Solar startup Morgan Solar plans to announce Thursday that it has raised $16.5 million in venture-capital funding. After declines in the second half of 2010, U.S. cleantech investment has been on the rise so far this year, with solar companies getting the most money, analysts say.

Founded in 2007 by company president John Paul Morgan and his brother Nicolas, Morgan Solar has developed a concentrating-photovoltaic technology that it claims can convert more sunlight into electricity at a lower cost than competing technologies. The technology involves staggered rows of thin, hexagonal optics that direct light to triple-layered solar cells positioned at the edges of the rows.

The company says the initial commercial panels will be able to convert sunlight into electricity with 25 percent efficiency, which is higher than most conventional silicon-based panels but lower than some other concentrating PV technologies. Even at its current low volumes, its cost is on par with that of traditional panels, Morgan told us in an interview, adding that the company expects to be able to deliver a levelized cost of energy – meaning the total cost of energy, with everything included – competitive with that of thin-film solar in many markets by 2012.

Still, he acknowledged the company faces plenty of challenges in the next year to make that happen. “I don’t want to stop at just being better than solar; I want to compete with coal,” he said. “A lot of things have to be executed correctly – we have to ramp up right and drive down this plan of bringing costs down and efficiency up.  … The details are what are going to make us take this to the next level. And the details are where we’re at now.”

Morgan Solar’s latest deal is the first tranche of its second round, which the company expects to close with $25 million in the next few months, company president John Paul Morgan told us.

News of the funding comes at an important stage for Morgan Solar, when the company hopes to transition from demonstration projects to its first commercial shipments. It is installing a 200-kilowatt demonstration plant in Lancaster and plans to ship its first commercial panels this year. The company, which is already shipping test panels, had previously aimed to ship its first commercial panels last year.

“2011 and 2012 are going to be the most important years in this company’s history,” Morgan said. “This year, when we’re really demonstrating [our product] in the market, taking it to customers and deploying it on a large scale, is really going to be what tests the mettle of the team and of the company and demonstrates to the world how big of a deal this all is.”

Morgan Solar ran into some speed bumps during its internal testing last summer, when it discovered some issues that could result in some defective panels, he said. “We’ve ironed all that out,” he said, adding that he now expects the panels to get international certification by early next year.

The company plans to use its newfound cash – along with its $3.3 million loan guarantee – to grow its optics factory in Chula Vista, Calif., which Morgan said is on track to begin production in the next few months. The factory already has some of its equipment in place and will initially have the capacity to produce 5.5 megawatts a year, then will expand to 50 megawatts of annual capacity by the end of next year, he added.

The 50-megawatts of capacity near San Diego will cost $13 million, Morgan confirmed. “We can ramp up much more cheaply than other companies,” he said, adding that most of the company’s first-round funding went into research and development, lab equipment and testing equipment, not capital expenses. “That’s why we’re not trying to raise $100 million.”

Morgan Solar will also use some of its new capital to expand its panel assembly, as well as research and development – including testing, engineering and design work – at its Toronto headquarters, Morgan said.

Investors in the latest tranche include big Spanish utility Iberdrola’s venture arm, Inversiones Financieras Perseo, which led the deal; existing investor Nypro, which makes Morgan Solar’s optics; and pharmaceutical billionaire Phillip Frost’s The Frost Group, a new investor. Turnstone Capital Management, which led Morgan Solar’s first VC round, didn’t participate in this tranche.

The deal brings the Toronto-based company’s total private capital to $26.3 million. It also has received $10.3 million in U.S. and Canadian government funding, and has won a $3.3 million loan guarantee from the California Energy Commission.

Companies: Inversiones Financieras Perseo, Morgan Solar, Nypro, The Frost Group

People: John Paul Morgan

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Datameer, a company that allows users to analyze massive amounts of data without technical know-how, today announced a second round of funding for $9.25 million. The money will be used to hire additional employees for its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

The company created a user dashboard to easily feed and analyze data into Apache Hadoop, an open-source software that processes large amounts of data sets and spits out analytics as well as reporting. The benefit of the tool comes to those that don’t have a technical background and thus wouldn’t be able to use Apache Hadoop.

