Mens Womens Replica Watches, Discount Replica Watches

By Jeffrey McCracken, Lauren Coleman-Lochner and Matt Townsend

(Updates share price in fourth paragraph.)

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Collective Brands Inc., owner of the Payless ShoeSource chain, is reducing the pool of suitors for all or part of its business ahead of the second round of bidding, said people familiar with the matter. The stock rose.

The company began yesterday notifying the 20 bidders from the first round whether they would move on to the next, which will comprise about 10 parties, said the people, who declined to be identified as talks are private. Based on bids so far, Collective Brands could get at least $20 a share if the entire business is sold, said one of the people. That would value the Topeka, Kansas-based retailer at about $1.2 billion.

Collective Brands got initial offers from buyout firms TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners LP, as well as from rivals such as Wolverine World Wide Inc., Columbia Sportswear Co. and Deckers Outdoor Corp., the people said. The retailer is keeping at least 10 suitors to have greater choice in a sale, two of the people said.

Collective Brands rose 6 percent to $18.24 today at the close in New York. Before today the stock had gained more than 70 percent since Aug. 23, the day before the company announced its review.

Collective Brands, whose sales were projected to reach $3.4 billion in the year ended in January, disclosed the strategic review in August, with Perella Weinberg Partners LP and Kurt Salmon advising the board. At that time, the company also reported a $35 million loss and said it planned to shut 475 stores in the next three years.

Piecemeal Sale?

The company is open to selling itself piecemeal, shedding parts such as the Payless chain or the Performance + Lifestyle Group, or as a whole, these people said.

Other first-round bidders included Brown Shoe Co. and private-equity fund Golden Gate Capital Corp., which bid on the Payless unit, said these people. Collective Brands will probably ask for final bids toward the end of March to close the deal before early April, one person said.

A representative at Collective Brands declined to comment, as did those at Wolverine Replica Watches, Golden Gate, Leonard Green and TPG. Spokesmen at Columbia, Deckers and Brown Shoe didn’t respond to calls seeking comment.

Some of the private-equity funds may team up with retailers or other strategic bidders to put in combined bids for the whole retailer, these people said. Bidders in the next round will receive management presentations and access to a second data room, they said.

Payless ShoeSource Inc. became Collective Brands after acquiring Stride Rite Corp. in August 2007. The company operates almost 4,500 Payless stores in 34 countries and owns the Keds and Saucony brands.

–Editors: Julie Alnwick, Elizabeth Wollman, Kevin Orland

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeffrey McCracken in New York at jmccracken3@bloomberg.net; Lauren Coleman-Lochner in New York at llochner@bloomberg.net; Matt Townsend in New York at mtownsend9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jennifer Sondag at jsondag@bloomberg.net

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SCIENTISTS have found a 300-million-year-old tropical forest frozen in time in what is now a remote part of northern China.

The peat forest was swampy with a lower canopy of tree ferns beneath other, now-extinct trees soaring 24m above ground.

It also had vines and a few species of extinct Noeggerathiales, a little-understood group of spore-bearing trees believed to be related to ferns.

But the lush expanse, located by what is now Wuda in Inner Mongolia, was smothered in ash when a nearby volcano erupted some 298 million years ago.

At that time, dinosaurs had not yet emerged Replica Watches, the supercontinent Pangea was forming, and Wuda would have been located on the northwest corner of a large island straddling the equator, along with what is now northeast China and most of Korea.

The region no longer has a tropical climate and is now mined for coal, which helped the researchers find the forest – in three study sites that together cover more than 1000m sq.

"It’s marvellously preserved," University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, a lead author of the study, said. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting."

Many of the species already had been discovered but scientists rarely get to study a Pompeii-like, fossilised array of plants that provide a snapshot of the flora from a distinct moment in time.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By Scott Hamilton

Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) — U.K. banks should pay lower bonuses and retain the money to help strengthen their balance sheets, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said.

“If it was left up to me, and probably up to you, and probably up to many people watching this program, we wouldn’t have any bonuses, particularly in the state-owned banks while they are still being repaired” after the financial crisis, Clegg said in a television interview on the BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show” yesterday. “If there is no change in the bonus behavior this year compared to last year, of course I would be outraged. It’s not going to happen.”

