PLANYC 2030

Insurance broker Debbie Stocks spends much of her work day helping clients select health plans.

“People often shop online for health insurance. They don’t necessarily buy insurance online, though,” said Stocks, who is with Your Benefits Partner in Henrico County and also is president of the Central Virginia Association of Health Underwriters.

“Most find it very confusing when trying to compare the plans they see online,” Stocks said.

Health-care reform will change the insurance landscape for consumers, but it also will change it for insurance brokers and agents who earn a living helping people choose plans.

The law requires states to set up health insurance exchanges that consumers can go to and shop for a health plan. It also requires that exchanges provide “navigators” that do outreach and help people understand options.

The role of these navigators and how brokers and agents will be paid have created uncertainty for agents.

“I would envision that exchanges should work the same way, in that people may shop or browse the available plans on the exchange but would still need an agent’s help to find the right plan for themselves or their families,” Stocks said.

California insurance brokers are taking their case to policymakers.

Last week, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group advising federal officials on how exchanges should operate, adopted a resolution to “protect the ability of licensed insurance professionals to continue to service the public.”

The National Association of Health Underwriters, which represents more than 100,000 insurance agents and brokers, praised the NAIC’s action.

“Insurance is a complicated purchase, and you cannot boil it down to a simple one-page comparison,” said Alan L. Jones of TPA Benefits in Henrico County.

Health plans in the state-run exchanges will offer plans that cover essential benefits at various levels of cost-sharing. Plans would be classified as bronze, silver, gold, platinum and catastrophic.

Jones said there is always the risk that people will choose a plan based on price of New York health insurance quotes and end up underprotected.

“People are attracted to the price but do not understand or forget the limitations of the policy,” Jones said. “Then, when they need it and it does not cover what they thought it would cover, it is too late.”

Stocks said about half her time is spent helping clients resolve plan issues.

 

Tiger Woods fans have put up with the philandering, the text messages and the domestic spats. Now comes what may be the hardest thing of all to tolerate: Losing.

Woods has played through the year without a single tournament win, putting him at 83rd on the PGA Tour’s money list. As his performance slumps, so have sales of his apparel line through Nike Inc., according to retailers Golfsmith International Holdings Inc., Roger Dunn Golf Shops and Golf Discount Superstore.

Golf apparel sales overall are on the rise, signaling consumers are returning to the course, just not to Woods. Nike gets about 10 percent of its golf sales from the Woods brand, whose shirts, jackets and pants are among the most expensive clothing the sportswear maker sells.

“Apparel is hot right now,” said Laura Dowdy, the clothing buyer for Roger Dunn, which has more than 20 stores. “Everything — Adidas, Puma, Nike, except the Tiger brand.”

Nike, based in Beaverton, Oregon, doesn’t disclose sales for the Tiger Woods Collection. Nike gets about $650 million in sales tied to the sport, according to Matt Powell, an analyst at Charlotte, North Carolina-based researcher SportsOneSource, who provided the estimate for sales of the Woods line.

“We support Tiger and never underestimate his abilities as a competitor,” Nike spokeswoman Beth Gast said in an e-mail. “He’s a phenomenal athlete with over 70 wins on the PGA Tour and 95 wins worldwide.” She declined to comment further. Woods’s representatives did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment.

Volume Slump

The line’s volume through the first half dropped 7.5 percent from a year earlier at Golfsmith’s 76 stores, Chief Executive Officer Martin Hanaka said in an interview. Total golf apparel sales climbed 11 percent over the same period at the Austin, Texas-based retailer.

Nike fell 90 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $70.05 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have risen 6 percent this year.

“The Tiger effect has been negative this year,” Hanaka said. “Fortunately, other Nike products and other brands have been doing well, so we’ve been able to overcome it.”

