Business and Finance

Who wouldn’t want to get paid to go shopping? That’s partly the allure behind “mystery shopper” scams.

While they aren’t new, these phony “we’ll-pay-you-to-shop”-type ads sprouted like online weeds during the recession as job-hungry Americans hunted for employment.

Law enforcement and some financial institutions say they’re spotting mystery shopping scam attempts — which involve phony checks deposited into a victim’s bank account — several times a week.

“We’ve been seeing it pretty frequently since 2005,” said Vanessa Oddo, finance loss prevention manager for SAFE Federal Credit Union in North Highlands, Calif. She said 200 to 300 suspect checks get brought in to SAFE branches every year.

Similarly, the Northeast California Better Business Bureau office said it gets two or three calls a day from consumers asking about mystery shopper checks they’ve received in the mail.

The losses can be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on how much was deposited into the unsuspecting shopper’s bank account.

There are plenty of legitimate mystery shopping companies, which hire individuals to drop in unannounced at retailers, hotels, fast food outlets, restaurants and other businesses to secretly evaluate customer service.

But the fraudulent kind typically operate as fake check scams.

Making contact by mail, email or phone, a fraudster posing as a mystery shopping company “hires” an unsuspecting consumer, who is promised payment after completing a “first assignment totally free credit score.” That assignment often involves sending a phony check to the consumer’s home, with instructions to deposit it in a bank account, keep a small amount as reimbursement, then wire the remainder to Western Union, ostensibly to report on the wire company’s “customer service.”

Ultimately, the phony check bounces, leaving the victim’s bank account dinged for the total amount, as well as wire transfer charges and potential bank fees.

“You see more of these during a recession, when people are searching for jobs or ways to (make) more money. Scammers plan on that,” said Dan Denston, executive director of the North America Mystery Shopping Providers Association, or MSPA, based in Louisville, Ky.

Even legitimate companies that hire mystery shoppers are not immune from scammers. National Shopping Service in Rocklin, Calif., one of at least 16 mystery shopper firms in California, said it, too, has been victimized by scammers who used the company’s name in fake-check scams.

“The majority of people getting these letters and falling for the scams were not even our shoppers. Unfortunately, they got scammed,” said Katy Gravatt, National’s operations manager.

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Spanish stocks sank and its borrowing costs rose Friday after the government released data showing the country’s banks borrowed a record (EURO)316.3 billion ($415.9 billion) from the European Central Bank in March.

Bank of Spain data showed that ECB lending to the country’s financial institutions almost doubled since February when their reliance was (EURO)169.8 billion ($223.3 billion).

Concern is mounting over Spain’s ability to cut its national debt and lift its struggling economy out of recession when unemployment is nearing 23 percent.

The ECB made some (EURO)1 trillion in emergency three-year loans to banks in two batches in Dec. and Feb., lifelines to Spain’s troubled banks that find it hard to secure short-term financing elsewhere.

The injection spurred lenders to snap up battered government debt, driving Spanish borrowing costs down. However, the effects of the cheap loans across Europe have since dissipated and Spain is taking the brunt of market distrust.

Some of that distrust is misplaced, said analyst Manuel Escudero, who added that much of Spain’s industrial sector appeared to be riding the crisis instead of heading to a major downturn in output.

“I see much of Spain’s industrial sector beginning to internationalize instead of heading toward stagnation, it has slimmed down and is looking reasonably muscular,” said Escudero who heads Deusto University business school in the northern Basque region.

Klaas Knot, a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, also said he did not see a need for the ECB to engage in buying up Spanish bonds or launch a third program of low-rate loans to European banks to steady markets.

Knot, said last week’s spike in the interest rate of Spanish government bonds was due to “awkward communication” by its government about its plans for budget cuts.

To boost confidence in its finances, the government last month unveiled an austerity budget with (EURO)27 billion ($35.5 billion) in tax hikes and spending cuts this year.

Spain is expected to enter its second recession in three years this quarter, with the country’s central bank forecasting its economy will contract 1.7 percent this year.

The Ibex 35 stock index in Madrid was down 3.6 percent at close of trading Friday and 10-year government yields rose 0.2 percent to 5.93, according to FactSet.