With the bank bonus season beginning next month and the prospect of large sums being paid to financiers at a time when many Britons are enduring pay freezes, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking to placate voters while implementing the biggest budget cuts since World War II. Cameron said last week that cash bonuses at state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Lloyds Banking Group Plc will be limited to 2,000 pounds ($3,115).

“We’ve been very, very clear that in RBS, and for that matter in other banks, the bonus pool has to be considerably lower than last year,” Clegg said. “Any money that is spare should Replica Watches, where possible, be used to repair the banks’ balance sheets.”

RBS may pay investment bankers a total of about 2.5 billion pounds, including pay, perks and an estimated 500 million pounds in bonuses, the Sunday Times reported yesterday without saying where it got the information. The bank’s 2010 bonus pool was about 950 million pounds, a 27 percent reduction from 2009. The Edinburgh-based lender required a 45.5 billion-pound rescue from taxpayers in 2008, the world’s biggest bank bailout.

Reforming Taxes

Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in Cameron’s coalition administration, said the government should be “bolder” on reforming the tax system as high inflation and weak wage growth squeezes voters.

Business Secretary Vince Cable, who has previously said owners of properties worth more than 2 million pounds should pay an annual levy, said a so-called mansion tax is “very much on the agenda,” the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported yesterday, citing an interview.

“We think that is part of a patchwork of measures which would over time make the tax system fairer because it would ask people who have got very considerable wealth to make a greater contribution,” Clegg said, referring to the proposal.

‘Hard-Pressed’

“I want this government to be absolutely rooted in the central ground of British politics on the side of hard-pressed, hard-working families,” Clegg said. “The tax system shouldn’t be constantly catering for a very small fraction of people at the top.”

The deputy prime minister also said he supported Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s proposal to cap the total amount of welfare benefits paid to individual households. Parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, will today debate the proposed 500-pound-a-week limit, a measure Duncan Smith says will encourage people into work.

“The central argument, which is one that I fully support and I completely back Iain Duncan Smith on this, is to say it surely can’t be fair, it can’t be right, that you can be earning more on benefits that someone going out and earning 35,000 pounds,” Clegg said.

Reports last week showed Britain’s unemployment rate rose to 8.4 percent in the three months through November, a 16-year high, and consumer confidence dropped as the government cuts spending to tackle a budget shortfall.

U.K. GDP Growth

The U.K. economy probably shrank in the fourth quarter for the first time in a year, with gross domestic product falling 0.1 percent from the third quarter, when it rose 0.6 percent, according to the median of 33 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. The Office for National Statistics will publish its report at 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 25 in London.

“We need urgent action on jobs and growth now to prevent stagnant growth and rising unemployment carrying on into 2012,” Rachel Reeves, a spokeswoman on Treasury issues for the U.K.’s opposition Labour Party, said in an e-mailed statement. “Of course we need tough decisions on tax and spending cuts, but to successfully get the deficit down we also need to get our economy moving again.”

In a speech in northeast England today, Cameron will say new business startups are “critical” to Britain’s economy. He will also announce plans to allow small businesses to utilize under-used and empty government buildings to help them expand, a spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.

Opinion Poll

Labour has lost its opinion-poll lead, drawing level with the ruling Conservative Party as support for opposition leader Ed Miliband drops, according to a poll.

The proportion of people who said they would vote for Labour in a national election has dropped 2 percentage points to 38 percent since a survey in December. The same proportion would back the Conservatives, according to the ComRes Ltd. poll. Support for the Lib Dems rose 1 point to 11 percent. The proportion of respondents who disagreed Miliband was a “good leader” climbed 1 percentage point to 53 percent from December, the poll found.

ComRes surveyed 2,050 British adults in the two days through Jan. 19 for the Sunday Mirror and Independent newspapers for the poll. It didn’t provide a margin of error.

–Editors: Will Hadfield, Francis Harris

To contact the reporter on this story: Scott Hamilton in London at shamilton8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Craig Stirling at cstirling1@bloomberg.net

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By Mark Niquette and Romy Varghese

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) — Thirty-four years after Black Monday, the day Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced shutdowns marking the end of the Ohio city’s steel era, a $650 million mill is coming to life thanks to the natural-gas drilling boom.

