PLANYC 2030

The announcement by Vladimir Putin came as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization called an emergency meeting to discuss the wheat shortage, and riots in Mozambique left seven dead.

The unrest in Maputo, in which 280 people were also injured, followed the government’s decision to raise bread prices by 30 per cent. Police opened fire on demonstrators after thousands turned out to protest against the price hikes, burning tyres and looting food warehouses.

Although agricultural officials and traders insist that wheat and other crop supplies are more abundant than in 2007-08, officials fear the deadly Mozambique riots could be replicated.

The 2007-08 food shortages, the most severe in 30 years, set off riots in countries from Bangladesh to Mexico, and helped to trigger the collapse of governments in Haiti and Madagascar.

The Russian announcement extended an export ban first announced last month until late December 2011, sending wheat and other cereals prices to near a two-year high.

The FAO said that “the concern about a possible repeat of the 2007-08 food crisis” had resulted in “an enormous number” of inquiries from member countries. “The purpose of holding this meeting is for exporting and importing countries to engage.”

Russia is traditionally the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, and the export ban has already forced importers in the Middle East and North Africa, the biggest buyers, to seek supplies in Europe and the US.

Mr Putin said Moscow could “only consider lifting the export ban after next year’s crop has been harvested and we have clarity on the grain balances”. He added that the decision to extend the ban was intended to “end unnecessary anxiety and to ensure a stable and predict-able business environment for market participants”.

“This is quite serious,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, of the FAO in Rome. “Two years in a row without Russian exports creates quite a disturbance.” Dan Manternach, chief wheat economist at Doane Agricultural Services in St Louis, added: “This is a wake-up call for importing nations about the reliability of Russia.”

Jakkie Cilliers, director of South Africa’s Institute of Security Studies, said there was concern over a repeat of the protests of 2008: “That certainly strengthened a return of the military in politics in Africa.”

European wheat prices on Thursday hit €231.5 a ton, just shy of last month’s two-year high of €236. Wheat prices have surged nearly 70 percent since January, and analysts forecast further rises after Russia’s decision and concerns about weather damage to Australia’s crop.

The $24-a-share price is 46 percent more than Miami-based Burger King’s close Aug. 31, before reports of a deal surfaced. Under the terms of the agreement, the second-largest U.S. burger chain can solicit superior bids through Oct. 12, according to a statement today.

The chain’s sales growth has slowed for two straight years as consumers ate out less during the U.S. economic slump. Burger King, which trails only McDonald’s Corp. in the U.S., has seen a slower recovery than its larger rival as its clientele suffered more from the recession, said Tom Forte, an analyst at New York- based Telsey Advisory Group.

“Burger King’s heavy user — young, male, and more likely to be a minority — has had a higher rate of unemployment than the McDonald’s consumer,” Forte said in a telephone interview.

The transaction with New York-based 3G amounts to about $4 billion including debt. The purchase would eclipse the 2007 sale of OSI Restaurant Partners Inc., the parent of Outback Steakhouse, as the biggest restaurant deal since Bloomberg started compiling data more than a decade ago.

Burger King rose $4.73, or 25 percent, to $23.59 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The gain was the largest since May 2006, when the company went public.

Trading of bullish Burger King options surged to a record Aug. 25, a week before today’s announcement. Volume for calls to buy the stock jumped Aug. 25 to 37,427, or almost 20 times the average during the preceding four weeks, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Call trading exceeded that level yesterday, reaching 54,284, after the Wall Street Journal said the company was in talks to be sold.

Deal Valuation

The deal values Burger King at 9 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization in the year ended June 30. Over the past five years, U.S. restaurant acquisitions closed at a median multiple of 8.2, according to Bloomberg data.

Transactions in the restaurant industry have picked up as the U.S. economy begins to recover, with rival chains such as Wendy’s/Arby’s Group Inc. attracting interest. 3G has shown interest in fast-food chains in the past, disclosing last year that it owned about 4.2 million shares of Wendy’s/Arby’s. 3G’s disclosure of holdings as of June 30 didn’t show any Wendy’s/Arby’s shares.