Nike’s apparel sales climbed 13 percent in the quarter ended May 31, and its golf apparel sales also have climbed about that much this year, according to Powell. The retailer is now selling the fall 2010 men’s collection on its website. The cover boy? Not Tiger. It’s 2009 British Open Champion Stewart Cink. Woods appears in a list of “athletes” on a linked page.

Fallen Champion

Other than his rookie season, when he finished 24th, Woods has been in the top four on the money list every year on tour. This month, he recorded the worst 72-hole score — 18 over par – - of his professional career.

“When Tiger’s doing well, people watch and buy his brand,” said David Martin, a branding expert with almost three decades of experience who runs Interbrand’s New York office and global golf practice. “When he’s not, people decide not to watch and they buy something else.”

Online retailer Golf Discount Superstore said it’s seen a “definite decline” for the brand. Roger Dunn, a division of Santa Ana, California-based Worldwide Golf Enterprises Inc., says almost all other apparel products are growing save for Tiger’s line.

Personal Problems

“Before, he was a champion,” said Patrick Rishe, a sports business professor at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, and director of Sportsimpacts, which analyzes the economic impact of sports events. “He conveyed discipline and consistency. Now he’s lost that aura of perfection, on and off the course, and there’s no way Nike can create that aura again.”

Woods’s personal problems haven’t helped. Yesterday his lawyer announced that his divorce from model Elin Nordegren was completed, nine months after reports of his extramarital affairs surfaced.

Woods, 34, crashed his Cadillac sport-utility vehicle into a fire hydrant outside his Florida home last Thanksgiving, leading to his admission that he had relationships with several women during his marriage. One of those women, Joslyn James, created a website showcasing alleged text messages from the golfer that described various sex acts.

Nike first signed Tiger Woods to a five-year endorsement contract in 1996. The retailer has described the Tiger Woods Collection, launched in 1999, as “Nike Golf’s top-of-the-line apparel,” with sweaters and pants that cost more than $100 on the company’s Web site.

Nike hasn’t discounted its Woods Collection apparel and probably won’t, according to Powell, who says the company is counting on Woods returning to form and being “an important part of its portfolio.” Golfsmith also has no plans to lower prices for the brand, according to its chief marketing officer.

Nike Challenge

“The challenge to Nike is that we’ve never seen Tiger Woods weak before, and it’s completely antithetical to what his brand is,” Interbrand’s Martin said. “Some athletes can ski off into our memory as stars, but for Tiger, unless he gets it together this winter and starts winning, his career trajectory is a double-black diamond,” or exceptionally steep slope.

Not everyone has abandoned Woods. Clint Utz, 28, said he owns about 15 Tiger Woods Collection shirts and has bought several this year.

“All of a sudden, so many people were against him, but he’s still the same person that worked hard and achieved things no one else has ever achieved,” said Utz, a marketing director for Landscapes Unlimited, based in Lincoln, Nebraska. “Everyone loves a winner. They’ll come back.”

 

Standard Chartered Plc started a trainee program for the children of private-banking clients, joining bigger rivals including Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG in reaching out to Asia’s next generation of millionaires.

Eighteen people aged 18 to 26 enrolled in the six-week program in Singapore, which ended Aug. 13. They were assigned to projects ranging from identifying potential acquisition targets for London-based Standard Chartered to developing ideas for branch design, said Jungkiu Choi, the executive responsible for the course.

UBS and Citigroup, the biggest managers of money for the rich in the Asia-Pacific region, also run programs for children of their private-banking clients as banks target the scions of millionaires. Asia’s wealth may grow at double the global pace over the next four years, according to a Boston Consulting Group report published in June.

For “rich people, the next generation is their number one concern,” Choi said in an Aug. 23 interview in Singapore. “Transferring knowledge, discipline, business acumen, capability — that’s more important to them than transferring their wealth.”

Private banks ignore the offspring of rich clients at their peril, said Justin Ong, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s private banking leader for Asia-Pacific. A survey by PwC last year showed almost 40 percent of private banks in Asia don’t know how much money they’ll keep when a clients’ wealth gets transferred, he said.

