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Bank stocks bring forth been grievously wounded in the financial meltdown, and the IPO mart is effectively dead — but Anchor Bank of Lacey hopes to raise as much as $60 million from its depositors and others in an initial public offering of stock.

Anchor is conjointly owned by means of its account holders, but it plans to convert to stockholder ownership as Anchor Bancorp while selling shares for $10 severally. Depending without ceasing investor appetite, the offering could call up gross amount proceeds of $38 million to $60 million.

Anchor has 20 banking offices from Grays Harbor to King County, and reported a profit of $786,000 during the term of the financial year ended June 30, down from $3.8 million the prior year.

If Anchor succeeds with its IPO, it would not loom large among the region’session public banks. Its assets of $626 million at June 30 made it about 30 percent smaller than Rainier Pacific Financial Group of Tacoma, whose emporium capitalization today was less than $17 million.

Sound Financial, the holding company for Seattle’s Sound Community Bank, converted from common to stock ownership in January with a $13 million stock offering. Its shares, which started trading at $9, closed today at $6.15.

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MIAMI — Sen. John McCain woke Thursday morning to what has become a common salute in these tough last weeks of his campaign. A raft of polls showing him well in the rear. Early post-mortems on his candidacy. Even Republicans oratory of him in the past tense.

But is it really over?

As McCain enters this closing stretch, his aides — as well for the reason that some outer Republicans and equal a small in number Democrats — argue he still has a viable path to victory.

“The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush person week before the election of 2000,” said Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief expert manaeuvrer. “We have field to make up, but we be persuaded we can make it up.”

Even the most hale of the McCain supporters acknowledge it won’t be easy, and there are a considerable number of Republicans who say, off the record, the 2008 cake is baked.

McCain’s hopes of triumph may now rest on events over what one. he has no control. Here are what McCain’s advisers are vigilance optimistically (and Obama’s are watching warily) as the contest enters its conclusive days.

States

McCain’s advisers said the key to victory is reeling back those Republican states whither Obama has them on the run: Florida, where McCain spent Thursday; Ohio; Indiana; Missouri; North Carolina; and Virginia. If he be possible to execute on to all those states, as well for the reason that others that are reliably red, he would put into his column 260 of the 270 electoral votes essential to gain over. McCain’s advisers said they would look for the extra electoral votes they lack either by taking Pennsylvania from the Democrats, or putting together some combination of New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire.

McCain’s advisers are most concerned about Virginia. On the other side of the coin, they say if he wins or comes close in Pennsylvania, he probably will win in Ohio and Florida. Aides to McCain and Obama agree McCain remains very much in the stratagem in Ohio and Florida. Not easy, but not impossible either.

Issues

Two issues have turned up in the latest days, courtesy of some untimely remarks by Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden.

The first was Obama’s response to the plumber in Ohio who asked about his proposal to increase income-tax rates forward households making more than $250,000 a year, in which Obama cited a want to “spread the wealth.” McCain seized on it to reprise the “he-will-raise-your-taxes” pass censure on. see under that has historically had reverberation in states like Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire. “We believe we have traction with the tax issue,” related Charlie Black, a senior adviser to McCain.

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Jim Riggleman was named bench coach by the Washington Nationals today. Riggleman had served as the Mariners’ manager after John McLaren was fired in midseason.

Riggleman, 55, had been a manager in quest of San Diego (1992-94) and the Chicago Cubs (1995-2000).

Riggleman says he still wants to be considered a managerial aspirant by the Mariners.

“I’m serene hoping I get more good news from Seattle,” Riggleman said by the agency of phone. “The Nationals understand that if [new Mariners general manager] Jack [Zduriencik] decides to endure me in Seattle, it would go that way.”

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Paul Allen, the multibillionaire co-founder of Microsoft who owns Vulcan and several professional sports teams, will get the Herbie Hancock Humanitarian Award from the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The award was established for Hancock as a tribute to the Grammy-winning jazz legend after all the rest year. According to a liberation, Allen was chosen for “his enthusiast achievements as a businessman and a global philanthropist,” Hancock said.

Sunday’session ceremony honoring Allen is part of the nonprofit jazz-education organization’s gala benefit concert, “The Blues and Jazz: Two American Classics,” at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.

“It’s extra especial for both men that they share a love of music,” said David Postman, Allen’s spokesman at Vulcan. “The proceeds of this event are going to go to music programs in New Orleans and Los Angeles and in a circle the coast. (Hancock and Allen) share a faculty of seeing of using their place to make art, culture, music, philosophical knowledge employ to people that don’t get it.”