3G is an investment vehicle whose main investors are three Brazilian business partners — Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto da Veiga Sicupira, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The men founded Brazilian investment bank Banco de Investimentos Garantia SA and agreed to sell to Credit Suisse Group AG in 1998 for at least $675 million.

Lemann’s Background

Lemann, 71, whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes magazine at $11.5 billion this year, and his partners also own stakes in Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, the world’s biggest brewer, and Brazilian retailer Lojas Americanas SA.

3G is run by managing partner Alexandre Behring, who joined in 2005 after previously working at a buyout firm founded by Lemann. Before the Burger King deal, 3G focused mostly on investments in public equities. In a U.S. regulatory filing, it disclosed holdings of about $1 billion in stocks as of June 30, including its biggest position, CSX Corp.

3G in 2007 joined with London-based TCI Fund Management LLP to start a proxy contest for board seats at CSX, the largest U.S. railroad. Behring eventually won a seat.

3G was in the news in July when a partner at the firm, Marc Mezvinsky, married Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.

Chidsey’s Role

John Chidsey, Burger King’s chief executive officer, will remain CEO through a transition period, according to the statement. Chidsey will then become co-chairman of the board along with Behring.

Burger King gets about two-thirds of its revenue from the U.S. and Canada. The chain also operates in Latin America, Europe and parts of Asia. Total sales fell 1.4 percent to $2.5 billion in the year ended June 30, Burger King said last week.

TPG Inc., Bain Capital LLC and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bought Burger King from Diageo Plc in 2002 before selling shares to the public again four years later. The three own about one- third of Burger King and agreed to tender their shares into the offer.

Lazard Ltd., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, and Barclays Capital advised 3G. Burger King was advised by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. 3G Capital’s legal advisers were Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and Burger King’s were Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Holland & Knight LLP.

Hynix’s agreement to build computer memories using a technology H.P. scientists developed called memristors indicates that more computer memory will be packed in even smaller devices in the second half of this decade. The two companies said the memristors will be commercially available in about three years.

To date, the memristor’s most likely application is for dense nonvolatile memories, which is what is used in flash memory cards for products like cameras and PCs. It is not out of the question, however, that it might play a role in other kinds of chips, including microprocessors, in the future.

The agreement to build the memory chips validates the work of Leon O. Chua, a University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineering professor. In 1971, he proposed a fourth basic circuit element (the other three are the resistor, capacitor and inductor) and called it a memristor, or memory resistor, as a simpler alternative to transistors. The idea languished for many years before a team of H.P. researchers found a way to use it in 2006. Since then, memristors have attracted industrial, academic and military interest, but have not gone beyond being laboratory curiosities.

Competing in the memory business will not be an easy battle. Memristors are still viewed as laboratory and academic experiments by the majority of the world’s leading semiconductor firms, most of whom have settled on a competing technology known as Phase Change Memory, or P.C.M. However, H.P. scientists said they traveled the world discussing memristors with all of the leading chip makers before settling on their commercial development agreement with Hynix, the world’s second-largest maker of memory chips behind Samsung Electronics.

“Right now the memristor outperforms flash,” said Stan Williams, an H.P. Labs scientist who has led the development effort. He said the tiny switches could be turned on and off more than 100 times as fast as flash, use a tenth of the energy and have a much greater lifespan.

The storage densities are already staggering and will become even more impressive in the future. Next year the most advanced flash storage chips will have a capacity of roughly 64 billion bits per square centimeter, according to the industry’s annual road map. By 2014, that is expected to increase to 170 billion bits per square inch. Rice University scientists said that memristive storage devices could be five times as dense as the industry standard in 2014 and that the technology was more easily adaptable to three-dimensional packaging. That would make it possible to build even vastly denser chips.

H.P. researchers have described ways to design 1,000-layer memristor-based chips, although they acknowledged that with current manufacturing techniques such devices would not be practical.

Deals in the industry have jumped 60 percent to $44.8 billion so far this year, up from $28 billion in the same period of 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America, Aegon and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc have more than $10 billion in insurance assets currently on the block.