Loss of Customers

“This is really a time of investment by the banks to develop relationships with the next generation of high net worth,” Singapore-based Ong said. “They have only just come to realize the deepening issue around potential customer loss if they don’t react to this and start building relationships now.”

Standard Chartered, the U.K. lender that gets more than three-quarters of its profit from Asia, restarted wealth management operations in 2006 after a decade-long hiatus. It caters to people with more than $1 million of assets. Half of the interns’ families have at least $10 million managed by the bank, said spokeswoman Ally Lim.

Standard Chartered’s private bank increased assets under management by 27 percent in Asia in the first half, more than twice the global pace.

The bank has no plans to extend the program to other parts of Asia, since most senior executives are based in Singapore, said Choi. This year’s participants came from Singapore, China, Dubai, South Korea, India, Indonesia and Malaysia and paid for transport and accommodation themselves.

UBS, Citigroup Courses

In Asia, Zurich-based UBS runs a two-week course once a year in Singapore and Hong Kong on topics including wealth management, leadership and personal development. Citigroup’s program, which alternates between the two cities, ran for five days this year and covered financial planning, investing and “soft skills” such as public speaking, said Aamir Rahim, the New York-based bank’s Asia-Pacific chief executive officer of wealth management.

Both banks said their courses had record numbers of participants in Asia this year. Credit Suisse Group AG this year started its first Chinese-language course for young investors in Taiwan.

“Our programs for the next generation of ultra-high net worth clients are designed to provide practical advice on how to manage the wealth they will eventually acquire,” said Daniel Harel, UBS’s head of private banking in South Asia for clients with at least 50 million Swiss francs ($48 million) of assets.

M&A Shortlist

Standard Chartered’s program is the only one in Asia that takes place in a real-life business setting, Choi said. At the end of the six-week course, participants can opt for a one-week class in financial planning, he said. They get paid an intern stipend of S$1,300 ($957) a month for their work at the bank.

“I tell them: ‘You are Spiderman. You have a special power and a special responsibility, but you need to learn how to deliver pizza first’,” said Choi.

One thing the trainees may deliver for Standard Chartered is an acquisition. As part of their on-the-job training, they were asked to help identify potential takeover targets for one of the bank’s units. The participants whittled down the list of candidates to less than 10 from “a few hundred,” and Standard Chartered may start talks with those companies, Choi said.

He declined to identify the potential targets.

In an effort to be one of the world’s most recognized schools for business, Yale’s School of Management stuffs its students and faculty into century-old buildings resting upon a rat-warren of basements. That is a distant level of learning atmosphere standards from Harvard Business School’s 33- building campus, which also supports a chapel and health club.

To get up to par on today’s high class collegiate living standards, Yale has plans to build a $180 million structure to help attract and retain students against rival schools. The new allure is designed by Lord Norman Foster, who built London’s “Gherkin” tower, and the building is scheduled to open in 2013.

“You can’t be in a dump if everyone else is in a spectacular building,” Oster said.

Top business schools have a common approach of designing and constructing larger, more complex business campuses to recruit the most elite students and faculty, said Yale finance professor Matthew Spiegel. New learning facilities mean additional space for faculty as well as more classrooms and lecture halls for high-margin education programs that provided essential global cash flow. Additionally, higher capacity schools can also accept more students, who invest up to $80,000 per year in tuition, room and board and other expenses.

Even schools with less capacity are developing new standards in learning atmosphere as well as educational opportunities. A mid-size Michigan university, Ferris State, has begun heavy promotion of its Michigan MBA degrees, along with revamping many facilities around campus.

Business schools are dropping a pretty penny on top architects to create elaborate glass-and-steel structures, targeting all aspects of the campus from study rooms to cafeterias and health clubs.

