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Marc Lopata, chief operations officer

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Considering tax law provisions for 2011, is this a good time to install a solar energy system?

Missouri sunshine combined with a package of federal, state and utility incentives makes this a terrific time to install solar. It’s also a good time to take a look at a business’ overall energy performance.

The 2010 tax-cut extension bill allows for faster depreciation and a higher, earlier after-tax cash flow for a new solar energy system.

At the state and utility levels, rules enacting Proposition C, which Missouri voters overwhelming approved two years ago, are scheduled to go into effect this month. The proposition requiring utilities to get some of their energy from renewable sources further improves the business case for solar and keeps Missouri revenue in Missouri easy pay day loans.

An investment in solar for profitable businesses with good credit can deliver positive cash flow every year, shorten the payback period, increase net operating income and produce a double-digit internal rate of return. Combine solar, other renewables and energy efficiency into a corporate energy strategy, and a company can have tools to help manage risk and improve financial performance.

Ameren Missouri rates rose more than 20 percent last year and will continue to go up. No longer is the cost of energy incidental to a company’s profit and loss.

Small firms to the St. Louis Cardinals

Stocks are ending the day at their highest levels in more than two years after a successful bond auction in Portugal eased worries about Europe’s debt crisis.

Financial firms led stocks higher Wednesday on hopes that banks would start raising their dividends this year.

An analyst at Wells Fargo Securities issued a report saying banks’ earnings should grow much faster than other companies this year, allowing them to raise dividends.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 83 points, or 0.7 percent, to close at 11,755.

The S&P 500 index gained 11, or 0.9 percent, to 1,285.

The Nasdaq composite rose 20, or 0.7 percent, to 2,737.

More than two stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was 964 million shares.

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Venezuela will devalue its currency for the second time since January in a bid to pull South America’s third-biggest economy out of recession.

Venezuela will unify its two fixed foreign exchange rates at 4.3 bolivars per dollar, Finance Minister Jorge Giordani said in comments carried by state television. Imports of so-called essential goods, such as food and medicine, were previously bought at a rate of 2.6 bolivar per dollar.

“We think that by unifying the exchange rate, we’ll have economic growth in 2011,” Giordani said today.

Chavez devalued the bolivar for the first time since 2005 in January and created a multitiered exchange system in an attempt to spur non-oil exports and curb the consumption of luxury imports at subsidized exchange rates payday loan. A devaluation may accelerate inflation, which at 27 percent, is the highest of 78 economies tracked by Bloomberg.

Venezuela’s economy contracted for a second consecutive year on an electricity crisis, foreign currency shortages and a drop in oil production, the central bank said in a report published on its website.

Gross domestic product fell 1.9 percent this year, with the oil sector shrinking 2.2 percent and the non-oil sector contracting 1.8 percent, according to today’s report, which cited preliminary figures. The economy shrank 3.3 percent in 2009.

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A suicide bomber blew up his car Sunday outside government offices west of the Iraqi capital, killing 17 people, including women and elderly people waiting to collect welfare checks, officials said.

Six police officers were among the dead in the latest strike on the provincial council compound in the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, police and hospital officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

At least 23 people were wounded in Sunday’s attack on the compound, which has been a favorite target for insurgents in the past.

“We rushed out of the office complex and saw many people injured and dead, lying on the street,” said Anbar Deputy Gov. Saadoun Obeid, who was at his office when the explosion touched off a fire in the compound. “I saw two women who were dead, their bodies burnt.”

Obeid said a traffic jam kept the suicide bomber from driving his explosives-laden car to the front gate. Eyewitnesses said the vehicle exploded about 200 meters (yards) from the compound, creating a crater several meters wide.

Officials immediately blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for the attack in Anbar, a former stronghold of al-Qaida militants and Sunni insurgents that stretches just west of Baghdad to Iraq’s borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Police found a second bomb in a nearby parking lot a few minutes later, but said they safely disposed of it. The compound in Ramadi, which is 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad, also houses the Anbar police headquarters and the governor’s office.

The chairman of the Anbar council, Jasim Mohammed al-Halbusi, put the casualty count much lower, at eight killed and 12 wounded, but said the death toll likely would rise because many of the wounded were in critical condition fast payday loan no faxing. Obeid said as many as 57 people were wounded.

Conflicting casualty tolls are common in the immediate aftermath of insurgent attacks in Iraq.