Companies in several industries have needs to process large amounts of data, including

Frank Curzio with The Growth Stock Wire this morning writes that Apple (AAPL) is “one of the world’s best ‘bank accounts‘,” by which he means the recurring revenue stream from iTunes content that flows through to the company from rising sales of its iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Curzio notes that the company made “a whopping” $17 billion in free cash flow in the last 12 months, for a total cash position of $65 billion. Back out that cash, and the stock fetches 10 times projected earnings. “You could take the super-safe route, put your money in cash, and earn next to nothing in interest… But Apple is the better play.”

“To put this $65 billion in perspective, that’s larger than the market cap of Home Depot (HD) and Boeing (BA). It’s also bigger than the market caps of 90% of the companies listed in the S&P 500. And this cash position could easily grow to $100 billion over the next 18 months.”

Noting the words of CEO Steve Jobs that “one or more strategic opportunities may come along that we’re in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position,” Curzio concludes “Apple expects to use this cash to purchase other companies.” It has enough money to buy MGM Resorts (MGM), Las Vegas Sands (LVS), and Wynn Resorts (WYNN) “and have a near-monopoly on the gaming industry,” he observes.

Now that’s a thought: Apple dominating slots!

Apple shares today are down $1.60, or half a point, at $344.97.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Or may he did and “patently ill-advised” and “grossly wrong” were compliments?

From The Gartman Letter:

“Finally, The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an article entitled “Hedges Clip Gas Producer’s Earnings,” wherein the journalist took Chesapeake Energy, Clayton Williams Energy, Devon Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources and a few other smaller cap energy companies to task for their losses they’d suffered on their hedging operations.

Several of these are clients of TGL, and most notably Chesapeake Energy, and we thought the tone of the article was patently ill-advised and grossly wrong. The article made it appear that the hedging operations of these energy companies were speculative in nature, and that they would have done better for their shareholders had they chosen not to hedge, which in almost all instances means having taken short positions in either the Brent, or WTI crude futures or perhaps in nat-gas futures. We suspect too that the article was prepared prior to the massive plunge in crude oil prices last week that suddenly turned these supposedly ill-conceived hedge programs into much more profitable once instead.

Hedging is given a bad name by articles such as his. WE suspect that many of the hedges were put into place when the companies in question borrowed large sums of money to undertake oil exploration programs. With costs high but with prices higher still, wise management acted to sell production for months or years forward, thus protecting the borrowing programs from going from ones that are profitable when begun to ones that might become massively un-profitable when half way through if crude oil prices fell. As the CFO of Pioneer Natural Resources said, defending his company’s decision to hedge, “The hedging program in place allowed Pioneer to plan for drilling activity and make sure we can achieve our cash flow goals.”

That is precisely what good, sharp businessmen and women are supposed to do: play for business activities that allow them to achieve their cash flow and earning’s goals. To do otherwise is rank speculation and that is not the business they are supposed to be in. They are in the business of finding and distributing energy. If their shareholders wished management to speculate upon the direction of crude oil prices, would it not have been cheaper to shutter in all drilling activities, fire all employees, cancel all drilling rig leases, lease a quote machine or two and begin a program of organized gambling. Then, we supposed, the Wall Street Journal would have been satisfied.”

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Moving deeper into  mobile chips, Nvidia said it has agreed to buy mobile wireless chip design firm Icera for $367 million.

Icera specializes in making baseband processors for 3G and 4G cellular phones, and it has more than 550 patents. The deal will put Nvidia in a better position in a $15 billion market to compete against Qualcomm and integrate Icera’s technology into Nvidia’s own solution for tablets and smartphones.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia already makes its Tegra family of mobile gadget application processors. The Icera technology enables Nvidia to advance further into making baseband processors, or the actual radio chips in cell phones. By offering both major chips in a cell phone, Nvidia now has a chance to double its revenue opportunity within each device, the company said.

‪“This is a key step in Nvidia’s plans to be a major player in the mobile computing revolution,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, in a statement. “Adding Icera’s technology to Tegra gives us an outstanding platform to support the industry’s best phones and tablets.

