VI/01/02  AABR Business Bulletin (Vol. XXIII, No. 45)

 

I.                   General

·       The success of DOI is tied directly to its OSDBU. Its accomplishments are translated in FY’01 to $1.2 billion obligated to small businesses (57% of all procurement dollars); $442 million to SDBs (20%); $190 million awarded to 8(a) firms (8.8%); and $130 million to WOBs (6.1%), DOI was the only agency which got an “A” from the Annual Scorecard on Small Business & the Federal Government. Mr. Robert Faithful, IV, DOI OSDBU Director, on June 5. He is one of the presenters at the “National Training Conference on HUBZones” at the USDA Auditorium.

 

·       It is doubtful that reforms of the accounting industry will ever get off the ground, unless it is diluted. There is too much financial muscle from lobbyists to be serious about the reform. But it isn’t the same on the state level. State legislatures, e.g., CA, NY, TX, PA, etc. take a far different approach than measures under consideration in Congress.

 

·       Big farmers don’t need Govt. subsidies, and small farmers don’t deserve it. If they do not have the ingenuity to bond altogether and farm more efficiently, perhaps they should go the way of the butter churn and the washboard.

 

·       Two years and $4 trillion worth of investor losses later, Wall Street remains in denial. The major Wall Street houses stepped forward last month to declare that they didn’t do anything wrong but promised never to do it again. Why did Merrill Lynch pay $100 million fine if they didn’t do anything wrong?

 

·       Fasten your seat belts! Health insurance companies are raising premiums 12%-18% in 2003, e.g., CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield-13% to 15%; MidAtlantic Medical services-12%; Aetna-18%; Kaiser Permanente-4% to 30%; etc.

 

·       The top ten languages spoken in the world include (in millions): Mandarin Chinese (874), Hindi (336), English (341), Spanish (322), Bengali (207), Arabic (201), Portuguese (176), Russian (167), Japanese (125), and German (100).

 

II.                Private Sector

·       Even as PriceWaterHouseCoopers is adopting foreign nationalities of convenience to minimize or even avoid US income taxes, it has registered with the US Govt. as a lobbyist on its own behalf to hustle consulting contracts with the Office of Homeland Security. PwC Consulting doesn’t want to pay taxes to Uncle Sam but is eager to take our tax money to help protect us! It is no different from Accenture (former Andersen Consulting), based in Bermuda, and running an IRS web site.

 

·       Federal authorities brought charges against former executives of Quintus, Unify and Legato, saying they cooked the software companies’ books.

 

·       Late fee revenue is proving a boon to credit card companies, rising to a record $7.3 billion a year, from $1.7 billion since 1996.

 

·       Coca Cola is repacking old and expired bottles and cans, and selling them in minority neighborhoods, according to some employees who made the expose’.

 

III.             Federal Government

·       Energy experts told Congress that FERC knew in late 2000 tha traders were manipulating the CA electricity market.

 

·       A State Dept-Govt exchange program  to bring foreign clerics into the US at a cost of $500,000 and send American clerics to Muslim communities in the Middle east is worrisome for its possible exploitation by terrorist groups to enter the US.

 

·       DOL found 13 companies had sharply underpaid pensions to workers after converting defined-benefit plans into cash-balance programs.

 

·       EPA reported that toxic chemical releases into the environment posing serious health risks declined by 8% in 2000, part of a decade-long improvement in industrial pollution.

 

IV.              International

·       Documentum is hoping to get ahead of market leaders Vignette, Interwoven and Stellent in Asia-Pacific sales of enterprise content management (EMC).

 

·       The spectacular share price increases of companies racing to invest in China’s fast-growing natural gas market could be a bubble in the making, analysts & brokers warned.

 

·       A weakening US dollar will ease deflation pressure in Hongkong while making exports more competitive against other Asian currencies.

 

·       More than 2,000 foreign and Chinese firms, including for the first time Taiwanese hi-tech firms, displayed their products last week at the 5^th China Beijing International Hi-Tech Expo.

 

·       NEC’s, Japan’s largest PC, said it planned to close PC plants in Scotland and Malaysia and that it was in talks to sell them as part of a restructuring drive.

 

·       English-speaking capability of Filipino IT professionals has encouraged Japanese investors to choose Philippines over China.

 

·       Indonesia has overtaken RP as the top producer of coconut while India is coming in as a close 3^rd. And their productivity is going up.

 

·       S. Korea reported that its economy expanded at a 5.7% annual rate in the 1^st Q.

 

·       Malaysia considers China, with its cheap and highly skilled labor and the potential of its huge domestic markets, an economic threat for the countries of S.E. Asia.

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