“The better the experience people have, the better they feel about the place, the more likely it will be that they would support it at some point,” said dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, in Ann Arbor, Robert Dolan. As a part of the trend, in 2009 the U of M business school opened a $145 million, 270,000-square foot building to help support their Masters of Business Administration program.

Shortly after the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School unveiled its $140 million Jon M. Huntsman Hall in 2002, competing business schools have scrambled to keep pace.

In 2004, the University of Chicago opened its $125 million Harper Center, while Michigan’s building debuted last year. Opening new facilities are Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Business, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, near Palo Alto, California.

Also in the development stages are New York’s Columbia Business School and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Illinois. Ramping up their IT capacity for an influx of digital learning needs for their new online MBA courses is Ferris State, in Michigan.

Harvard’s buildings, which started construction in 1927, rest on a beautiful perch along the Charles River across from the rest of the university. Harvard has added more to their campus building investments, such as a glass-and-concrete chapel, housing designed to support 400 visiting executives and a health club.

The new business school building at the University of Chicago is structured around a six-story, glass-and-steel atrium that serves as the school’s “living room” for students. An assistant dean of the school adds that the new social space has helped change the perception that the school of business is a sole destination for book worms enrolled in MBA classes.

“We’re working hard to break that perception,” Kole said. “When you come to campus, you see more activity. It’s a much more positive place to be.”

In fact, applications spiked 30 percent after the first year the University of Chicago put the new building in its marketing, however improved collegiate rankings contributed to the rise as well, she noted.

While the physical condition of a business school is not the most important factor of consideration, “you do consider the facility, you do consider what school will allow you to access the latest technology,” said Ashil Ann, a 26 year old prospective college applicant at New York University’s Stern School of Business and McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington.

High tuition costs contribute to students’ rising expectations – as well as the increase in size and complexity of the new buildings, said Jonathan Levav, a faculty member at Columbia. Tuition, room and board, as well as other expenses for two years at Columbia Business School cost approximately $168,307. With such high costs of education, along with a growing demand for loan origination, the expectations students have are respectable considerations for colleges everywhere.

While a number of U.S. based universities have made cuts to new construction due to decreasing endowments, business schools, especially those that offer MBA courses, are not as nearly affected from the reductions as other areas of study because of their ability to raise money.

“Graduates of business and law schools are often the wealthiest alumni,” said Ronald Ehrenberg, an economics professor at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. “It is easy to raise the funds to build buildings from donors to those schools” he adds.

For the school’s new complex of buildings, Stanford’s school of business was granted $105 million, the largest gift in its history, from the Oregon alumnus who founded Nike Inc., Phil Knight. The Standford business campus, which will require an estimated $350 million, will be named the Knight Management Center in his honor.

Developing new buildings can also provide more room for additional education programs, like those pursuing MBA degrees or executive education, the highly profitable, non-degree programs for business-related employees paid for by their companies.

MIT Sloan’s new building has a learning center solely for executive education, offering a better ambiance than the rest of the school. Currently, many Sloan executive education classes are held off campus.

“It is on campus, it is clearly part of the Sloan school complex and it makes it easier to say ‘yes,” said the school’s the associate dean for executive education Rochelle Weichman.

The innovative offerings are also in an effort to counter the growing popularity of online MBA classes, which have provided many students an extremely convenient alternative to post-secondary education opportunities.

MIT’s building holds offices for 107 faculty members who used to be distributed across five structures throughout the campus. To drive innovative ideas and creative brainstorming, the four new office floors are designed to encourage interaction between professors of different departments, said Lucinda Hill, director of capital projects at Sloan.

The Yale School of Management, founded in 1974, is the youngest business school among the Ivy League, a group of eight U.S. colleges in the Northeast. The school has areas of study in Masters of Information Systems Management as well as many more emerging Master’s programs.

“We want to build a great business school,” Yale President Richard Levin said during an interview. Levin added that he wants the school of business to be on par with Yale’s law and medical schools and “be thought of among the best” in the world.