Lynley Gwennap, an analyst at the Lynley Group, said that Icera can design chips that are about a quarter of the size of competing chips from Qualcomm. If true, that could give Icera a big advantage in both manufacturing cost and power consumption compared to the rival. Gwennap estimates that the purchase price was about four times Icera’s 2010 revenue, which means its revenue last year was about $91.7 million or so. In the near term, he said that the companies could sell their chips separately. But in the long term, the could combine the chips into a single chip.That will enable Nvidia to reach a broader market.

Icera was founded in 2002 and is based in Bristol, England. It has more than 300 employees in seven countries, and its senior executives have backgrounds in microprocessor design and cellular communication. Icera’s chips are used in wireless modems and have been approved for use by 50 carriers around the world. The company makes next-generation, multi-protocol wireless processors with radio components. A single chip can offer everything from 2G to 4G service and can be custom configured. Stan Boland is the company’s chief executive.

The deal is expected to close in 30 days, subject to customary closing conditions. The transaction will be slightly dilutive to Nvidia’s earnings through the first half of calendar 2012.

Tags: 4G, baseband processor, chips

Companies: Icera, Nvidia, Qualcomm

People: Jen Hsun Huang

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Fed Presidents Signal Record Stimulus Won’t Be Removed Soon (Bloomberg)
Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and San Francisco’s John C. Williams followed the lead taken by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who signaled last week that policy makers will keep stimulus in place after ending large-scale bond purchases in June. “Right now we’re pretty far away from our targets, and right now we’re keeping monetary policy accommodative,” Rosengren, 53, said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s very appropriate given how far we are from our targets.”

Traders Exit High-Speed Lane (WSJ)
Companies that use fast-trading, computer-driven strategies, which were painted by some as culprits of the collapse, have curtailed trading. So, too, have many long-term investors, for whom the trauma of that May 6 afternoon was the final straw after a decade of stock-market turmoil. In their absence, trading volume and volatility have plunged, further deterring high-frequency traders.

A Lack of Supply Feeds Rise in Munis (WSJ)
Yields on a benchmark of highly rated 10-year general-obligation bonds, backed by a government’s taxing authority, have fallen to 2.79% from 3.21% at the start of the year, according to Thomson Reuters. Meanwhile, the cost of insuring against default by some of the most financially troubled states also has dropped…A major driver of the dropping yields, which move opposite to price, is the lack of new supply, which hit an 11-year quarterly low in the first quarter. That slowdown has prompted many investors and bankers to caution it is too early to size up whether the market could absorb any significant uptick in bond issuance.

Claiming Fraud in A.I.G. Bailout, Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Names 3 Companies (NYT)
The lawsuit, filed by a pair of veteran political activists from the La Jolla area of San Diego, asserts that A.I.G. and two large banks engaged in a variety of fraudulent and speculative transactions, running up losses well into the billions of dollars. Then the three institutions persuaded the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to bail them out by giving A.I.G. two rescue loans, which were used to unwind hundreds of failed trades…The lawsuit names A.I.G., Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank as defendants, but not the Fed.

Facebook and Google mull Skype deals (Reuters)
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been involved in internal discussions about buying Skype, according to one of the sources. Another source said Facebook had reached out to the Luxembourg-based company about forming a joint venture.Google has also held early talks for a joint venture with Skype, the second source said.

Mexican central bank buys 100 tonnes of gold (FT)
The purchase, reported in monthly data published by Mexico’s central bank, is the latest in a series of large gold buys by emerging market economies intent on diversifying reserves away from the faltering US dollar. China, Russia and India have acquired large amounts of gold in recent years, while Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bolivia have made smaller purchases…Mexico bought 93.3 tonnes of gold in February and March, according to the central bank, in a haul valued at $4.5bn at current prices and equivalent to 3.5 per cent of annual mined output.

Hero dog helped snare Osama (The Sun)
Heavily armoured hounds — equipped with infrared night-sight cameras — have been used in the past by the top-secret unit. The war dogs wear ballistic body armour that is said to withstand damage from single and double-edged knives, as well as protective gear which shields them from shrapnel and gunfire…Wearing oxygen masks, the pooches have been trained to jump from aircraft at 25,000ft, before seeking out insurgents in hostile environments.