Just five years ago Spain was one of Europe’s most buoyant economies, but a nose-dive started in 2008 when the international financial crisis coincided with the bursting of a real estate bubble that had buoyed the economy for over a decade.

The government ordered banks to strengthen capital levels to cover exposure to bad real estate debt. Investors fear that sustained bank weakness, coupled with rising public debt and high funding costs could force Spain to apply for European aid.

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Some Asian airlines plan to change flight paths for several routes to avoid a rocket North Korea is expected to launch in the next week.

Philippine Airlines said Monday that a dozen of its flights from the United States, Japan and South Korea will fly safely away from the rocket’s possible path.

Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways are changing flight paths on routes connecting Tokyo to Manila, Jakarta and Singapore. Domestic flights will not be affected.

JAL has four flights a day on the expected rocket launch dates, and airline official Norio Higashimine said each flight will carry more fuel in case of an unexpected route change.

ANA is making similar route changes on five flights pay day loans.

North Korea says it is launching a satellite between Thursday and April 16, depending on weather. It says the satellite will observe crops and natural resources and denies suspicions that the launch is intended to test long-range missile technology.

Philippine officials have declared a no-fly zone and urged ships and fishing boats to avoid northeastern territorial waters where rocket debris may fall.

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Apple is on the verge of doing what few others have: change the English language.

When you have a boo-boo, you reach for a Band-Aid not a bandage. When you need to blow your nose, you ask for Kleenex not tissue. If you decide to look up something online, you Google instead of search for it. And if you want to buy a tablet computer, there’s a good chance there’s only one name you’ll remember.

“For the vast majority, the idea of a tablet is really captured by the idea of an iPad,’” says Josh Davis, a manager at Abt Electronics in Chicago. “They gave birth to the whole category and brought it to life.”

Companies trip over themselves to make their brands household names. But only a few brands become so engrained in the lexicon that they’re synonymous with the products themselves. This so-called “genericization” can be both good and bad for companies like Apple, which must balance their desire for brand recognition with their disdain for brand deterioration.

It’s one of the biggest contradictions in business. Companies spend millions to create a brand. Then, they spend millions more on marketing that can have the unintended consequence of making those names so popular that they become shorthand for similar products. It’s like if people start calling station wagons Bentleys. It can diminish a brand’s reputation.

“There’s tension between legal departments concerned about `genericide’ and marketing departments concerned about sales,” says Michael Atkins, a Seattle trademark attorney. “Marketing people want the brand name as widespread as possible and trademark lawyers worry … the brand will lose all trademark significance.”

It doesn’t happen often. In fact, it’s estimated that fewer than 5 percent of U.S. brand names become generic. Those that do typically are inventions or products that improve on what’s already on the market. The brand names then become so popular that they eclipse rivals in sales, market share and in the minds’ of consumers. And then they spread through the English language like the common cold in a small office.

“There’s nothing that can be done to prevent it once it starts happening,” says Michael Weiss, professor of linguistics at Cornell University. “There’s no controlling the growth of language.”

FIGHTING BACK

A company’s biggest fear is that their brand name becomes so commonly used to describe a product that a judge rules that it’s too “generic” to be a trademark. That means that any product _ even inferior ones _ can legally use the name. A brand usually is declared legally generic after a company sues another firm for using its name and the case goes to a federal court.

Drug maker Bayer lost trademarks for the names “aspirin” and “heroin” this way in the 1920s. So did B.F. Goodrich, which sued to protect its trademark of “zipper” in the 1920s after the name joined the world of common nouns. Similar cases deemed “escalator” generic in 1950, “thermos” generic in 1963 and “yo-yo” generic in 1965.

It’s difficult to quantify how much revenue a company loses when its brand is deemed generic. But companies worry that it breeds confusion among consumers.

To prevent their names from becoming generic, some companies use marketing to reinforce their trademarks. For instance, after its Band-Aid brand name started becoming commonly used to refer to adhesive bandages, Johnson & Johnsons changed its jingle in ads from “I’m Stuck on Band-Aid” to “I’m Stuck on Band-Aid brand.”