The faculty at Yale’s business school is now working in almost 200 year old buildings and offices originally intended to be bedrooms. Many classrooms are buried in building constructed in 1961, which first housed Yale’s computer department.

“The current facility doesn’t look and feel like a business school,” Levin said. “I think it does hurt us in attracting students.”

Having more students will allow Yale to assure its programs are fully enrolled and to justify the size of its faculty, Oster said. More students also help with financial forecasting for future, long-term investments.

“You don’t want to be in a position where you have three students in each category because you’ll never get enough recruiters and you won’t get classroom excitement if the electives have too few people in them,” Oster commented. “We don’t have enough students to go around.” 

 

 

Loans to households and companies in Europe grew at the fastest pace in 13 months in July after the economic recovery gathered steam.

Loans to the private sector rose 0.9 percent from a year earlier after growing an annual 0.5 percent in June, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt said today. That’s the strongest increase since June 2009. M3 money supply, which the ECB uses as a gauge of future inflation, increased an annual 0.2 percent in July, the same rate recorded in the previous month.

Strengthening global demand helped Europe’s economy expand 1 percent in the second quarter, the fastest pace in four years. Economic growth may slow as governments reduce spending to tackle bloated budget deficits and the global recovery shows signs of losing momentum. Orders for durable goods in the U.S. increased less than forecast in July, a sign one of the few remaining bright spots in the economy is cooling, while China’s industrial output rose the least in 11 months.

“It is encouraging that the annual growth rate of bank lending to the private sector is moving in the right direction,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Group in Amsterdam. “But overall demand for bank credit remains subdued. This highlights the fragility of domestic demand in the euro zone, and is a reminder not to get too carried away by the recent resilience of the euro-zone dataflow.”

Confidence

European confidence in the economic outlook rose to the highest in more than two years in July and business sentiment in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, unexpectedly increased to a three-year high in August, suggesting the recovery may not lose as much momentum as some economists forecast.

ECB council member Axel Weber said last week the bank is likely to raise its euro-region growth forecasts next month after the German economy expanded in the second quarter at the fastest pace since records for a reunified country began in 1991. The ECB in June predicted euro-area growth of 1 percent this year and 1.2 percent in 2011.

Still, a report today showed Italian consumer confidence fell in August to the lowest in more than a year as government austerity measures made households more pessimistic about the their ability to save.

According to the ECB’s latest Bank Lending Survey published on July 28, euro-area banks “anticipate credit standards on loans to enterprises to tighten somewhat in the third quarter.”

In the three months through June, M3 rose 0.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, the ECB said. M3 is the broadest gauge of money supply and includes cash in circulation, some forms of savings and money-market holdings. The annual rate of M1 money-supply growth eased to 8.1 percent from 9.2 percent.

 

The amount consumers owed on their credit cards in this year’s second quarter dropped to the lowest level in more than eight years as cardholders continued to pay off balances in the uncertain economy.

The average combined debt for bank-issued credit cards – like those with a MasterCard or Visa logo – fell to $4,951 in the three months ended June 30, down more than 13 percent from $5,719 in the same period a year ago, according to TransUnion.

The credit reporting agency said it was the first three-month period during which card debt fell below $5,000 since the first quarter of 2002.

Credit card debt remained the highest in Alaska, but slid 7 percent there to $7,148. A total of 22 states recorded debt higher than the national average.

Residents of Alabama paid off the most debt, dropping their average balance by 27 percent to $4,753.

More borrowers also made payments on time. The rate of cardholders past due by 90 days or more fell to 0.92 percent in the second quarter, from 1.17 percent last year.

That’s the first time the delinquency rate has been below 1 percent since the second quarter of 2007, before the recession, said Ezra Becker, director of consulting and strategy in TransUnion’s financial services unit. The rate fluctuates during the year, he said, but the improvement is more evidence that consumers are working to make sure their credit cards remain in good standing.