The factory for Vallourec SA’s V&M Star will have 350 workers and produce seamless pipes used in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. It’s part of a development that an oil and gas industry study calculates will mean more than 200,000 jobs and $22 billion in economic output in Ohio by 2015 — and which has neighboring states looking to get in on the action.

The new mill is rising about two miles (3.2 kilometers) from an injection well for disposing wastewater from fracking that has been closed after 11 earthquakes shook the Youngstown area last year. States that that sit atop shale formations are cashing in on the drilling and the expanding businesses that support it, even as the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reviews the earthquake data and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies the effects of fracking on drinking water with an eye on possible nationwide regulations.

“This will be the biggest thing to hit the state of Ohio economically since maybe the plow,” Aubrey K. McClendon, chief executive officer of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the most active U.S. oil and natural-gas driller, said during an energy summit that Governor John Kasich convened in Columbus in September.

Shell Plans

Drillers have turned to fracking — a process that injects water, sand and chemicals into rock to free natural gas — in shale formations including the Marcellus and Utica below Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. A boom in production helped cut prices 32 percent last year.

While some shale-gas development is anchored to the drilling sites, states are jockeying for spinoff investments such as a “world-scale” natural-gas processing plant that Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it plans to build in Ohio, Pennsylvania or West Virginia.

All three states say they have offered incentives to Shell, and Kasich flew to Houston in November to hand-deliver letters of support for the project.

“States compete every day for every business they can find,” Keith Burdette, West Virginia’s secretary of commerce, said in a telephone interview from Charleston. “Suddenly, there’s this vast new array of manufacturing opportunities that may be returning to this region of the country, and I think we’ll all be aggressively looking for every opportunity.”

Emulating Texas

Development of the shale-gas industry is one of Pennsylvania’s top priorities, C. Alan Walker, secretary of community and economic development, said in a Jan. 4 interview in Harrisburg. Republican Governor Tom Corbett has said he wants the state to be the “Texas of the natural-gas boom.”

Texas wants to be the Texas of the gas boom, too. Half of the eight most active U.S. oil- and gas-drilling regions are in the state, according to a December presentation by Pioneer Natural Resources Inc., a Dallas-based exploration and production company.

Oil and gas employment in the state increased by 18 percent to almost 238,000 during the year ended Oct. 31 and now exceeds the peak of the last energy boom in October 2008, according to the Texas Petro Index, a survey compiled by Amarillo economist Karr Ingham.

Bridge to Future

In Youngstown, which has lost more than half the 168,330 residents it had in 1950, V&M Star may help make the area the Utica Shale’s supply-chain capital, said Eric Planey, a vice president at the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber.

“I look at it as being a bridge from our past to our future,” Planey, whose father worked at Youngstown Sheet & Tube for 40 years, said in a Dec. 8 interview. “Our past was exclusively steel. It looks like our future is going to be significantly a part of the oil and gas and energy business.”

Even so, an Ohio State University analysis concluded last month that the industry study, prepared for the Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program, “greatly overestimates” the economic impact. Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that job-hungry states are moving too fast to capitalize before fracking’s consequences are known.

Vanessa Pesec, president of the Network for Oil and Gas Accountability and Protection in Northeast Ohio, pointed to the earthquakes in the Youngstown area last year that she blames on the disposal well, including a 4.0-magnitude temblor on New Year’s Eve.

“This is a short-term boom with long-term negative impacts,” Pesec said in a telephone interview.

Moratorium Urged

Yesterday, doctors at a conference on fracking in Arlington, Virginia, said the U.S. should declare a moratorium on the drilling process until the health effects are better understood.

David Mustine, general manager for energy of JobsOhio, the state’s development arm, said Ohio has strong regulations and he doesn’t think the complications from fracking will slow development. The state is benefiting from direct investment as well as jobs and lower natural-gas prices, he said. Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake alone has spent almost $2 billion in Ohio to acquire drilling rights, said McClendon, its CEO.

The money that drillers such as Chesapeake are paying landowners for leasing rights and royalties is buoying local economies, said Brad Hillyer, a lawyer in Uhrichsville. Landowners are being paid as much as $5,200 an acre plus royalties as high as 20 percent of the money from gas produced at a well, said Hillyer, who is negotiating leases.