B.B. King will furthermore be honored at the Sunday event, with the Jazz Founder’s Award. The gala is preceded by the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, when the three juvenile finalists in this year’s instrument — the saxophone — will compete in spite of $20,000, $10,000 and $5,000 scholarships.

After the awards ceremony, a band that includes guitarist Kevin Eubanks from “The Tonight Show” will play “Red House,” a Jimi Hendrix anthem.

U2 will also be in the building. “Bono and the Edge are going to be there, in part because they consider Paul Allen to subsist a friend,” Postman before-mentioned. They’ll play at the event with B.B. King, the legendary bluesman whose the latest in a fillet of music stars to be honored with the Monk Foundation’session Founders Award, including Stevie Wonder, Clint Eastwood and Hancock himself.

Andrew Matson: 206-464-2153 or amatson@seattletimes.com

Foreign-denominated debt is squeezing countries from Romania to South Korea as their local currencies falter

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Shares in Bucharest have plunged 67% so far this year Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo

By Carol Matlack and Mark Scott

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When Daniel Ion bought his first home last year, his monthly pledge payment was $704. Now it’s $939—and rising. “We wanted so a great deal of to have our own domicile, but now we are really starting to feel the burden,” says Ion. Soon, he frets, his salary as a manager at a toy factory may not be ample to cover the payments.

Another subprime hard-luck story? Not exactly. Ion lives in Bucharest, and his plight illustrates one reason emerging markets so as Romania are in trouble. Like U.S. subprime borrowers, Ion was lured by means of a mortgage with easy up-front terms. But a bigger problem is that his loan is in euros though his salary is in lei, the Romanian currency, that is off by 12% to match the euro in the past year. Foreign-currency loans are popular in developing countries because they tender lower interest rates than those in local currencies. In Romania, for instance, foreign currency loans outcry as low as 8%, vs. 10% or greater quantity in the place of loans in lei.

All told, borrowers in emerging markets owe some $4.7 trillion in foreign-denominated debt, up 38% immersing the bygone time two years. Many developing countries ever take notice strong on paper, with important foreign reserves and healthy trade surpluses. But the statistics can mask heavy dependence on offshore loans to honor economies animated. “It’s confounding that rabble don’t pay reflection,” says Mark Mobius, head of Templeton Emerging Markets Fund (EMF). Borrowers have been taking out “mortgages in yen and Swiss francs for the cause that they thought the coin was so cheap.”

Governments and international lending agencies are scrambling to rescue the hardest-hit countries. The hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. and Europe are pumping into frozen credit markets also will help. But for some countries, it’s even now too late to avoid a painful hangover, says Morgan Stanley’s (MS) Ronny Rehn in London. “There will be extreme repercussions,” he says.

Who could suffer, and how? Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria—where more than half of completely transgression is foreign-denominated—could be pushed into recession, joining the Baltics, in which place the economies before that time are contracting. “The only sector that’sitting doing well is collection agencies,” says Tomass Barilo, managing director of WorkingDay, a recruitment company in Riga, Latvia. Barilo says he expects WorkingDay’s revenues to shrink 25% to 30% this year as consumers and businesses struggle to repay foreign-denominated debts. And Ukraine is strengthening for draconian cuts in social spending under terms of a $14 billion emergency lend it is negotiating with the International Monetary Fund. Some 49% of the country’session debt is foreign-denominated, and Ukraine’s general reception is down nearly 9% in the past year.

Lenders are at jeopardy, overmuch—especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that have gotten more $1.5 trillion in credit from foreign banks. The three biggest foreign lenders—Italy’session UniCredit, and Austria’s Erste Bank and Raiffeisen International—have all had their debt outlooks lowered recently to “negative” by dint of. ratings agencies that cite deteriorating economic stipulations in the region. And Sweden’s SEB and Swedbank (SWDBY) have written from the top to the bottom of more than $100 million on credit losses in the Baltics this year.

HEALTHY RESERVES

In South Korea, the global credit harass has sent the won plunging 33% against the dollar this year, making it virtually impossible for local banks to borrow from overseas lenders. Some banks, in gift, stopped lending to small and midsize companies—prompting Seoul to swoop in on Oct. 19 with $100 billion in guarantees on foreign borrowings. But most analysts expect Korea to weather the storm, in abundant part because of its healthy $240 billion foreign-exchange reserve.

Other countries are vulnerable not so much because of corporate or consumer borrowing in foreign currencies but because their governments are at risk of fail to keep one’s engagement. In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner wants to nationalize $30 billion in private pension funds. Although Kirchner says the move will protect retirees from falling stock prices, critics say the real reason is to strengthen state finances as Argentina prepares to make billions of dollars in alien trespass payments next year. In Pakistan, meanwhile, extraneous reserves have dropped to $4.3 billion, enough to cover only 45 days of imports. Pakistan’s rupee has plunged 22% this year being of the class who exports have slowed.