The financial crisis that crippled American International Group Inc. is providing a buying opportunity for competitors such as MetLife Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc., which were quicker to recover from the global recession and are seeking growth in new markets. AIG has sold more than 30 assets since its 2008 bailout, while RBS and Amsterdam-based ING Groep NV were told to sell insurance businesses as conditions of their government lifelines.

“There’s a lot of stuff on the market,” said Clark Troy, a senior analyst at researcher Aite Group LLC in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “For deep-pocketed buyers with firm conviction, it’s a great time to be making acquisitions.”

While the year’s biggest insurance deal collapsed when Prudential Plc shareholders stymied the company’s planned $35.5 billion takeover of AIG’s biggest Asian unit in June, the total value of announced deals is still set to surpass 2008 and 2009, when there were $58 billion and $53 billion in takeovers, respectively, Bloomberg data show. That tally excludes a $40 billion U.S. government infusion into AIG in 2008.

Insurance transactions totaled $90 billion in 2007.

‘Hard Choices’

AIG, which is working to repay part of a $182.3 billion government bailout, has held talks with Newark, New Jersey-based Prudential Financial this year about selling two Japanese life insurance units, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

Prudential and AIG still have divergent views on the value of AIG’s Star Life and Edison Life units, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. The divisions together had a book value of $4.8 billion as of June 30, AIG said in a regulatory filing.

Mark Herr, an AIG spokesman, and Robert DeFillippo, a spokesman for Prudential, declined to comment.

Insurers that were bailed out are being forced into “making hard decisions about where they want to play and where they don’t,” said Achim Bauer, an insurance partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London. “They are seeking to repay some of that money by selling businesses that are non-core.”

ING, RBS

ING is required to divest its insurance business by the end of 2013 as part of a restructuring plan to win European Union approval for its government rescue. While the company is preparing the business for one or two initial public offerings, ING is getting “a great deal of interest” from potential buyers, Chief Executive Officer Jan Hommen said on Aug. 11.

RBS agreed in November to unload its insurance businesses, including the Direct Line auto insurer, after receiving 25.5 billion pounds ($40 billion) of state aid. In 2008, RBS had sought as much as 5 billion pounds for the businesses.

Some asset sales are being driven by regulatory changes in the wake of the financial crisis, including the recent U.S. financial overhaul and reforms being contemplated by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, said David Havens, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in New York.

Bank of America, the largest U.S. lender, is being pushed by regulators to raise a net $3 billion this year. The bank’s Balboa Insurance unit, obtained as part of the Countrywide Financial Corp. acquisition in 2008, is likely to fetch roughly the amount of its policyholder surplus, which was $1.92 billion as of March 31, according to Havens.

More Capital

“The financial regulations in general are requiring firms to hold more capital, and you can achieve that concept either by raising more capital or reducing risk,” Havens said. “By selling off non-core units you can actually achieve both.

Aegon’s Transamerica Reinsurance unit, which helps life insurers pool their risks, has gotten interest from both competitors and investors, said Aegon CEO Alexander Wynaendts on an Aug. 12 conference call. It has book value, or assets minus liabilities, of 1.6 billion euros ($2 billion). Reinsurance Group of America Inc., the largest U.S. company that focuses on life reinsurance, trades at about 73 percent of book value, implying a value for Transamerica of $1.5 billion.

Some potential buyers, meanwhile, are seeking to free up their capital reserves to fund growth in faster-growing markets like Asia. Paris-based Axa SA, Europe’s second-biggest insurer, agreed in June to sell part of its U.K. life insurance unit to Clive Cowdery’s Resolution Ltd. for 2.75 billion pounds.

MetLife, based in New York, made the biggest purchase of an insurer this year when it agreed to buy AIG’s American Life Insurance Co. for $15.5 billion.

Deals are happening because there is “a greater level of stability in the system compared to where we were six or 12 months ago,” said Bauer at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “That provides a greater willingness on the part of both buyers and sellers to consider transactions.”

“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.

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.”

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.