Kleenex uses “Kleenex brand” instead of just “Kleenex” on its packaging and in marketing and places ads to remind people Kleenex is trademarked. And the company contacts some people who use Kleenex generically to refer to tissue in order to correct them.

“We’ve worked very hard to keep `Kleenex’ from going the route of `escalator’ and `aspirin,’” says Vicki Margolis, vice president and chief counsel, intellectual property and global marketing for Kimberly-Clark, which owns Kleenex. “If we lose the trademark, people can use it with sandpaper and call that a Kleenex.”

Xerox is taking a similar route. The company, which introduced the first automatic copier in the U cash advance.S. in 1959, has been on a public crusade for decades to keep its brand from becoming generic. The machine’s success has led people to start using “Xerox” to refer to any copying machine, copies made from one and the act of copying.

“In the mid- to late-1970s, we ran dangerously close to Xerox becoming `genericized,’” says Barbara Basney, vice president of global advertising. “That prompted a lot of proactive action to protect our trademark.”

Xerox has spent millions taking out ads aimed at educating so-called “influencers” like lawyers, journalists and entertainers about its brand name. A 2003 ad said: “When you use `Xerox’ the way you use `aspirin,’ we get a headache.” More recently, a 2007 ad read: “If you use “Xerox” the way you use “zipper,” our trademark could be left wide open.”

While people still use “Xerox” generically _ the Merriam-Webster dictionary lists the word as both a lower-case verb with the definition “to copy on a xerographic copier” and a trademarked noun _ the brand says its campaign has been a success.

Xerox is still popular: It’s ranked the 57th most valuable global brand, worth $6.4 billion, according to brand consultancy Interbrand. And perhaps most importantly, Xerox hasn’t lost its trademark.

TAKING IT IN STRIDE

Sometimes companies embrace when their brands become common nouns.

Perhaps the best example of this is Google, a company created in 1998 when Alta Vista and Yahoo.com were the top online search engines. Google, which created a formula that returned more accurate results than its competitors, became so popular that people began saying “Google” to refer to a Web search, in general. Experts say Google has benefited from its name becoming a part of the lexicon.

“You don’t say `Why don’t I Google it’ and go to Yahoo or Bing,” says Jessica Litman, professor of copyright law at the University of Michigan Law School, referring to other search engines.

Apple also has gotten a boost from its brand names becoming synonymous with products. The iPod, which was the first digital music player when it came out in 2001, is still the name people use for “digital music player” or “MP3 player.” And it appears Apple’s iPad is headed down the same path.

For consumers like Mary Schmidt, 58, the “iPad” is generic for “tablet.” Schmidt, a Baltimore marketing executive, owns an iPad and doesn’t know the names of any other tablets.

“When I think of tablets, I think of an iPad,” she says. “I think it’s going to be the generic name. They were first.”

It remains to be seen if the iPad will maintain its name domination in the tablet market. Apple declined to comment for this article.

For now, Apple Inc. has a majority of the tablet category, which includes Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Tablet. The iPad accounted for about 73 percent of the estimated 63.6 million tablets sold globally last year, according to research firm Gartner.

Apple’s market share is likely to decline as more rivals roll out tablets. But experts say that won’t necessarily diminish iPad’s name recognition.

“Apple is actually pretty good at this,” says Litman, the law school professor. “It’s able to skate pretty close to the generics line while making it very clear the name is a trademark of the Apple version of this general category.”

When the iPad debuted in 2010, some people offered up “Apple Tablet” or the “iTab” as better names. Others even suggested that the name sounded more like a feminine hygiene product than a tablet: “Get ready for Maxi pad jokes and lots of `em!” wrote tech site Gizmo at the time.

Two years later, those complaints are all but forgotten.

“At the end of the day, the product was so successful that even if it wasn’t the `quote unquote’ best name, it made the name synonymous with the category,” says Allen Adamson, managing director at branding firm Landor.