That concern reflects several economic factors, from the fear of unemployment to the fact that the collapsed housing market means it’s harder to cash in on home equity when money gets tight. “You can’t buy groceries with your house anymore,” Becker said.

Reflecting the weak economies in the states hardest hit by the housing crisis, the delinquency rate was highest in Nevada, at 1.5 percent of cardholders, followed by Florida, 1.24 percent, Arizona, 1.11 percent and California, 1.08 percent. In all, 16 states fared worse than the national average for delinquencies.

The lowest delinquency rates remained in North Dakota, at 0.54 percent, and South Dakota, at 0.55 percent.

In a twist, Becker said the foreclosure crisis could be helping to improve the timeliness of credit card payments and lower balances. When people don’t make mortgage payments, he suggested, they have a short-term cash boost.

“That can provide extra money to pay down credit cards,” he said.

Besides paying down debt, consumers are getting fewer new cards. Nationwide, the number of new accounts opened dropped almost 6.5 percent from last year.

TransUnion predicts that the national delinquency rate will remain below 1 percent for the rest of the year. However, on the high end, the Nevada rate is forecast to edge up to 1.6 percent.

 

In the past, making a late credit card payment was like forgetting your mother’s birthday. Repairing the damage could take months. Sometimes, years.

Now, though, the repercussions of a tardy credit card payment may not be as long-lasting or severe. Federal rules that took effect Aug. 22 limit the amount of late fees banks can charge. The rules also make it more difficult for banks to permanently raise your interest rate if you make a late payment.

The rules, adopted by the Federal Reserve Board in June, implement provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act that was signed into law last year. What’s new:

•Ceiling on late fees. Most late-payment fees are now capped at $25. Lenders are also barred from charging a fee that exceeds the amount of the violation. For example, if you’re late making a $20 payment, the penalty can’t exceed $20.

Previously, banks charged a median penalty fee of $39 for late payments or transactions that exceeded the card’s limit, according to the Pew Health Group’s Safe Credit Cards Project. The median penalty fee for credit unions was $25.

The law gives issuers the right to charge a higher penalty fee if they can justify the need for a higher amount. However, most issuers will probably play it safe and stick with the $25 limit, says Nick Bourke, manager of the Safe Credit Cards Project.

•Cooling off period for penalty interest rates. Banks can still hike your interest rate if you make a late payment, but they must wait at least 45 days before raising your rate, says Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com.

This gives customers time to resolve any billing issues that could have caused the missed payment, he says. Even if you were at fault, the 45-day window gives you time to pay off the balance or transfer it to a lower-rate card before the new rate kicks in.

•Time limits on penalty rates. Once a lender imposes a penalty rate, it’s required to review the rate after six months. If you haven’t missed any payments during that period, the bank will have to roll back the rate, unless it can give the Federal Reserve a good reason for keeping it.

•No penalties for inactivity. Do you keep an extra credit card in the back of your wallet for emergencies? Now, it won’t cost you anything to do that. Lenders are prohibited from charging you a fee if you don’t use your credit card to make new purchases. Your issuer could, however, close your account.

•No piling on. Card issuers are prohibited from charging you multiple fees based on a single late payment or other single transaction.

Now, the bad news

Don’t let these changes lull you into thinking it’s OK to get sloppy about your bills. The ceiling on penalty fees is limited to one misstep. If you make more than one late payment in a six-month period, your issuer can charge you up to $35.

Even worse is what could happen to your interest rate. Since February, card issuers have been prohibited from raising rates on your existing balance unless your account is 60 days past due. However, once you’re 60 days late on a payment, your interest rate could skyrocket.

While the law says penalty fees must be “reasonable and proportional,” it places no limit on penalty interest rates, Bourke says. “If you’re experiencing some financial difficulty and become 60 days past due on your credit card account, the credit card issuer still has the right to impose any size of (interest rate) penalty on you it wants,” he says.