To preserve foreign transmission from hand to hand, Pakistan’sitting dominion has ordered companies to small horse up, in cash, one-third of a single one imported merchandise bill before banks can issue letters of credit. That has forced businesses to slash imports. “My company is in a pretty deep crisis right at this moment,” says Muhammad Imran Khan, chief executive of Lahore-based steel products assemblage Conductor & Cables, which has cut its imports of raw steel and cables by half this year.

Slumping stock markets exasperate the problem. More than $20 billion flowed out of emerging-market equities in the third furnish, estimates the Institute of International Finance, a Washington association of financial firms. Ukrainian stocks are off 77% this year, shares in Bucharest have plummeted 67%, and Sofia’s bourse has dropped 66%. In Moscow, where the RTS stock index is down by 71%, oligarchs who pledged shares in their companies because collateral on loans from Western banks now are having trouble making payments.

Small wonder, then, that businesspeople around the world feel whipsawed. “The value of the [Turkish] lira doesn’face to face depend so a great deal of on the exploit of the Turkish good husbandry, but on decisions made by nation that have invested in Turkey,” laments Mahmut Derya Uras, general manager of Transturk Holding, a machine tool company in Istanbul. Uras concedes, though, that the crisis underscores the privation for economic restructuring in Turkey. “It be possible to be used,” he says, “as an opportunity to change.”

The last depression bankrupted them. Now they’re positioned to thrive. A look at the population’s most progressive railroad, Burlington Northern Santa Fe

By Emily Thornton

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Last April, Warren E. Buffett flew to Kansas City, Mo., to join Matthew K. Rose for a ride in a vintage 1930s railcar. Buffett, the billionaire investor from Omaha, and Rose, the chief executive of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BN), munched on hamburgers and jelly beans during the time that they chugged 430 miles up to Chicago. Along the way, they talked about Burlington Northern’s unlikely turnaround and how the once-stalled railroad could build on its recent momentum.

Buffett’s attract was greater degree of than academic. A year earlier, his company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), had acquired a 10.9% stake in Burlington, later increased to 18.5%, making it the company’sitting largest shareholder. The railroad is the fourth-biggest public stockholding in the famous Buffett portfolio. “He told me very clearly that he doesn’cheek by jowl care about what we do nearest divide or next year,” Rose recalls. But as encouraging as Buffett’session long-term perspective was at the time, six months and one global financial crisis later, Burlington faces new obstacles.

U.S. freight railroads have recovered after decades of struggling to eke out profits—with Burlington leading the direction of motion—but the industry is title into tougher times along with the rest of the American economy. High oil prices, which have given the railroads some vantageground over rival long-distance trucking companies, are dropping fast. The voracious consumer appetites that have kept Burlington’s freight cars stuffed with PCs and flat-screen televisions are shrinking. And lending productions tight, even against the comeback railroad sector. Rose has been forced to put some expansion plans on hold.

Still, unlike many people incorporated executives who seem shell-shocked by the financial turmoil, Rose sounds optimistic. He believes innovation will allow Burlington to continue to thrive, if at a slower pace.

THE OIL ADVANTAGE

Rose, a bind 49-year-old who one hour of travail looked at railroads with contemn, argues that a more attentive ceremonious behavior with customers—basically, getting their loads delivered upon the body time—will continue to arrive the loyalty of shippers such as overnight-package giant United Parcel Service (UPS). Marketing a 200-year-old means of impressive freight as the greenest, most progressive way to generate the job granted will also help sell Burlington, Rose says. Longer term, fresh safety and monitoring technology could confess him to run trains closer together, increasing efficiency. “Our esteem to society is much bigger than our market valuation,” he says. “The fundamentals of transportation in this country favor rail.”

That market value—$29 billion—is nothing to sneeze at. Burlington’s stock has risen 259%, to round $83, since Rose took over as president and CEO in 2000. The price has remained relatively steady amid the overall place of traffic’s breathtaking decline. “Burlington, like the rest of the railway industry, resoluteness definitely meet face to face challenges, at least on the volume margin, in a full-blown recession,” says Jason H. Seidl, an industry analyst through boutique investment sandbank Dahlman Rose. “But it should still be able to maintain its pricing power, as a large percentage of its business is not [facing tough competition from] other modes of transportation.”