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Sean Chua expected the hunt for his first job after college to be tough. After all, he watched his brother struggle to find a position when he graduated back in 2008. But his fears were unwarranted. The 21-year-old justice major at American University sent out only seven resumes before getting an offer earlier this month from IBM for an IT consulting job, making him a beneficiary of a turnaround in the labor market for U.S. graduates. “My mom’s first position was with IBM so she is particularly proud,” says Chua. Hiring is back in a big way on many college campuses, one of several signs a recovery in the U.S. jobs market is gaining traction. After four years during which many students graduated to find no job and had only their loans to show for their studies, most college campuses are teeming with companies eager to hire. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found 2012 hiring is expected to climb 10.2 percent, above a previous estimate of 9.5 percent.

Companies such as General Electric, Amazon, Apple and Barclays Global are looking for new staff, even if some firms remain below the pre-recession levels of new hiring. In another sign of the recovery, some first-time job seekers are receiving multiple offers.

At University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the career service office has seen up to now a 7.4 percent increase in the number of interviews of students by potential employers from last year and the number of companies seeking to recruit for full-time jobs is up 9.2 percent. Undergraduate business majors reporting full-time job offers is up about 10 percent.

Career experts at a dozen of U.S. schools said they have seen an increase of 15 to 30 percent in the number of companies attending campus career fairs. At University of Florida, the fall career fair garnered 15 percent more companies in attendance than in 2010. And 150 companies asked to conduct interviews versus about 100 in recent years, said Ja’Net Glover, associate director of employer relations at the school. The increase in demand was so significant that it was the first time in years the school had to use both the first and second floors of the school’s basketball facility for interviews.

“It’s kind of like a no-brainer,” says Kathy Sims. Director of Career Services at UCLA. “The economy is better and the college recruitment market is improving.”

While the U.S. jobless rate fell to 8.3 percent in February, unemployment among college graduates over the age of 25 stood at 4.2 percent. Historically, their jobless rate is half that of Americans with only a high school education. Over the recession, unemployment among graduates climbed as high as 5 percent, sparking protests over the rising tuition cost of some U.S. colleges. U.S. unemployment data for March, due for release on April 6, is expected to show a total of just over 200,000 jobs were created in the month, keeping the overall unemployment rate at 8.3 percent.

BACKLOG FROM PAST YEARS, INTERNS SOAR

College graduates’ earnings are also on the rebound payday loans with no fax. NACE says the median wage for first-time job seekers after college for 2012 is up 4.5 percent higher than a year ago to $42,569.

That initial pay level can resonate over the span of a career. Several studies show that the life-time earnings for workers who enter the labor force at time of economic recession are lower than lifetime earnings of those who are hired amid an economic recovery. Given the tepid recovery of the economy, some caution is required. In 2008, many college graduates who had already accepted job offers were later away. After the run of lean years, many graduates are stuck in low-paying jobs and professions that never intended to follow, meaning there could be a backlog of well-educated workers who need to get their careers on track as well as new graduates. However, with a wide range of employers — from automakers to investment banks — back on campus offering internships and full-time jobs, and not just to engineering, computer science and math majors, the outlook for the Class of 2012 looks rosy.

General Electric wants to hire 5,000 interns this year, up from its usual 3,000 to 4,000. Since 70 percent of its full-time hires come from the interns pool, Steve Canale, head of global recruiting, said that uptick will also translate into more full-time jobs after graduation. “(Companies) are saying, ‘we have an aging workforce, and we have to replenish the pipeline.’ GE has always done it, but this year a lot of other companies are also reloading their talent pool,” Canale said.

Chrysler said it plans to hire 400 interns this year compared to 256 in 2011. The automaker has also hired almost 4,000 salaried employees since June 2009, about a quarter of which are new college graduates. The pick-up in hiring extends to industries that were among the hardest hit during the financial crisis. Schools report that banking and financial services companies have returned to campus for the Class of 2012.

It’s a stark contrast from just a few years ago when smaller firms appeared on campuses to replace the corporations no longer showing up.

“Even students with lower grades are finding opportunities,” says Notre Dame’s Svete, who believes job placement at the school is up about 7 percent. In 2009, only 75 percent of students had jobs or plans for graduate school at graduation. This year, the school expects that to climb to 85 to 88 percent, closer to the 90 percent level of 2007.