GM Profit Triples (WSJ)
GM said net income rose to $3.2 billion, or $1.77 a share, from $865 million or $0.55 a share. Operating profit, reflecting the strength of its core automotive business, increased to $2 billion from $1.7 billion. Revenue increased 15%, to $36.2 billion, from $31.5 billion.

Government Joins Bowl-Game Brawl (WSJ)
The Justice Department sent a letter Tuesday to the National Collegiate Athletic Association stating that “serious questions continue to arise” over whether the Bowl Championship Series—the sport’s much-criticized method for choosing a champion—complies with antitrust laws. The letter also asks why major-college football doesn’t have a playoff, when so many other college sports do; what steps the NCAA has taken to create a playoff; and whether the NCAA has determined that aspects of the BCS system are unfair.

Bank of America to Triple Number of Mortgage Help Centers (NYT)
The bank, which will announce the plan on Thursday, will focus on regions hit especially hard by the rising tide of homeowners struggling to make their mortgage payments. Seven locations will open in California and three in the Detroit area; other centers will be unveiled in St. Louis, Newark, Philadelphia and Tucson, among other cities…Additional centers may open later this year, the bank said. Counselors fluent in languages including Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Russian will be available for non-English speaking customers…Most of the counselors in the new centers will be transferred from other areas of the mortgage business, like sales and originations, which have slowed with the decline in mortgage demand.

Brazil Banks Beat Wall Street as Itau Shows JPMorgan Who Rules (Bloomberg)
Foreign firms pursuing investment-banking fees in Brazil, where an emerging middle class and rising commodity prices are propelling one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, face stiff competition. Local players have a greater capacity to finance deals, improved relationships with investors, experienced executives and the ability to provide services once offered only by large global banks.

Indian stocks suffer worst losing streak in 10 years (FT)
Mumbai’s BSE Sensex index fell for a ninth-consecutive session, its longest losing streak in a decade, on concerns over the impact of rising costs on corporate earnings. The BSE Sensex index fell 1.1 per cent to 18,266.79, taking its losses since Monday’s 50 basis point interest rate increase by the Reserve Bank of India to 4 per cent. Over the nine consecutive losing sessions, the index has fallen 6.8 per cent.

Charges, rising costs hit Societe Generale results (MarketWatch)
The group reported a profit of 916 million euros ($1.36 billion), compared to €1.06 billion a year earlier, driven by a €239 million accounting charge as improving spreads on the group’s own debt make it theoretically more expensive to buy back. The bottom line was below the €1.12 billion consensus forecast of analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires.

Citi Hires UBS Banker (DealBook)
Kevin Cox, formerly head of Americas investment banking at UBS, is joining Citigroup as co-chairman of global industrials banking.  

Dalai Lama suggests Osama bin Laden’s death was justified (LA Times)
As a human being, Bin Laden may have deserved compassion and even forgiveness, the Dalai Lama said in answer to a question about the assassination of the Al Qaeda leader. But, he said, “Forgiveness doesn’t mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.”

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Bank Of America Earnings Miss Expectations, Profit Drops (BAC)
The bank reported net income of $2.0 billion, or $0.17 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2011, compared with $3.2 billion, or $0.28 per diluted share, in the year-ago period and a net loss of $1.2 billion, or $0.16 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Banks Near Deal With SEC (WSJ)
U.S. securities regulators are in talks with several major Wall Street banks to settle fraud allegations related to mortgage-bond deals that helped unleash the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the matter. The expected settlements, some of which could be reached as soon as next week, collectively mark the biggest attempt by enforcement agencies to hold Wall Street accountable for its role in the subprime mortgage bust. The settlements are expected to vary significantly among banks—but few, if any, are expected to surpass the $550 million penalty that Goldman Sachs paid last year to settle allegations that it misled investors in a mortgage-bond investment called Abacus 2007-AC1.

True Scale Of Glencore’s Trading Empire Unveiled (FT)
Glencore disclosed that it controls 45 percent of the third-party lead market, 38 percent in alumina, and between 30 and 20 percent for aluminium, cobalt and thermal coal. It has a smaller market share for nickel, ferrochrome, oil and grains. The sheer dominance of raw materials trading is set to play into Glencore’s favor as it pushes for a 15-20 percent stake sale worth $9 – $11 billion in London and Hong Kong.