No New Trucks

C.H. McCutcheon, general manager of Elder Ag & Turf Equipment Co. in East Palestine, estimated in a telephone interview that 25 percent of his business this year came from sales of equipment costing as much as $100,000 or more and paid for by lease payments that farmers received.

“If you take a look in western Pennsylvania and parts of eastern Ohio, if you go to the implement dealership, there ain’t no new tractors, red or green, and if you go to the local car dealership, there ain’t no new trucks,” Dale Arnold, director of Ohio Farm Bureau Federation’s energy services, said in an interview from Columbus.

The development “could bring an economic resurgence really to all of Ohio,” Kasich told reporters last month.

The impact is evident in Pennsylvania.

Collections of business taxes from oil and gas drilling in that state from January through November last year increased to $385.2 million, more than double the 2008 tally and a 64 percent increase from 2010, according to the revenue department.

Employment Gains

Employment by businesses directly involved in Marcellus shale grew 114 percent in the first quarter of 2011 from the same period in 2008 Replica Watches, according to the Pennsylvania Center for Workforce Information and Analysis. Wages in Marcellus industries average $76,036, compared with the state average of $46,222, according to the center.

Pennsylvania wants to attract manufacturing related to drilling to “reindustrialize the state,” said Walker, the economic development secretary, who is former president of Bradford Energy Co.

The big prize is the so-called cracker plant that Shell plans in Ohio, Pennsylvania or West Virginia. An announcement is expected during the first quarter, Kelly op de Weegh, a company spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview. The plant would “crack,” or process ethane from natural gas to produce ethylene, which is used in the chemical and plastics industries.

Andrew Carnegie

The company will invest as much as $4 billion, Walker said, an amount he said equals what Andrew Carnegie put in U.S. Steel in the early 1900s.

The project will require as many as 10,000 construction jobs and “several hundred” full-time positions at the plant, op de Weegh said in an e-mail. For every plant job, there would be seven support workers, Walker said.

Walker, Ohio’s Mustine and West Virginia’s Burdette all declined to discuss what incentives their states are offering.

The states also are competing in other ways. In a letter to legislators in November urging them to consider shale bills, Corbett cited Ohio’s “broad and sweeping law” that pre-empts local ordinances and is being used as a “carrot” to draw businesses.

Ohio officials point to predictability in rules “as they continue to attempt to lure Pennsylvania jobs and investment across our western border,” Corbett wrote.

“We are certainly mindful of what the other states are doing,” said Patrick Henderson, Corbett’s energy executive. “The governor is committed to being as competitive as we can.”

–With assistance from David Mildenberg in Austin, Texas, and Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York. Editors: Stephen Merelman, Mark Schoifet

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Niquette in Columbus, Ohio, at mniquette@bloomberg.net; Romy Varghese in Philadelphia at rvarghese8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net

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By Sarah Jones

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — The U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index slid from a five-month high as investors awaited the outcome of three days of meetings between Greece and its private creditors.

BP Plc led a selloff in energy companies as crude oil tumbled in New York. Petrofac Ltd. dropped 4.3 percent as JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded the oil and gas producer. Weir Group Plc lost 6 percent, following a selloff in U.S.-based Gardner Denver Inc.

The FTSE 100 declined 12.6, or 0.2 percent, to 5,728.55 at the close in London after swinging between gains losses today as futures contracts expired. The gauge still gained 1.6 percent this week as European borrowing costs fell at debt auctions. The FTSE All-Share Index retreated 0.2 percent today Replica Watches, while Ireland’s ISEQ Index dropped 1 percent.

“The FTSE finished lower today after edging higher all week,” said Chris Beauchamp, a market analyst at IG Index. “Rumors of a Greek debt deal have stalked investors all week and have been back with a vengeance today.”

Greece’s government and its private creditors met for a third day to seek agreement on a debt swap. Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said Greek officials held “long and substantial” discussions with Institute of International Finance Managing Director Charles Dallara yesterday.

Euro-area officials and the nation’s private bondholders agreed in October to implement a 50 percent cut to the face value of Greek debt by voluntarily exchanging outstanding bonds for new securities, with the goal of reducing Greece’s borrowings to 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020.