Nathan Pace, a senior at American University, hasn’t yet found a job, but is confident for his future job. He started the college four years ago and he has since seen each class of graduating seniors have better luck finding jobs.

Many of his friends recently secured job offers. “The vibe on campus is that people are excited,” says Pace.

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Less than two years after tightening some financial regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress appears ready to loosen others in the name of job creation.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups bill – known as JOBS, of course – would reduce the red tape involved in making an initial public stock offering, and make it legal for businesses to solicit investors over social media, a process known as crowdfunding.

The bill also would roll back some longstanding investor protections. The Securities and Exchange Commission, AARP, the AFL-CIO and the Consumer Federation of America have all expressed concerns that the bill will lead to a surge in investment fraud.

The North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state regulators, calls the bill “an investor protection disaster waiting to happen.” The group’s president, Nebraska official Jack Herstein, said in a statement that the JOBS bill creates “new jobs for promoters of Internet investment scams.”

Tossing such warnings aside, Senate passed JOBS Thursday on a 73-26 vote, following an even more lopsided approval in the House. (The bills differ slightly, so another House vote is necessary. President Barack Obama has said he’ll sign the legislation.)

The hope is that, freed of red tape, entrepreneurs will find it much easier to raise money and hire people. It’s tough to be against a jobs bill in an election year.

What happens, though, if the critics are right and there’s an increase in fraud? If investors lose faith in the capital markets, companies will find it harder, not easier, to raise money.

“Investors won’t return to the IPO market if they don’t believe they can trust it,” SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar says in a statement on the agency’s website. He also calls the legislation “a boon to boiler room operators, Ponzi schemers, bucket shops, and garden variety fraudsters.”

The bill would create a new class of “emerging growth companies” that wouldn’t have to follow certain rules. They’d get a five-year reprieve, for example, from the need to have an audit of their internal controls.

The most eagerly anticipated part of the bill involves crowdfunding, a concept that sites like Kickstarter have used to raise money for art projects and other nonprofit causes.

Advocates say crowdfunding could be a big new source of capital for new businesses.

“The majority of Americans have been excluded from the opportunity to participate in the startup community,” says Clifford Holekamp, a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Washington University’s Olin School of Business. “It really democratizes the process of equity investing. This is a cultural shift that’s really exciting.”

Those novice mini-angel investors will be operating, however, with only a thin layer of protection. The Senate version of JOBS requires crowdfunding platforms to register with the SEC, but no regulator would vet the offerings themselves.

They’d be exempt from states’ registration requirements, and that’s what bothers Robin Carnahan, the Missouri Secretary of State.

“I’m a fan of crowdfunding,” she said. “It’s important to give small businesses access to new funding opportunities, but we need to do it in a measured and responsible way.”

Her office will watch crowdfunding deals for signs of fraud, she says, but unfortunately, it’s hard to get your money back from a scam artist. A wiser course would have been to combine this new form of investing with the upfront protection that people have come to expect in America’s financial markets.

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Deep in Republican oil country, President Barack Obama is fending off criticism of his energy policies, pointing to plans to fast-track an oil pipeline that emerged after he delayed the larger Keystone XL project earlier this year.

Obama was directing federal agencies Thursday to expedite a 485-mile line from Oklahoma to refineries on Texas’ Gulf Coast that would remove a critical bottleneck in the country’s oil transportation system. The directive would also apply to other pipelines that alleviate choke points.

“We’re drilling all over the place,” Obama said in Maljamar, N.M., on Wednesday, standing alongside oil rigs on federal land. The president was announcing his plans for the expedited pipeline, a southern portion of the original Keystone XL, in Cushing, Okla., where construction is expected to begin this spring.

In oil fields and amid acres of solar panels, Obama is trying to rebut charges that he has stifled domestic energy production and been too eager to spend government money on renewable energy projects as gas prices have climbed to $3.86 a gallon. His emphasis on oil drilling is aimed at countering criticism of his rejection of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

For Obama’s advisers, rising gas prices pose a threat to his re-election bid because they could undermine the benefits of a payroll tax cut that he made the centerpiece of his jobs agenda last fall _ Congress approved the tax cut extension in February _ and throttle the economic recovery.