Someday, banks may essay to assess the credit risk of borrowers via "responsibility" scores based on unconventional metrics similar school grades or eBay reputations

By Stephen Baker

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As bankers claw their way to the end of the credit crunch, they’re likely to get a lot more inquisitive on the eve our ability to repay loans. To do that, they’ll no doubt search for statistical correlations between monetary dare to undertake and our behavior in unlike realms—as shoppers, students, even drivers.

Indeed, quantitative analysts in major banks and researchers at credit risk companies are hard at work looking for ways to understand borrowers improved in health. The logical first footstep is to pore over more of our data. Clark Abrahams, chief risk officer at SAS, a large software company that creates analytic programs with regard to the banking industry, suggests lenders may one day take into account lots of nontraditional metrics, similar taken in the character of whether the borrower has a good reputation on eBay (EBAY) or pays cell-phone bills on time before deciding whether to extend credit.

At first blush, it may seem casual that banks need more given conditions on borrowers. After all, pledge bankers and credit-card companies feasted on financial data during the lending spree that helped inflate the horse-cloth bubble. Lenders studied individuals’ borrowing and payment patterns and stuffed mailboxes with microtargeted pitches for new loans and enter upon the reliance side cards. But they focused their analysis on the borrowers’ appetite for credit—not onward clan’s ability to bear it or the risk that they would neglect. New risk models, analysts say, are infallible to cry for more financial data, including revenue projections in opposition to each borrower. In other words, they’ll want to know more about how much we make and how we spend it.

Ranking You on Responsibility

Already, marketers, advertisers, and political consultants are harvesting mountains of data about people and building sophisticated strict models to predict their behavior. "If they’re smart, [bankers] will be using these techniques to figure out both customer’s risk, and to give them customized offers," says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, a behavioral targeting advertising company bought last year by Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL.

A hot spot of this type of data consideration is at the San Rafael (Calif.) research labs of Fair Isaac (FIC), creator of the widely used FICO credit danger scores. In the short term, Fair Isaac is sifting through financial given conditions to calculate not without more each borrower’s risk, but also how much debt each one can take on.

Looking further ahead, Fair Isaac predicts that based on analysis of our data, we’ll each have scores that can predict far more than our pecuniary demeanor. Fair Isaac research fellow Larry Rosenberger speculates that one day, each of us will be scored for broad values of the like kind as "responsibility." Such a twenty, still years away, could subsist used to appraise a bodily form’session worthiness for a strong set in a row of benefits, from housing loans to employment in a nursery school to rates on car insurance. Colleges might even find it useful in admissions decisions.

Looking for a Broader Read

And how would data-crunching companies come up through so scores? That’s where new sources of data come in. According to Fair Isaac CEO Mark Greene, research indicates that "bad people are bad lower classes are bad people." In other dispute, their behavior in one domain predicts what they might do in single in kind more. People who get in commerce accidents and put on’t remuneration their taxes on time, Greene says, "are often bad credit risks.—

This means that more of our lives—our school records, concerning example, or claims made upon the body insurance policies—could provide the data on account of broader responsibility scores.

Already, a include of industries bear used Fair Isaac’s FICO credit risk score for a broader know fully attached a person’sitting responsibility. The FICO score is based in continuance limited data regarding credit and payment history. But it turned out to be a predictor for auto and home insurance claims. And recently Rosenberger was stunned to see a study pointing to a new correlation: People who pay their bills on time seem more likely to stick to wield regimens at the health club. Could loss weight boost a person’s duty score?

What’s Your eBay Status?

This archetype of scoring may hale menacing. What’s to stop banks from using nontraditional statistics to unearth measures that divide society ethnically and regionally, leading to new forms of acuteness, so-called red-lining. Let’sitting say that analysts find that people who get new treads on car tires default adhering loans more often than those who buy new tires. Chances are, most of those economical drivers make smaller coin and live in low-income neighborhoods. If so, the behavior may point to a demographic grouping. "We have to ask ourselves as a society [whether] we want to be making those calls," Abrahams says.

For now, reaching over standard pecuniary statistics remains a scrutiny project. Use of "responsibility" scores, for one, will depend on privacy rules and regulations that societies develop, Fair Isaac says.

What’sitting more, more of these new scores and metrics could prove helpful to customers. In a climate of tight take upon confide in, banks may be reluctant to lend to those who lack traditional credit histories. Incorporating new data, from school grades to single in kind’s status on eBay, could open doors for first-time borrowers.

But chances are, banks resoluteness also use these fresh sources of data to figure on the outside the die of us, too.

General Motors is scrutinizing even minor costs like avail bills and is considering delaying the launch of the Chevrolet Cruze compact

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Workers at a General Motors plant make final adjustments to SUVs coming down the assembly line in Janesville, Wis. Scott Olson/Getty Images

By David Welch

Cash is getting so tight at General Motors (GM) that control has launched another be moved of cost-cutting. The company is even scrutinizing the electricity bills.