Al-Halbusi said the dead and wounded were Anbar residents who had come to the compound to fill out paperwork or receive government aid.

“The bombing came after a period of calm in the province,” al-Halbusi said, blaming it on “powers of hatred who killed innocent civilians.”

Another suicide bomber in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province killed a Shiite pilgrim and his son as they headed to a parade of worshippers marking Ashoura, an annual ritual for Shiite Muslims.

Diyala police spokesman Maj. Ghalib al-Karkhi said a follow-up blast wounded eight people, including six policemen. The director of the federal police in Diyala province Raghib al-Mamouri was among those injured in the blast along with the provincial councilman Muthana al-Timimi, al-Karkhi said.

Insurgents have frequently targeted government and security officials since shortly after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. More recently, the have sought to undermine Iraq’s security as U.S. troops prepare to leave by the end of next year.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida front group, claimed responsibility for a December 2009 bombing on the same government complex in Ramadi in which Anbar Gov. Qasim al-Fahadawi lost a leg. In July, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a reception room outside al-Fahadawi’s office.

Obeid said al-Fahadawi was not in the building during Sunday’s strike.

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Investors’ no-confidence vote in the aid package for Ireland may force European policy makers to expand their arsenal to fight the debt crisis threatening to tear the euro apart.

Options outlined by economists at Societe Generale SA and Barclays Capital include: Boosting the 750 billion-euro ($975 billion) temporary rescue fund or turning it into an asset- buying program; cutting interest rates on bailout loans; issuing joint bonds for the 16 euro nations or flooding the economy with cash from the European Central Bank.

All would be unprecedented, and none of Europe’s political leaders — dominated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel — has indicated the steps are being considered. Earlier this year, they struggled to cobble together the measures that investors and economists now say are proving inadequate to safeguard the euro and keep speculators at bay.

“You’ve had repeated interventions, but the markets are still selling in response,” said Andrew Balls, London-based head of European portfolio management at Pacific Investment Management Co., which runs the world’s biggest bond fund. “Policy makers have to move beyond a country-by-country approach and think about the system-wide challenges.”

Investors punished Europe’s markets in the two days since Ireland became the second euro nation after Greece to get outside aid. Selling extended beyond “peripheral” countries including Portugal to core members of the euro area such as Italy and Belgium.

Euro Weakens

The euro yesterday fell to a 10-week low versus the dollar and yen and most European stocks declined. Italian, Belgian and Spanish government bonds fell, driving the extra yield investors demand to hold the securities instead of German bunds to euro- era records. The ECB bought Irish government bonds, according to people with knowledge of the transactions.

“Contagion in the peripheral countries is rampant,” said Joachim Fels, co-chief global economist at Morgan Stanley in London. “It is also starting to put pressure on some of the core countries.”

Behind the selloff are concerns that the European Union is overcharging Ireland; fear that politically unpopular deficit cuts will flop or trigger recession; suspicion some countries may still restructure their debt; doubts that cash injections can treat underlying debt woes, and speculation that the EU’s fractured politics will negate a pledge by Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn to do “whatever it takes” to maintain financial stability.

Debt Rules

While euro-area governments can lend to each other, they are barred from assuming each other’s debts under rules dictated by Germany in the 1990s.

Signaling officials may be willing to step up their response, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet yesterday said they must assert authority to fight “demanding” market conditions. “We need a sense of direction,” Trichet told lawmakers in Brussels. Observers “are tending to underestimate the determination of governments.”

The off-the-shelf option is to expand the European Financial Stability Facility, set up in May to lend to distressed treasuries. Ireland was the first to tap it, drawing about 18 billion euros from a 440 billion-euro war chest underwritten by euro-region governments.

Due to collateral constraints, the EFSF’s actual lending capacity is less than the headline figure, raising doubts about whether it would be able to respond to a fiscal emergency in Spain, the euro region’s fourth-largest economy, according to strategists at Barclays. They say at least another 100 billion euros of funds should be added.

‘Punitive’ Rates

The EFSF needs twice the firepower, said Paul de Grauwe, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and two-time candidate for an ECB post. Ireland’s average interest rate on the bailout of 5.8 percent is “punitive,” he said, and jolts confidence by showing that European governments aren’t sure they’ll get their money back.

“We shouldn’t be surprised if the markets don’t trust it either if the European leaders don’t trust their own program — that’s what the high interest rate means,” De Grauwe said. “It really undermines the credibility of this whole program.”