Moody’s Cuts Ireland By Two Notches (Reuters)
Moody’s cut Ireland’s sovereign rating by two notches, to BAA3 from BAA1, to the verge of junk status on Friday and kept its outlook on negative.

Greece To Unveil Austerity Measures To Meet Deficit Goals (Bloomberg)
The government’s medium term-fiscal policy plan will detail more than 22 billion euros ($31.9 billion) of deficit-reduction measures through 2014, most of them in spending cuts, according to Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou. The government is also expected to unveil plans to raise 15 billion euros by 2013 through state-asset sales.

Deutsche Expands Nordic Focus as Bank Lands Biggest Merger Deal (Bloomberg)
Deutsche Bank which won 2011’s biggest Scandinavian corporate-finance deal when it led DuPont Co.’s bid for Danisco A/S, is boosting its Nordic unit as the pace of mergers in the region tops that of Europe and the U.S. “The Nordic market is playing a more important role relative to the rest of Europe,” said Jan Olsson, head of Deutsche Bank’s Nordic investment banking division, in an interview in Stockholm. Deutsche Bank set up a four-person currency team in Stockholm last year. The company also started offering corporate finance services at its Oslo branch, which until 2010 only provided banking to the country’s shipping industry.

JPMorgan Bankers Who Doubted Madoff In 2007 Are Named (NYT)
Those executives are John J. Hogan, the bank’s chief risk officer for investment banking; Matthew E. Zames, who oversees several important bank trading operations; and Carlos M. Hernandez, the head of global equities at the bank’s investment banking unit.

Mexican Economy Shrugs Off Narco War (CNBC)
“The buzz that has surrounded the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other fast-growing emerging economies in recent years has largely passed Mexico by, and arguably for good reason” said Rafael De La Fuente, an economist at UBS in a research note. Despite the drug war, Mexico’s economy took off last year with growth of 5.5 percent and UBS is predicting 2011 growth will hit 4.8 percent.

JPMorgan Pushes Microchip Card In Race With Wells Fargo (Bloomberg)
JPMorgan will first offer the card exclusively to affluent customers. Clients with a JPMorgan Palladium credit card, which has a $595 annual fee, will receive a chip card by June, the company said. “Initially, we are targeting the technology to our highest-spend clients,” Porter said. “Months after that we will issue the card to Chase-branded products.”

Adidas Debuts World’s Lightest Basketball Shoe to Tackle Nike (Bloomberg)
Adidas introduced the AdiZero Crazy Light shoe in New York yesterday. It has a weight of 9.8 ounces and is more than 15 percent lighter than any competing model, including Nike’s LeBron Air Max 8 V/2.

Luxury Spending By Rich To Rise; Value Sought (Reuters)
Spending by rich Americans on luxury goods is set to grow by $26.6 billion in 2011, with the number of affluent families planning to spend more almost doubling in the past three years, a poll found on Friday.

Firms Tip Scales Back In Favor Of Stocks (WSJ)
Companies such as Expedia are increasingly resorting to spinoffs, share buybacks and other financial engineering to boost market value, often to the detriment of bondholders. And in a switch, holders of investment-grade bonds are more at risk than those holding high-yield securities, because the safer bonds typically provide fewer protections against such shareholder-friendly actions.

Raj’s High Wires (NYP)
Just weeks before his trial on insider-trading charges, Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam wired a whopping $15 million to a hedge fund launched by a former employee and key defense witness, prosecutors told the jury yesterday. Rajaratnam’s investments account for $25 million of a total $35 million in Spottail’s assets under management, prosecutors showed. Rajaratnam, who faces a maximum sentence of 25 years, first invested in Spottail in September, giving Schutte $10 million. Then, on Jan. 4, two months before Rajaratnam was scheduled to go on trial in Manhattan federal court, his family wired an additional $15 million to Spottail, prosecutors said.