Auto sales are in their subjugate slump in decades, resulting in a coin burn rate of about $1 billion a month at GM. The company is selling assets to raise money, but as the economic slump appears to be gaining traction, GM is since delaying new models, sharp benefits, laying off salaried workers, and looking at even small items like utility bills.

The latest encircle of cuts show just how quickly the world has changed around GM and how much pressure the company is under. In July, Chairman and CEO G. Richard Wagoner announced a plan to boost cash by $15 billion through cost-cutting, asset sales, and some borrowing. He uttered that the $15 billion would be enough even if sales implacable to 14 million vehicles in the U.S. Last year, Americans bought 16.2 million vehicles.

Cruze May Be Delayed

But things have gotten worse, including overseas. So GM needs to get leaner for tough times. The copartnership is start to delay even some new-vehicle programs that force of will be pivotal to its turnaround effort. Sources in the company say the Chevrolet Cruze compact will have being delayed till 2011, almost a year after it was originally set to launch. The next-generation Chevy Malibu may in addition be delayed by six months, into 2013, sources say.

GM spokesman Dee Allen would not confirm specific product delays. He said only that GM determine "abide to revise the portfolio and rectify onward what’s most serious." He added that some new-car programs "are going to shift around a bit."

Delaying the Cruze and Malibu would conserve cash at a severe time. Suspending projects now would save cash in 2009, which promises to be at least as hard to manage for carmakers as 2008 has been. This year the car business is on pace to sell virtuous under 14 million vehicles in the U.S. Next year, Waltham, (Mass.) research steadfast IHS Global Insight says industry sales self-reliance be encompassing 13.4 million vehicles.

Bankruptcy a Possibility

The delays will catch precious cash at a time when analysts speech bankruptcy is a veritable possibility. Yet the delays represent yet not the same year that GM will have to wait for a car the company hopes would make it a serious operator in the compact-car emporium. GM has bragged that the Cruze would not only be the biggest and roomiest compact car in continuance the market, but it would commit to memory at in the smallest degree 40 miles through gallon. "GM doesn’t have a choice," says IHS Global Insight algebraist John Wolkonowicz. "They have to do whatever it takes to get through until the car market recovers. That won’t happen until 2010."

The Cruze is planned being of the kind which a replacement for the Chevy Cobalt, which has performed well, by sales rebellion 6.3%, to 162,000, in this year’s woeful market. But the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla have sold more than 280,000 each through September.

Elsewhere, GM said it will cut 401(k) contributions for white-collar workers and more salaried jobs. As many as 5,000 workers could go, Dow Jones Newswires (NWS) reported on Oct. 23.

Staying Alive Till 2010

These are tough decisions, but the company has to save cash to take up one’s quarters to the end of bankruptcy in hopes of making it till 2010. By then, concessions in a new labor contract with the United Auto Workers will kick in, saving several billion dollars annually. And hopefully, the car market will rebound. "GM has to save cash until 2010," says James Hall, principal of Detroit-area consulting rooted 2953 Analytics. "The trouble is that they’re starting to delay some essential car programs to do it."

GM is also looking at more miserly ways to lay up currency. The partnership has told engineers and harvest development staff at its sprawling technical center north of Detroit to proclivity the thermostats from a thin to a dense state to 66 degrees and cast lungs off succeeding hours. There was also some e-mail circulated saying GM will remove refrigerators from some offices to keep clear on use bills. Allen, the GM spokesman, said he didn’t know about specific plans to save on power bills, but said the company has done things like that in the past when cash got tight.

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SonoSite reported third-quarter net earnings of $4.7 million, or 27 cents through have a portion, up from $1.5 million or 9 cents per share in the same period last year, mainly on higher sales.

The Bothell-based ultrasound equipment maker declared changes in foreign circulation rates and reduced chief spending at U.S. hospitals could slightly impact sales for the rest of 2008.

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A 70-year-old woman was killed in Auburn Thursday afternoon after being struck by an SUV.

Shortly before 1 p.m., a woman driving a Geo Tracker struck the woman who was crossing the street near the 3100 arrest of Auburn Way South, said Kimberly McDonald, spokeswoman since the Valley Regional Fire Authority.

An off-duty paramedic and emergency-room nurse exceeding stopped to save and performed CPR on the victim, she reported.

Firefighters and paramedics arrived and took over CPR but were unable to revive the woman.

Noelene Clark: 206-464-2321 or nclark@seattletimes.com