Bundesbank President Axel Weber’s suggestion last week to increase the fund was repudiated the next day by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, both targets of domestic criticism for using taxpayer money to prop up Europe’s fiscal weaklings business cards design.

Just as U.S. authorities transformed the aim of their Troubled Asset Relief Program from buying illiquid assets to injecting cash into banks, Klaus Baader, co-chief European economist at Societe Generale, suggests EU policy makers may use the facility to buy bonds of peripheral countries.

‘Burn’ Shorts

“They would have to burn short positions with serious amounts,” said Baader, who also says governments may soon threaten to ban certain bets against European bonds.

Another option is to make the EFSF available to countries before they succumb to a speculative attack, along the lines of a flexible International Monetary Fund credit line tapped by Poland last year, said Andre Sapir, an economics professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and former EU adviser.

“One could discuss which countries would maybe benefit and the system as a whole would benefit from having that umbrella,” Sapir said. “This is the next step that should be considered seriously.”

Joint bond issuance — an idea kicking around since the pre-euro era — is also back up for debate. Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the panel of euro-area finance ministers, last week sought to overcome German opposition to forging a common bond market for all euro users.

EU Bonds

The upside would be to create a more liquid market, attracting buyers such as China. The downside, in the German mind, is that fiscally prudent governments would end up paying higher interest rates, in effect subsidizing the weaker ones.

“If bond yields keep rising like this then we may see a much faster move towards a de facto fiscal union with a central debt management office and a single European government bond, possibly under the auspices of the EFSF initially,” said Gary Jenkins, head of fixed income at London-based Evolution Securities Ltd.

Another solution suggested by JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief European economist David Mackie is to transfer 350 billion euros from the balance sheets of Greece, Ireland and Portugal to richer sovereigns. Mackie calculates that would reduce their debt to the EU limit of 60 percent of gross domestic product, and push up the debt ratios of core euro economies by less than 5 percentage points.

Fiscal Union

The result would be a reduction in the fiscal tightening required in the weaker economies and the elimination of chaos caused by a debt restructuring, he said in a Nov. 17 report.

“In the next five to 10 years there has got to be more of a fiscal union within the euro region than we have today,” said Paul Donovan, deputy chief global economist at UBS AG in London. “One of the things that Europe does well is integrate in a crisis.”

With politicians sluggish to act, investors are banking on tomorrow’s meeting in Frankfurt of the ECB’s Governing Council amid speculation it will again delay its exit from emergency liquidity measures for the good of the euro.

Peter Westaway, chief European economist at Nomura International Plc, predicts the ECB will delay a return to more limited auctions of three-month loans until after January. It will boost its buying of bonds to include Spanish and Italian assets, he said. The bank already bought the most government bonds in two months last week.

Bond Buying

“This is not the time to experiment with money-market operations,” said Westaway. “A significant increase in ECB bond purchases to the extent that is feasible would signal that it is providing a crucial policy back-stop that would halt the increase in periphery bond spreads.”

Ultimately, the ECB may be forced to follow the Federal Reserve and Bank of England in conducting quantitative easing in which it buys assets to inject cash into the economy and doesn’t offset the purchases as it does now, said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York.

“As the crisis deepens and threatens core countries, the future of monetary union continues to be called into question,” said Chandler. “As the situation becomes more desperate, the unthinkable has to be thought. Quantitative easing by the ECB may be one of the few ways out.”

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New Zealand’s prime minister says that hope is fading for 29 coal miners missing for four days underground after an explosion.

John Key says that police are now planning for the possible loss of life following the massive blast in the mine that is now swirling with toxic gases.

Key told Parliament Tuesday that it is still too dangerous to enter the mine to find what has happened to the men. He says he shares the families’ frustration that a rescue team can’t be sent in because of the toxic gas levels in the mine.

He says the miners are tough, resourceful and stoic men who look after each other in the same way a father looks out for a son.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

GREYMOUTH, New Zealand (AP) _ The bid to rescue 29 New Zealand coal miners trapped underground by a massive gas explosion ran into more problems Tuesday as a mechanical robot broke down inside a tunnel and hard rock layers slowed progress on drilling to test the air.

Police superintendent Gary Knowles said the army robot sent in to transmit pictures and assess toxic gas levels was damaged by water and out of commission. Authorities were urgently seeking other such robots from West Australia and the United States to replace the broken one, Knowles said.