And escaping that high rate won’t be easy. Issuers must lower your rate to the pre-penalty level if you make on-time payments for the first six months the penalty rate is in effect. But a big increase in your interest rate could make it harder for you make minimum payments, Bourke says. And if you make a late payment during the six-month period, he says, “The penalty rate can last forever.”

At least 94% of bank cards and 46% of credit union cards include the right to impose an interest rate penalty in their card holder agreements, according to Pew’s analysis. Among those that disclosed their rates, the median rate in March was 29.99%, up from 28.99% in July 2009.

To avoid costly oversights, take advantage of free e-mail reminders provided by many credit card issuers, says Bill Hardekopf, chief executive officer of LowCards.com.

“My advice is, do everything you can to make your monthly payment on time.”

 

Intel will expand the use of its Atom microprocessors in consumer electronic devices with the purchase of Texas Instruments’ cable modem chip division, it said Monday.

The deal highlights Intel’s struggle to compete against Arm Holdings as the processor company of choice in consumer electronics devices. Intel has worked hard to get its Atom microprocessors into smaller devices where energy efficiency and cost are more important than raw computing power, but it lags behind Arm. Intel sells processors that are far more powerful than Arm’s, but its focus on computing power over the years has been at the expense of energy efficiency. Intel has sought to catch up to Arm through its Atom line.

TI’s Puma 5 family of chips for cable modems currently use Arm processing cores.

“Intel will continue to sell the existing Puma products that are used in data and voice cable modems and continue to develop these products to address cable gateway applications. In the future, we plan to power the Puma product with the Intel Atom processor as well as to incorporate the product technology into future Intel SoC (system-on-chip) and platform designs,” said Intel in a statement not included with the news release.

The new unit will become part of Intel’s Digital Home Group and develop chips aimed at the cable industry, such as advanced set top boxes, residential gateways and modem products.

Intel said all employees of the TI cable modem business will join Intel at sites in their home countries, primarily Israel. The company believes the chip developers will add to its effort to expand its consumer electronics offerings, including complex SoC chips for digital TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, companion boxes and related devices, it said in the news release.

“Adding the talents of the Texas Instrument’s cable team to Intel’s efforts to bring its advanced technology to consumer electronics makes for a compelling combination,” Intel said.

Intel declined to say how much it paid for the chip unit.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year after regulatory review and customary closing conditions have been met.

 

The Energy Department abruptly shifted course on Thursday on a flagship federal effort to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants, saying it would not finance construction of a new plant in Mattoon, Ill.

Instead of underwriting that project, which would have turned coal into a hydrocarbon gas, filtered out the carbon and burned the hydrogen, the government said it would contribute $737 million to remake an obsolete oil-burning plant in Meredosia, Ill.

In the new design, the plant would be fed pure oxygen and burn coal, and the exhaust gas would consist of almost pure carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide would then be piped 170 miles east to Mattoon and injected underground, possibly along with contributions from an ethanol plant in Decatur, Ill., and other industrial plants along the way.

It is the latest twist for FutureGen, a federally supported venture to demonstrate the most advanced ways to convert coal to a gas, capturing pollutants and burning the gas for power.

Despite warnings that pollution from power plants contribute to global warming and that the United States should promptly build several prototypes using different technologies, FutureGen has been repeatedly delayed by drawn-out federal procedures for choosing a site and then by sticker shock in Washington.

The Bush administration cut off money, saying the costs were too high. But President Obama included $1 billion in last year’s stimulus bill. Now that there is money in hand, his administration opted to support a more advanced technology that some officials described on Thursday as FutureGen 2.

Although the planned retrofit involves an old oil-burning plant, the new approach could be a way of converting dozens of big old coal plants around the country, said Matt Rogers, a senior adviser to the energy secretary, Steven Chu. If successful, Mr. Rogers said, this would allow the coal industry “to remain competitive on a global basis.”