World’s Oldest Man Dies In Montana (Reuters)
A 114-year-old retired railroad worker reputed to be the world’s oldest living man died of natural causes on Thursday in the farming community of Great Falls, Montana. Walter Breuning, who had lived in a local nursing home since 1980, was declared oldest man on July 18, 2009, by the Guinness Book of World Records. He retired from the railroad at age 66 and attributed his longevity to restricting daily meals to breakfast and lunch and to downing an aspirin a day.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Sales for Taiwanese tech suppliers tied to Apple (AAPL) rose 35% in March, according to analysts at Ticonderoga Securities.

March is typically the strongest month of the year for these suppliers, and this year did not disappoint,  according to Ticonderoga analyst Brian J. White. The month’s gain bested the six-year moving average of 24% month-over-month for the month of March.

“We believe this strength was driven largely by the ramp of the iPad 2 that continues to experience serial stock outs,” White wrote.

The iPad 2 ramp was a bit earlier than the iPad 1 in 2010, so the month-over-month sales growth in March 2011 was below the 52% month-over-month sales uptick in March 2010, he added. But sales declined by only 3% month-over-month in February 2011 versus an 11% month-over-month decline in February 2010.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Obama Demands Budget Deal To Avert Government Shutdown (Bloomberg)
fter meeting with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Obama said issues remained unresolved and he hoped for a breakthrough that would prevent a shutdown, set to begin at midnight tonight. “I’m not yet prepared to express wild optimism but I think we are further along,” he told reporters. “My hope is, is that I’ll be able to announce to the American people sometime relatively early in the day that a shutdown has been averted.”

SEC May Relax Limits On Shares In Private Firms (WSJ)
According to the letter and people familiar with the matter, the likely changes would include raising from 499 the number of shareholders private companies can have without being required to open their books, and also making it easier for such companies to publicize share offerings.

Portugal To Face Strict EU Aid Terms Amid Political Storm (Bloomberg)
In an unprecedented intervention in national politics, euro-area finance ministers said Portugal can win relief by mid- May as long as it makes cuts that go beyond measures that failed to pass parliament in March and led to the government’s downfall.

EU Stress Tests To Examine 90 Banks, 5% Capital Pass Rate (Bloomberg)
“Make no mistake, 5 percent of Core Tier 1 is harder in comparison with last year,” James Babicz, head of risk at SAS, a business analytics company, said in telephone interview in London today. “But I think you have to look at how risky a bank is rather than look at a static capital threshold.”

Marc Faber: Gold Is Still Cheap Despite Record Surge (CNBC)
Faber rejected the notion that gold is in a bubble even as it begins to approach $1,500 an ounce. “If it were a bubble a lot of people would have gold. The whole world would be trading gold 24 hours a day,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s really a bubble. I think gold is maybe cheaper today than it was in 1999, when it was $252.

Why London Can Live Without Its Big Banks (Reuters)
“One or two of them might change their corporate headquarters for tax purposes but if they do go we probably won’t even notice. There won’t be a great outflow of workers and Canary Wharf won’t turn into a ghost town.”

Corporate Jets Often First Thing To Go After Leveraged Buyouts (Bloomberg)
Companies bought by private-equity firms are 32 percent less likely to have a jet in the three years after the deal closes than in the year before, according to a paper written by the Federal Reserve Board’s Jesse Edgerton. The study, published Jan. 21, found that jet fleets at LBO-backed companies are at least 40 percent smaller than at similar publicly traded firms.

Jefferies Expands (Breakingviews)
Jefferies’ lineup now includes municipal bonds and an enlarged investment bank. Staffing has increased by more than a third since the financial crisis struck. Now it’s adding commodities and futures, by buying Prudential Bache for $430 million. Jefferies is still far from joining the big boys. Net profit last year was just $280 million, far less than what Goldman harvested. There’s still scope to grow, however. New hires arguably have not yet settled in enough to crank out their full earnings potential. Shareholders appear to have baked in a better relative performance at Jefferies: the stock trades at about 1.7 times book value, double Morgan Stanley’s multiple and a third better than Goldman’s.

An Aggressive Fed? More Of Street Betting On It (Reuters)
The survey found that about a third of the economists, fund managers and strategists who responded to the survey see the Fed hiking interest rates this year, double the percentage from the March survey. About 27 percent believe the Fed will begin selling assets in the second half of 2011, to reduce the size of its portfolio, up from around 16 percent in the prior survey.