“I won’t send people in to recover a robot if their lives are in danger,” he said. “Toxicity is still too unstable to send rescue teams in.”

Making matters worse, the drilling team boring into the mine tunnel had hit “very hard rock” overnight, Knowles said. The police superintendent’s statements came as rescuers waited impatiently for a chance to test if air quality underground was safe enough for them to go in to pull out the miners, who have been trapped for nearly five days.

Family members have expressed frustration with the pace of the response as officials acknowledge it may be too late to save the miners, who have not been heard from since a massive explosion ripped through the Pike River Mine on the country’s South Island on Friday.

A buildup of methane gas is the suspected cause of the explosion. And now the presence of that gas and others _ some of them believed to be coming from a smoldering fire deep underground _ are delaying a rescue over fears they could still explode.

A diamond-tipped drill was put to work as workers hit layers of hard rock and came within 33 feet (10 meters) of the tunnel where they believe some of the miners are trapped, police superintendent Gary Knowles said. The 500-foot (160-meter)-long shaft they are creating will allow them to sample gas levels _ including explosive methane and carbon dioxide _ and determine if rescuers can finally move in days after the blast cash advance loans.

Knowles said rescuers planned to drop a listening device down the hole to see if they could hear anything _ such as tapping sounds _ that might indicate that the miners were still alive.

“This is a very serious situation and the longer it goes on, hopes fade, and we have to be realistic. We will not go underground until the environment is safe,” Knowles said.

Two workers stumbled out of the mine within hours of Friday’s explosion, but there has been no contact at all with the remaining 29. A phone line deep inside the mine has rung unanswered.

“The families are showing grief, frustration and probably anger,” said Laurie Drew, whose 21-year-old son, Zen, is among the missing. “I have my moments I can keep it together but deep down my heart’s bleeding like everybody else’s.”

Knowles appealed for patience.

“You can’t put men underground as a rescue team until it’s a safe environment,” he said. “I’ve looked at other rescuers and the chance of rescue teams dying or being critically injured (in a fresh explosion) is great.”

Those trapped include a teenager who was so excited about his new job he persuaded mine bosses to let him start his first shift three days early _ on the day of the deadly gas explosion _ his mother told local media.

Joseph Dunbar was one day past his 17th birthday and the youngest among them when he joined his fellow miners in the pit.

Mine shift supervisor Gary Campbell said Dunbar was desperate to be part of the team.

His mother, Philippa Timms, said her son “got offered this chance to have a career _ and that’s how he saw it, as a career,” she told TV One.

The wait to begin the rescue bid for the men had been frustrating, but Timms said she understood why.

“They can’t just rush in there because, I know right from the word go, I know how it works,” she said. “If the oxygen rushes in and it hits that methane, then bam, they’re gone, (in) another blast.”

Police have said the miners, aged 17 to 62, are believed to be about 1.2 miles (two kilometers) down the tunnel.

Each miner carried 30 minutes of oxygen, and more fresh air was stored in the mine, along with food and water that could allow them to survive for several days, officials say.

New Zealand’s mines are generally safe. A total of 181 people have been killed in the country’s mines in 114 years. The worst disaster was in March 1896, when 65 died in a gas explosion. Friday’s explosion occurred in the same coal seam.

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Ireland won’t be required to raise its corporate tax rate as part of a European Union bailout, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, addressing an issue that looms as a stumbling block to an aid agreement.

“When you have to tackle a deficit, you have two levers, spending and taxes,” Sarkozy said yesterday in Lisbon at a summit of NATO leaders. “I can’t believe that our Irish friends, in full sovereignty, won’t look at both since they have more room for maneuver given that their tax rates are lower. But that’s not a demand or a condition, just an opinion.”

Irish leaders have said they’ll fight to keep a 12.5 percent corporate tax, which helped make Ireland a destination for investment by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Pfizer Inc. Austrian Finance Minister Josef Proell and EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn have indicated the rate may be increased toward the level in continental nations as part of the financial rescue.

Rehn said Nov. 8 that “Ireland will not continue as a low- tax country.”

Irish officials and experts from the EU and International Monetary Fund are working through the weekend in Dublin, racing to finish an aid deal and avoid a setback in the markets.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said yesterday that the country’s corporate tax rate and four-year budget plan wouldn’t be significantly changed, the New York Times reported. Cowen spoke to reporters on a visit to Arranmore Island off Ireland’s northern coast, according to the Times.