The accord with bondholders is key to a second financing package for the cash-strapped country Replica Watches, which faces a 14.5 billion-euro ($18.7 billion) bond payment on March 20.

BP Slides

BP led energy companies lower as crude oil dropped below $100 a barrel in New York as data showed Chinese manufacturing contracted for a third month and sales of previously owned U.S. homes grew less than economists had predicted.

BP, Europe’s second-largest oil company, declined 3.1 percent to 467.45 pence. BG Group Plc slid 2.2 percent to 1,457 pence, while larger rival Royal Dutch Shell Group Plc lost 1.3 percent to 2,253.5 pence.

Petrofac, Weir Group

Petrofac paced declining shares, sliding 4.3 percent to 1,440 pence as JPMorgan lowered its recommendation for the shares to “neutral” from “overweight.”

Weir Group sank 6 percent to 1,954 pence, pacing a selloff in rival Gardner Denver which tumbled 5.1 percent in U.S. trading yesterday. Weir fell as the Financial Times reported that the marginal cost of production for some U.S. shale gas was close to zero.

Vodafone Group Plc added 1.5 percent to 177.05 pence, limiting declines on the FTSE 100 after India’s Supreme Court ruled the company isn’t liable to pay $2 billion in tax related to its purchase of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd.’s wireless operations in 2007. That judgment reversed a previous ruing.

Enterprise Inns Plc surged 13 percent to 35.5 pence for its fourth day of gains. Oriel Securities Ltd. said after meeting with the company that the shares have “significant upside,” if trading turns positive and it refinances its bank facility.

HMV Group Plc almost tripled to 7.15 pence after the CD and DVD retailer obtained a lifeline as banks waived an imminent covenant test and eased the terms of others. The company said it should be able to cut net debt by about 50 percent over the next three years.

–Editor: Will Hadfield

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Jones in London at sjones35@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Rummer at arummer@bloomberg.net

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By Hannah Benjamin and Radoslav Tomek

(Updates with new price guidance in second paragraph.)

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — The Slovak Republic began selling a new benchmark issue of bonds in euros, the first international offer of debt securities since April, bankers involved in the transaction said.

The bonds will have a maturity of five years and may be priced to yield 305 to 310 basis points more than the benchmark mid-swap rate, a banker involved in the transaction said. The country’s state-debt agency known also as Ardal didn’t specify the terms of the transaction in an e-mailed statement from Bratislava, Slovakia, today.

The east European country, which adopted the euro three years ago, is approaching international investors after domestic bond auctions in the fourth quarter failed to generate enough demand. As much as 5.65 billion euros ($7.18 billion) in Slovak debt securities mature this year, of which 4.98 billion euros is due in the first quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Given the amount maturing in the coming months Replica Watches, such a move is inevitable,” said Maria Valachyova, an economist at Slovenska Sporitelna AS in Bratislava. “Demand is hard to predict, since the perception of Slovakia has been hurt by the euro-region’s problems.”

German Spread

Slovakia is rated A1 by Moody’s Investors Service and A+ by Standard and Poor’s, better than Italy, a euro-area founding member. The country last tapped international markets in April, when it sold 1 billion euros in reopening of bonds maturing 2020. The bond is trading to yield 5.461 percent, or 3.89 percentage points more than German securities with a similar maturity.

Ardal failed to raise the planned amount in bond sales last quarter as the euro-region’s debt crisis has reduced investors’ interest in long-term instruments, which prompted the agency to sell bills instead. Two days ago, it sold 237.1 million euros in 77-day Treasury bills yielding 1.4313 percent.

Slovakia hired HSBC Holdings Plc., Societe Generale SA, Tatra Banka AS and UniCredit SpA to manage the benchmark bond issue, which will take place when market conditions allow, Ardal said.

The country is ruled by an interim government of Iveta Radicova before early elections are held on March 10. The administration targets a budget deficit of 4.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2012, down from a projected 4.9 percent for 2011.

–Editors: Douglas Lytle Replica Watches, Peter Branton

To contact the reporters on this story: Hannah Benjamin in London at hbenjamin1@bloomberg.net; Radoslav Tomek in Bratislava at rtomek@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James M. Gomez at jagomez@bloomberg.net

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