said. Coming less than nine months after the assassination of the head of the High Peace Council, the killing cast yet more gloom over Western-backed efforts to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table.

What a difference two years makes. 1989 was a pretty good year for California banks, a pretty lousy year for savings and loans--a flip-flop from the way things were just two years ago. The reason is simple: New federal rules enacted last year have shaken up the savings and loan industry, by requiring thrift owners to put more of their own money at risk if they want to stay in business. Former high-flying thrifts are struggling to stay alive because of soured investments. In any event, banks stood out as clearly the top performers during 1989 in The Times 100 survey of return on average assets (ROA)

Ford Motor Co. will offer about 90,000 U.S. salaried retirees and former employees vested in its pension plan a lump-sum payment to buy them out of monthly benefits. Ford, which also reported lower first-quarter earnings Friday because of losses in Europe and Asia, said the plan was an innovative strategy to reduce its pension obligations. The automaker won't put up any operating cash but rather will make the one-time payments from existing pension plan assets. "We believe this is the first time a program of this type and magnitude has been done in an ongoing pension plan," said Bob Shanks, Ford's chief financial officer.

As warehouses go, there are few like Skechers USA Inc.'s new 1.82-million-square-foot distribution center. This warehouse is so big that it takes half a minute to drive from one end to the other at 60 miles per hour. The setup is so advanced that human hands will hardly touch the cargo as it is unpacked, categorized, stacked and prepared for delivery. The building is so green that it uses prevailing winds for ventilation instead of air conditioning. For its new North American operations warehouse, the nation's No. 2 footwear company chose the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley.

After numerous consumer complaints, a Santa Monica gold dealer's assets were frozen and its operations turned over to a court-appointed receiver, officials said Tuesday. A judge froze the assets of Superior Gold Group on Monday after it was accused of fraudulent business practices in a civil lawsuit against the company and owner Bruce Sands filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney and the Santa Monica city attorney. The company, which sold gold coins and bullion and other precious metals, took payments from customers and never provided the gold ordered, charged prices much higher than fair market value and misled customers into buying expensive specialty coins, the agencies contended in their lawsuit, filed Friday.

More than three years have passed since Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick shot and killed her ex-husband and his new wife as they lay in bed in their Georgian-style mansion. Convicted of second-degree murder, Broderick, 45, is serving 32 years to life in the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She cannot be paroled until 2010.

More than three years after its collapse during the darkest moments of the global financial crisis, Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. emerged from bankruptcy Tuesday. Rather than the start of a new chapter, however, the move is just the latest maneuver in a drawn-out saga that has gone on far longer than expected. Lehman announced that it will begin distributing assets to creditors in a “complete liquidation.” But that process will take years, meaning that Lehman - or more accurately, its legal doppelganger - is unlikely to vanish anytime soon.

City National Bank is buying its second company in three days, acquiring a New York investment firm in an expansion of the bank's growing wealth-management business. The Los Angeles bank is expected to announce Wednesday that it is purchasing privately held Rochdale Investment Management, according to people familiar with the deal. Rochdale manages nearly $5 billion for high net worth investors; the deal would push the total assets that City National oversees to more than $60 billion.

East West Bancorp reported a 21% jump in first-quarter earnings, with an increased profit margin on lending and fewer troubled loans. The Pasadena company, the nation's largest Asian American bank, said Tuesday that it earned $68.1 million, or 45 cents a share, compared with $56.1 million, or 37 cents, a year earlier. Revenue, a challenge for many banks as the economy slowly recovers, rose 9.5% to $240.6 million from $219.8 million. The results, which beat Wall Street estimates by 2 cents a share, represented "another solid quarter" for East West, with steady increases in its portfolios of home mortgages and commercial and trade finance loans, RBC Capital Markets analyst Joe Morford said.

The versatility of Nick Young has allowed Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro to use him at shooting guard and small forward. Young is a natural shooting guard, but with Mo Williams and Eric Bledsoe getting a lot of the time as the reserve guards, Del Negro increasingly has used Young to back up small forward Caron Butler . "I noticed once Mo came back, Vinny's been wanting a little bit more scoring off the bench," Young said....

For the last 40 years or so, many baby boomers have saved and invested diligently for their retirement. Now they may face a much different challenge: finding buyers for the mutual funds, individual stocks and other assets they'll need to sell to pay for their golden years. The demographic bulge of the 70-million-some boomers has driven U.S. economic and market trends in each decade since World War II. They powered the housing market for much of that period, inspired an explosion of brand-name consumer goods and, in the 1980s and '90s, helped stoke the greatest stock bull move of all time.

Dear Liz: My husband and I are nearing 60. The company where we both have worked for over 30 years recently merged with another firm. The money in our retirement accounts, which totals several hundred thousand dollars, will be distributed to us, and we need to figure out how to manage it. We took your advice to interview several fee-only financial planners, and all of them are pushing for wealth management. They would manage the money in exchange for a percentage of the assets.

The Federal Trade Commission said it had reached a settlement with two telemarketing companies that illegally called millions of consumers, banning the firms from the industry and requiring them to give up roughly $3 million in assets. The FTC said the companies made approximately 2.6 billion calls to consumers from January 2008 through August 2009 with prerecorded telemarketing messages about lower interest rates or auto warranties that were about to expire. The calls lured thousands of people across the country into buying expensive warranties that didn't offer much protection or signing up for worthless debt reduction services, the FTC said.

Yahoo Inc.'s discussions to sell its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and its Japanese operations have reached an impasse, according to a person briefed on the matter. Representatives of Alibaba and Softbank Corp., co-owner of Yahoo Japan Corp., are prepared to approach Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson to explore another arrangement that would let companies buy back their stakes, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The value of the Asian assets is about $11.5 billion, said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. in San Francisco.

  Syrian First Lady Asma Assad, a glamorous, British-born ex-banker once thought to be at the vanguard of change in her adopted land, was hit by European sanctions Friday after embarrassing reports about shopping sprees as her husband's forces were accused of killing civilians. The latest round of European Union sanctions against President Bashar Assad's inner circle came as demonstrators across the country marched to the slogan "Damascus, here we come. " The rallying cry signaled the opposition's intention to take its campaign to oust the president to the Syrian capital, largely insulated from the unrest sweeping the nation.

More than three years after its collapse during the darkest moments of the global financial crisis, Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. emerged from bankruptcy Tuesday. Rather than the start of a new chapter, however, the move is just the latest maneuver in a drawn-out saga that has gone on far longer than expected. Lehman announced that it will begin distributing assets to creditors in a “complete liquidation.” But that process will take years, meaning that Lehman - or more accurately, its legal doppelganger - is unlikely to vanish anytime soon.