Cabinet Meeting

Cowen said he would return to Dublin for a cabinet meeting today to work out final details of a four-year deficit reduction plan, the newspaper said.

Allied Irish Banks Plc, Ireland’s second-biggest bank, emphasized the fragility of the financial system Nov. 19, reporting a 17 percent decline in deposits this year. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Europe is moving “too slowly” to resolve the sovereign debt crisis that began in Greece.

The deposit outflow at Allied Irish “looks grim,” said Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers in Dublin. “It underscores the urgency in the situation and need to reach a resolution. A big package is needed to reassure the markets.”

The aid talks began three days ago after a meeting of EU finance ministers urged Ireland to agree to a package within days. The plan, which will focus on a banking industry reeling from the 2008 property crash, may total as much as 100 billion euros ($136 billion), according to Barclays Capital.

Irish Bonds

Investors dumped Irish bonds this month on concern about the nation’s ability to keep its financial system afloat. They pared some of the loss when Cowen abandoned a refusal to seek assistance. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said on Nov payday loans. 18 that it was clear the country would need aid as the banks had become “unmanageable.”

The premium that investors demand to hold Irish 10-year bonds over the benchmark German bonds rose 3 basis points Nov. 19 to 544 basis points. The spread, a measure of the risk of investing in Irish debt, declined from a record 646 basis points on Nov. 11 as investors anticipated a rescue.

Amid the talks, Cowen campaigned in Donegal in northwest Ireland before a Nov. 25 election to fill a vacant parliamentary seat. The vote threatens to erode Cowen’s majority. He has the support of 82 lawmakers, including independents, compared with 79 for the combined opposition.

Contingency Funding

Lenihan said last week he would welcome the creation of “substantial contingency capital funding” for Irish banks as Irish officials said they’d resist any demand by the EU to raise revenue by increasing a corporate tax rate.

Ireland’s Trade Minister Batt O’Keeffe said last week the corporate tax rate isn’t “up for negotiation.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday dodged the question of whether the tax was in jeopardy if Ireland tapped the bailout fund.

“Every country that’s in need of this mechanism can use it,” she said at a briefing in Lisbon. “Everything beyond that is the decision of each individual country.”

A 2011 budget, due for release on Dec. 7, may placate investors concerned over a budget deficit that will be about 12 percent of gross domestic product this year, or 32 percent when the costs of the banking rescue are included.

Irish lenders have become more reliant on European Central Bank funding after being frozen out of wholesale markets. The amount of ECB loans to the country’s banks rose 7.3 percent to 130 billion euros in October from the previous month.

Central Bank Funding

Allied Irish has tripled its reliance on funding from central banks since the end of June as deposits fled. The bank’s dependence on “monetary authorities” rose to 27 billion euros from a “high single-digit” billion-euro amount on June 30, Alan Kelly, general manager of group corporate services at Allied Irish, said in a telephone interview Nov. 19.

Irish banks’ failure to wean themselves off the ECB lifeline prompted EU officials to step in, in an effort to halt the crisis before it spreads across the euro region.

“The current view seems to be if Ireland accepts bailout funds, at least for the banking sector, that might help fend off any move by the bond vigilantes to move onto Portugal,” said James Shugg, a London-based economist at Westpac Banking Corp.

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Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh said he’s concerned the central bank’s expansion of record stimulus may spark too much inflation, fail to aid growth and delay any plans to reduce U.S. indebtedness.

“I am less optimistic than some that additional asset purchases will have significant, durable benefits for the real economy,” Warsh said today in a speech in New York. “Of course, benefits may well be more substantial than I anticipate.”

Warsh’s comments suggest his vote Nov. 3 to support the Fed’s $600 billion of additional Treasury purchases was reluctant. Further disagreement came today from Dallas Fed Richard Fisher, who said the Fed is “monetizing” the government’s debt by printing money to finance the shortfall.

“When non-traditional tools are needed to loosen policy and markets are functioning more or less normally — even with output and employment below trend — the risk-reward ratio for policy action is decidedly less favorable,” Warsh said at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s annual meeting. “These risks increase with the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

“As a result, we cannot and should not be as aggressive as conventional policy rules — cultivated in more benign environments — might judge appropriate,” Warsh said. The remarks are an expanded version of an opinion column published today in the Wall Street Journal.

Entire Amount

Warsh’s comments mean it may not be a sure thing for the Fed to purchase the entire $600 billion amount of securities, said John Ryding, a former Fed researcher.