Republicans view rising gas prices as emblematic of Obama’s energy record and hope to tag him with the blame even though no president has much control over prices at the pump. Gas prices have risen more than 50 cents a gallon since January in response to a standoff over Iran’s nuclear program that has threatened to disrupt Middle East oil supplies.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, campaigning at a Harvey, La., company that services oil rigs, said Obama’s administration should open more federal lands for leases to boost U.S. oil production and revenue for the federal government.

“Here’s an opportunity for us in this country to do something about it: increasing jobs, lowering energy prices, decreasing the deficit, all of the things you would think the president of the United States would be for,” Santorum said.

Mitt Romney, Santorum’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, has labeled Obama’s top energy advisers as the “gas hike trio,” urging the president to fire three Cabinet secretaries because of the high prices.

The status of the Keystone XL pipeline has been a focal point in the heated political fight over energy development.

Calgary-based TransCanada said it hopes to complete the $2.3 billion Oklahoma-to-Texas section next year after receiving the last approvals it needs to start construction. Many of the permits and environmental reviews already have been completed as part of the larger Keystone project, company officials said.

Republicans questioned whether the executive actions by Obama would speed up the pipeline’s construction and said it reiterated the need for the larger Keystone XL pipeline.

“The American people can’t afford more half-measures on energy from the president. No matter what he says, the reality is he killed the Keystone pipeline and the energy production and 20,000 jobs that went with it,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman.

Obama’s energy tour was also aimed at defending his administration’s support of renewable energy projects, an agenda tarnished by his administration’s decision to pump millions into California solar company Solyndra before it collapsed.

In an interview with American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on Wednesday, Obama noted that the funding came from a loan guarantee program approved by Congress to help renewable energy companies, some of which would not succeed.

“Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it’s heartbreaking what happened to the workers who were there,” Obama said. “When you look at the overall portfolio, is it right for us to make sure that we’re not just cashing in our chips and letting the Chinese or the Germans develop the technologies that we know are going to be critical in the future? I’m proud to say that we’re going to continue to support it.”

Electoral politics remain close to the surface. Nevada and New Mexico remain top targets on Obama’s 2012 election map, and while Republican stronghold Oklahoma will get scant attention from his political team, taking his message to the site of a future oil pipeline allows him to strike back at his chief critics on energy.

Obama was ending the day with a stop in battleground Ohio, talking about automobile research and development at Ohio State University in Columbus. The president has cited his decision to raise fuel efficiency standards to 55 miles per gallon for new vehicles by 2025 as an important step in conserving oil and saving consumers at the gas pump.

Obama has repeatedly invoked his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler from collapse with billions in federal aid, a move that saved hundreds of thousands of auto assembly and supplier jobs in Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere. Romney opposed the bailout, and Obama’s team intends to make it a stark contrast between the two candidates if the former Massachusetts governor wins the GOP nomination.

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Even as lawmakers spent the fall debating its fate, the use of Missouri’s Historic Preservation Tax Credit surged at the end of 2011.

State officials authorized $90.8 million worth of the credits – which pay back a developer one-fourth of the cost to rehab a historic building – in the six months from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2011. That’s $18 million more than the entire 12 months prior and a pace similar to the program’s pre-recession heyday in the mid-2000s, when it funded the rehab of countless lofts, office buildings and single-family homes across St. Louis.

The quick clip of authorizations – which happen before a building is rehabbed (credits are cashed in after the project is done) – suggest that, after a few slow years, a new wave of redevelopment may be kicking off in St. Louis and Kansas City. But it also comes amid unrelenting pressure from Jefferson City lawmakers who say the historic tax credit, which is awarded to any rehab that qualifies, is gobbling up too much of the state budget.

The $91 million already approved this fiscal year is a bit higher than the full-year cap proposed in tax credit bills last fall — and well above the $75 million limit that a state tax credit panel endorsed in 2010. At this pace, authorizations would hit even the $140 million cap set on the program in 2009, before demand dried up in the recession.