With new Environmental Protection Agency rules scheduled to take effect limiting power plants’ emissions of conventional pollutants like nitrogen oxides, mercury and particulates, he said, many older coal plants are candidates for re-powering.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, who has been a strong supporter of the Mattoon project, said in a conference call that the gasification strategy no longer made sense because it was no longer the best or newest option. “That happens when you wait six years,” he said.

The largest plant for burning oxygen is 10 megawatts; the plant in Meredosia would be 200 megawatts and the first of a commercial scale, officials involved in the project said.

Under the new structure, the original FutureGen coalition would still manage the sequestration portion of the project and would arrange experiments with different types of coals to gain experience that could be useful around the world.

The oil-fired plant belongs to Ameren, which is based in St. Louis. It has not run much in recent years and has not generated any power since 2009, said a spokeswoman, Susan Gallagher. The plant operates in the competitive Illinois market, and any profit or loss would fall to Ameren shareholders and not its customers, she said.

Some of the oxygen will be supplied by the French energy company Air Liquide, which relies on a conventional technology, chilling the air until the oxygen turns to a liquid at 297 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The energy required to accomplish that has always been considered a drawback to the technology.

Mr. Rogers said the project would also test a membrane that could sort oxygen from nitrogen without consuming much energy. And a plant burning oxygen would not need to use much energy to clean up other pollutants, like nitrogen oxides, which cause smog, and mercury, he said.

Babcock & Wilcox will do the engineering. The project is expected to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide, or 1.3 million tons a year.

Two other efforts to capture carbon dioxide from coal burning are under way. Duke Energy is building a coal-fired plant in Edwardsport, Ind., that will cook coal into a gas that is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Tentative plans call for it to be outfitted with equipment that sorts out the carbon dioxide and burns the hydrogen, although there is no firm commitment yet to do that.

And American Electric Power is testing a system at its Mountaineer plant, on the Ohio River in New Haven, W.Va., that uses ammonia to scrub the carbon dioxide out of gas in the smokestack.

The government recently gave a $417 million tax credit to another coal project in Illinois, the Taylorville Energy Center, in exchange for a promise to capture 65 percent of its carbon. That plant would turn coal to natural gas and then burn the natural gas.

Global warming experts say that coal is certain to be burned around the world for decades, and that limiting carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will depend in part on finding inexpensive ways to capture the emissions from coal-fired plants.

Yet the United States has been off to a slow start in the field. An alternative is switching to natural gas, which has about half as much carbon as coal per unit of energy. But that would be inadequate to reach the goal espoused by President Obama, a reduction of 80 percent in emissions by 2050.

A House Republican is calling for a hearing into a former Fannie Mae employee’s allegations that the mortgage giant fired her after she criticized how the company was running a government loan assistance program.

The former Fannie Mae executive, Caroline Herron, made the allegations in a lawsuit filed in June. It was disclosed Friday by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity.

Fannie Mae executives, the lawsuit alleges, resisted Herron’s calls to require borrowers to provide proof of their incomes up front before entering into loan modifications. Fannie Mae, she alleges, had a financial incentive to resist because the company was eligible for government payments.

She also charges that Fannie Mae executives ignored her efforts to develop a Web-based system for collecting information from borrowers’ seeking loan assistance.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, asked for the hearing in a letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Barney Frank. Lawmakers, he wrote, need to examine whether Fannie Mae “mishandled and mismanaged” federal programs designed to combat foreclosures.

A spokesman for Frank declined to comment. Brian Faith, a Fannie Mae spokesman, said the company hired an outside law firm earlier this year to investigate Herron’s charges. “The investigation found no merit to her allegations,” he said,

The lawsuit is the latest problem for the $75 billion Obama administration program, called the Home Affordable Modification Program. It has been widely criticized for failing to help hundreds of thousands of homeowners at risk of losing their homes. More than 40 percent of U.S. homeowners who initially signed up for the program have dropped out, while about 30 percent have received permanent help.