“You can chalk his speech up as a soft dissent,” said Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics LLC in New York. “He’s raising serious concerns and questions of the kind that weren’t raised by some of the other members of the FOMC when talking about the potential costs.”

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week defended the decision, saying Nov. 6 that the “standard considerations suggest that we should be using expansionary monetary policy” and that the move was “nothing extraordinary.”

Fisher said in a San Antonio speech that the Fed may be prescribing the “wrong medicine” for the economy. James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, said in New York that the central bank’s decision will probably stimulate the economy as soon as six months from now.

Hoenig Dissent

Bullard voted Nov. 3 to support the move, while Fisher isn’t a voting policy maker this year. Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig was the only official to dissent in the 10-1 decision. Fed governors and five of 12 regional Fed presidents vote at each meeting; there’s one vacancy among the seven governors.

The minutes from the FOMC meeting, scheduled to be released on Nov. 24, “will try to provide some clarity over the nature of disagreement” among policy makers, Warsh said in response to audience questions after his speech. Overall, “my colleagues are remarkably focused on our statutory mandate” of price stability and full employment, he said.

Warsh’s skepticism about asset purchases isn’t new. In June, he said any decision to expand the $2.3 trillion balance sheet must be subject to “strict scrutiny.”

In today’s speech, he reiterated points from the column that the Nov. 3 decision wasn’t unconditional or open-ended and that the move is “necessarily limited, circumscribed and subject to regular review.”

Potential Risks

“Policies should be altered if certain objectives are satisfied, purported benefits disappoint, or potential risks threaten to materialize,” Warsh said.

The Fed won’t bring down the U.S. unemployment rate to its natural level without reforms in fiscal, trade and regulatory policies, Warsh said in response to questions.

“Monetary policy cannot do it alone,” he said. The Fed “should not be overpromising.”

The expanded stimulus carries “significant risks that bear careful monitoring,” including inflation from a weaker dollar and higher commodity prices, he said. In addition, buying more Treasuries “also runs the more subtle risk of obfuscating price signals about total U.S. indebtedness,” he said.

“Long-term economic growth necessitates putting the U.S. fiscal trajectory on a sounder footing,” Warsh said. “The fiscal authorities need as clear an early warning system as possible, not a handy excuse to delay.”

Treasury Yields

Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at Swiss Re Financial Products in New York, said he didn’t think Warsh’s reservations would change the course of the Fed in deciding next year whether to expand the second round of asset purchases. Bonds “didn’t move much today” in response to the remarks, he said. The 10- year Treasury yield rose 0.02 percentage point to 2.55 percent at 5:07 p.m. in New York, according to BGCantor Market Data.

“If it’s very successful, I think dissent will diminish enormously, and if it looks like there’s another one necessary, then we’ll have another one,” Karl said, referring to the program of asset purchases.

Warsh, 40, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker and economic-policy adviser under President George W. Bush, was appointed to the Fed in 2006 and worked closely with Bernanke on the response to the financial crisis in 2008.

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Craft Brewers Alliance, the Portland, Ore.-based operator of the Redhook brewery in Woodinville, has acquired Kona Brewing Co. of Hawaii for an undisclosed price.

The Big Island-based brewery will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Craft Brewers Alliance (NASDAQ: HOOK).

Three years ago, Redhook and Widmer Bros. Brewing Co. of Oregon merged in a $50 million deal and corporate headquarters of the new Craft Brewers Alliance company was located in Portland.

Click here to see a release on the Craft Brewers Alliance-Kona deal.

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The drug-data provider Epocrates Inc. has filed with the SEC to sell up to an estimated $75 million in an initial public offering.

The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq Global Market with the symbol EPOC.

Epocrates, a leading provider of mobile drug reference tools and interactive services, said it will use the proceeds to pay dividends due to the holders of its Class B preferred stock and for general corporate purposes, including working capital, research and development, sales and marketing, and capital expenditures.

J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. and Piper Jaffray & Co. will serve as joint book-running managers no fax pay day loan. William Blair & Co. LLC. and JMP Securities LLC will act as co-managers.

The company has yet to determine the number of shares to be sold and their price range.

Epocrates has more than 1 million users, including more than 40 percent of U.S. physicians, the company said. Its products are used on popular hand-held devices including the iPhone, iTouch and Blackberry, and Palm, Android and Windows devices.

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