by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), as reported in the Wall Street Journal, has introduced legislation that would put the burden of underfunded union pension plans on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the equivalent of the FDIC, and have taxpayers pick up the tab. However, Casey and the others [...]

by James Hendricks, Esq.
Business owners with union contracts, pay attention. Companies that lay off workers and have partial withdrawal liability may find themselves faced with a new but old weapon being resurrected by union pension fund counsel.
There is a little known provision in ERISA that allows a union pension fund to seek injunctive relief for [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
By force of habit, people tend to think that trends must always continue, even when we all know that change is inevitable. That’s why when home prices and the real estate market were rocketing skyward, investors thought it would never end—and then it did.
The same may be true [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
We are getting reports of increased construction orders coming in from around the country. We also are hearing about increased business-to-business activity that is looking for financing and finding some relief from asset based lending and other non-bank sources.

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
The new home building market is showing no improvement. “The guys who were hoarding cash are now showing up to buy finished land. There still is no economic reason to buy raw land, because finished land is cheaper than the cost of improving raw land, even if you [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
The federal government has pumped almost two trillion dollars into the economy and yet unemployment is roughly at 10%. Job losses have been so severe that it would take us until 2012, or later, to recover the jobs lost in the last year even if the economy fully [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
Good news. Steel sales are good and they are going for domestic manufacturing of automobiles for export to China. GM is the beneficiary of this large increase in Chinese buys. The hot brands that the Chinese want are the Chevy Malibu and Buick Regal.
These export sales are enabling [...]

The economy is always about the numbers and this week it’s about home mortgages.

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
In addition to other announced asset sales, what we are told is that BP is leaving North America. Between the Gulf of Mexico disaster, problems with their N.A. pipelines, the Texas City refinery explosion a few years ago, other liability issues, and a large scale public relations attacks [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
The Meyers Report hears a huge national drug store chain is preparing to sell its Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) operations to make itself a prettier acquisition target. The firm’s profits are flat-to-declining after a long strategy of deliberate overgrowth to eliminate competition, a planthat is backfiring. To save [...]