A big reason for the surge is simple economics. Commercial real estate is starting to pick up. Building projects – including tax-credit funded rehabs – are moving again.

The activity also has Fred Lafser’s phone ringing. Lafser, a redevelopment consultant in Creve Coeur, does a lot of front-end tax-credit work, such as getting a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places and filing the historic credit application with the state.

“During the recession, people just weren’t calling with new projects. We went from the phone ringing all the time to the phone not ringing at all,” he said. “In the last six to nine months we’re getting a lot more phone calls.”

A company like Lafser’s will often start working nine months or a year before the state actually OKs a tax credit award, making him an early indicator, of sorts, for historic redevelopment. If Lafser is busy, the pipeline of tax credit projects likely will grow.

Still, it’s not clear that the state will hit its $140 million cap by July. Of the $90.8 million in authorizations through December, $3.9 million went to small projects that are exempt from the cap. And nearly two-thirds went to just two buildings: $31.3 million to turn the old Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City into a hotel; and $27.5 million over four phases to renovate the Railway Exchange Building in downtown St. Louis. If no more large rehabs win authorization, there should be funds to spare.

Urban appeal

Of the 66 projects authorized for credits, just two – one each in Columbia and Boonville – were located outside the St. Louis or Kansas City metropolitan areas. In the 12 months ending last June 30, 15 of 125 recipients were outside the state’s two largest metropolitan areas, with much of the money going to two big projects in Springfield.

That urban-rural split helps to explain divisions in the General Assembly about the future of the historic tax credit. While The credits enjoy strong support from urban lawmakers – and House Speaker Steven Tilley, R-Perryville – Senate budget hawks, particularly from outstate districts, have long targeted them for cuts.

After last fall’s failed special session, few in Jefferson City expect anything to happen on the topic in this election year spring. Still, some are trying. Sen. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, has filed a bill that would halt historic tax credit authorizations entirely for a year, and another that would place a one-year stop on redemptions of them.

In a recent hearing on the bills, Crowell blasted the credits, and the developers who use them, noting they consume more than $100 million a year from the state budget while funding for education gets cut.

“Our priorities are all screwed up,” he said. “If the No. 1 priority is rehabbing old buildings, and the hell with the children, it’s shameful.”

The historic program’s many supporters see it differently. They point to studies saying the credit drives enough investment to recoup its cost, and – coupled with schools and businesses – it has rebuilt both downtowns and neighborhoods across the state.

That’s what Brent Crittenden is trying to do.

An architect and developer, he was approved last year for about $1.6 million worth of historic tax credits to rehab 11 buildings in McRee Town, a long-battered neighborhood just north of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The biggest building is a new home for the City Garden Montessori school, and the rest will be rehabbed townhouses, with some infill new construction mixed in.

The townhouses are priced between $165,000 and the mid-$200,000s, which is comparable to similar-sized rehabs in many parts of south St. Louis. Absent the credits, Crittenden said, they would cost much more, too much to sell in this market. The project wouldn’t happen.

“It just wouldn’t make sense,” he said.

Where the money goes

Historic tax credit authorizations, July 1 - Dec. 31, 2012

County           Number         Value

STL City          50                $49.2 million

Jackson            9                $35.5 million

Clay                 3                $4.7 million

Boone              1                $1.2 million

STL County       1                $250,000

Cooper             1                $25,475

St. Charles       1                $17,500

Source: Mo. Dept. of Economic Development

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Orders for U.S. durable goods fell in January by the most in three years, led by a slowdown in demand for commercial aircraft and business equipment.

Bookings (DGNOCHNG) for goods meant to last at least three years slumped 4 percent, more than forecast, after a revised 3.2 percent gain the prior month, data from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. Economists projected a 1 percent decline, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

The expiration at the end of 2011 of a tax incentive allowing full depreciation on equipment purchases may have prompted a slowdown in investment at the start of this year. At the same time, a strengthening auto industry may help keep factories at the forefront of the expansion that began in June 2009.

The Obama administration will release details tomorrow on its proposal to reduce the 35 percent corporate tax rate and eliminate tax breaks, said administration officials familiar with the plan.

The Treasury Department will outline the proposal, according to the officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. They didn