How To Pay No Taxes (BusinessWeek)
Some tips.

Asian Central Banks Intervene As Currencies Rise (WSJ)
Asian currencies rose against the dollar Friday, prompting a number of regional central banks to intervene, as the U.S. currency fell over that nation’s budget woes and a rise in the euro spurred the region’s currencies higher. The move follows Thursday’s rate increase by the European Central Bank, its first tightening since 2008. While the move was widely expected, it suggests world economic growth will continue to improve.

Speed Trading May Be Heading Out To Sea, Literally (CNBC)
In many cases, the best places to maximize chances of buying low in one place and selling high in another (for example between New York and London) were located in the world’s oceans. So could this be the end of traditional fixed stock exchanges in the world’s biggest cities and the rise of floating exchanges in the mid-Atlantic ocean? Wissner-Gross believes that floating trade centers could be a reality of the future.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

David Sokol’s Ways Questioned In Past Suits (NYT)
The most serious lawsuit centered on the accounting of an irrigation project by MidAmerican Energy, where Mr. Sokol was chief executive when Berkshire bought it in 1999. In a rebuke last year, the judge ruled in that case that MidAmerican had improperly changed its accounting on the project and criticized Mr. Sokol directly. The change in accounting was “intended to eliminate the minority shareholders’ interests,” the judge wrote, awarding more than $32 million to the minority shareholders. The case had taken more than five years to work its way through the courts. During that time, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire, expressed confidence in Mr. Sokol by broadening his portfolio beyond MidAmerican to include Netjets, a company that sells fractional use of private aircraft.

Bernanke Downplays Inflation (WSJ)
Bernanke said the recent rise in prices of oil, grains, and other global commodity prices is likely to be temporary and won’t translate into a broader inflation problem. However, the Fed chief was quick to add that if his prediction is wrong and inflation begins to mark strong gains, the central bank would respond. “I think the increase in inflation will be transitory,” Bernanke said. He attributed the sharp increases in prices for oil and food to “global supply and demand conditions,” adding he reckoned these prices “will eventually stabilize.”

Geithner Sees ‘Severe Hardship’ If Debt Limit Isn’t Reached (Bloomberg)
Congress needs to raise the limit to maintain vital services and avoid “questions about our ability to defend our national security interests,” Geithner said. The U.S. would face sharply higher interest rates and would have to stop or delay payments to the military, retirees and others, he said. “Default would cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover,” Geithner said. “For these reasons, default by the United States is unthinkable.”

Apple Crunched In Nasdaq Rebalance (WSJ)
In a move likely to ripple across the stock market, Nasdaq OMX plans to announce Tuesday a rare rebalancing of its Nasdaq-100 index, which will reduce the big weighting of Apple Inc. The company currently makes up more than 20% of the index.

Barclays Chief Set To Raise Appetite For Risk (FT)
Bob Diamond has decided Barclays must increase its risk appetite amid internal expectations at the bank that a key measure of its profitability will fall or stay stagnant this year. Barclays’ new chief executive is considering increasing the bank’s risk profile, in order to hit profitability targets over the next three years, according to people familiar with the bank’s thinking. Mr Diamond, who began in his job in January, has set a target of achieving a 13 per cent return on equity by 2013.

Santander Tops Goldman As Greenest Bank (Bloomberg)
At Banco Santander SA headquarters on the outskirts of Madrid, Joaquin de Ena says he’s gotten used to wearing his sweater vest indoors after the bank turned down the heat to trim power use and greenhouse-gas emissions. “This is OK,” de Ena, director of corporate social responsibility, says with a laugh as he looks at a conference room thermostat as a chilly wind blows through the capital on an early March day. “I’m not sure if it should go any lower.” Santander’s in-house conservation and ecominded investments won it top billing in Bloomberg Markets’ inaugural ranking of the world’s greenest banks…Goldman Sachs was second overall and topped the list for green investing. New York-based Goldman, along with No. 4 bank Credit Suisse, managed the $3 billion initial public offering of Enel Green Power SpA, Rome-based operator of wind, geothermal and hydropower plants. Goldman also co-led the IPO of Tesla Motors, the Palo Alto, California, maker of the $109,000 all-electric Roadster. Read the full story