Investors were disappointed at a lack of item in the financial rescue attempt. The S&P 500 was off 4.6%, while the Dow dropped below 8,000

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Timothy Geithner unveiled the government’s revised financial-sector rescue plan on Tuesday, and investors turned some emphatic thumbs prostrate on the eagerly awaited announcement from the Treasury Secretary. U.S. stocks plunged Tuesday afternoon, by the large-cap benchmark S&P 500 index etc. over 4% and the Dow industrials falling below the psychologically significant 8,000 trace.

On Tuesday at 3:10 p.m. ET, the 30-stock Dow Jones pertaining average was lower by the agency of 361.36 points, or 4.37%, at 7,909.51. The broad S&P 500 index was off 40.39 points, or 4.64%, at 829.50. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite pointer shed 61.06 points, or 3.84%, to 1,530.50.

On the New York Stock Exchange, 26 stocks were lower in price for every 5 that advanced. Nasdaq breadth was 22-5 negative. Trading was active.

Treasuries were sharply higher as stocks plummeted, with the submit on the 10-year note falling to 2.86%. The dollar index was higher at 85.65. Gold futures were higher in a volitation to safeness. Crude oil futures were weaker in New York trading.

Financial stocks led the place of traffic lower, with the S&P Diversifed Banks index down nearly 11%, reflecting Wall Street’s growing concerns about the government’s ability to revive the banking industry.

The market appeared to subsist disappointed at a lack of new information about the plan beyond what had been leaked to the press on Tuesday morning. Traders were selling on the news after fresh equity rallies, notes S&P MarketScope. The sell-off comes after investors last week scooped up issues in anticipation of the digest’s unveiling.

Meanwhile, the Senate passed President Obama’s economic stimulus plan. legislation, while

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke defended the central bank’s actions dealing with crises under the jurisdiction a a cantankerous House Financial Services Committee.

Geithner declared Monday that the new administration will wage an aggressive two-front engagement against the worst monetary crisis in seven decades, while the Federal Reserve announced it was expanding a key lending program to up to $1 trillion. The efforts were part of the government’session major overhaul of the widely criticized financial rescue program. The Fed said it would diffuse the bigness of a key lending program to as much as $1 trillion from $200 billion. The program, which has yet to begin operations, is designed to boost resources for consumer credit and small business loans. The Fed said the program would be expanded to cover the troubled commercial real estate market and certain residential mortgages.

“Right now momentous qualities of our financial system are damaged,” Geithner said in his speech. “Instead of catalyzing recovery, the financial system is working in requital for redemption and that’s the dangerous dynamic we need to change.” “It is essential for every American to take that the battle for economic recovery fust be fought on two fronts,” Geithner declared in a speech in Treasury’session ornate Cash Room. “We own to both jump-start job creation and not to be disclosed investment and we must get credit flowing once more to businesses and families,” he said.

In responding to criticism and an implied rebuke from the stock market, the Treasury Secretary said in a subsequent CNBC appearance that the financial rub is “enormously complicated” and a solution will take time to implement and heal. When posed a topic on the miscues on the “saddening bank” solution, Geithner said he will avoid any program that foliage the government and impost payers liable to injury to the impeachment of overpaying for assets. He said parts of the financial system are functioning well, others are under repair and still others badly damaged, requiring a public-private interest.

As to vagueness in the distinct parts on the device, he emphasized the “complexity” of the issue.

The response from Wall Street was swift — and negative.

“The lack of particularize in today’s announcement suggests that this is another hurried attempt to prop up the banks,” says Grant Lewis, superintendent of fetters inquiry at Daiwa Securities in London.

“Geithner spoke in plain terms, catering more to Main Street than to Wall Street, clearly showing the panic that exists in the compass of Washington over the use of taxpayer money,” says Miller Tabak strategist Tony Crescenzi. “The moot point is that Geithner needed to enunciate more to Wall Street, where the problems falsehood, rather than stumbling-block at a distance as he did, and leave Wall Street with too few minor circumstances with no roadmap through how it might find its way out of current difficulties.”

The drop in equities suggests the market isn’face to face over impressed that this “new” Treasury plan will exist any better than its predecessor, says Action Economics. “These guys really perceive how to disappoint, despite having many earlier failures from which to learn.”

To get viable fast, GM is slashing 10,000 more workers from global payrolls, and dramatically trimming its lineup and production

By David Welch

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General Motors (GM) is slashing staff in moves aimed at shrinking the collection and showing that it is serious about careful cash in preparation for another round of body of executive officers loans.

The company aforesaid that it will cut 10,000 workers from its global salaried staff of 73,000 and temporarily cut pay by the agency of 3% to 7% in quest of those who remain. At the same time, GM is escalating its grow to find buyers as being Hummer and Saab, two of the four brands that GM no longer views as core to its future, and is looking to restructure its debt.

The cuts come as part of the plan GM outlined for the treaty government on Dec. 2 to get approval for billions of dollars in loans. GM needs to seem the Treasury Dept. a road map for viability and profitability by Feb. 17 in bid to keep $13.4 billion in loans from the government.

Of the 10,000 jobs heart cut, 3,400 of them will come from GM’s U.S. prop, which has 29,500 workers. The company says the cuts will be targeted so that individual departments don’t lose too many people.

Analysts say that GM needs to make the cuts and has probably not sliced deep enough since it fell into a financial crisis in the rear in 2005. "How is it that four years into a crisis, there are again 10,000 people they can cut," says Maryann Keller, an independent auto analyst who covered GM on Wall Street on the side of decades. "They should be cutting into bone by now."

GM’s North American operations are taking a pretty big hit since sales are so weak in the U.S. Other, healthier regions may have fewer cuts.

At the similar time, GM has been offering buyouts to United Auto Workers members in a bid to reduce its factory capacity. More set closings may moreover exist in the offing.

GM has a few other pieces of its viability plan that are still in the works. When GM laid out its initial plan in December, the association reported that it would explore options for its bloated family of brands, including selling or shuttering Saab, Saturn, and Hummer, while shrinking Pontiac etc. to a brand selling just two cars—likely to exist the G8 sedan and the Solstice two-seater—at Buick/GMC dealerships.

The company has explored selling Hummer, Saab, and Saturn. Right now, in that place are two bidders for Hummer—a Chinese automaker and a private equity player—according to sources unceremonious with the auction efforts. The sources would not sameness the bidders.

But it won’t be an easy sell. Even with gasoline prices on the ground, Hummer’s aging product line is drawing fewer buyers. Hummer sales fell 62% in January. GM was talking to two players, maker Hummer owner AM General and China’s Chengfeng Motors. But both have backed away, say sources involved by the sale efforts.

GM still needs to peel Saab out from GM’s European business and recapitalize it. For the past month, GM has been in intense negotiations with the Swedish government to achieve loans end one of sum of two units programs. One program has up to $24 billion advantageous to Swedish industrial firms from the European Investment Bank, and another program has up to $600 million available from Sweden’s government, said Frank Nilsson, a spokesman for the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise & Energy.

The Swedish government also wants a viability plan as antidote to Saab before it approves loans from either government bonds. While the Swedes wouldn’t stop a sale of Saab to another automaker, the government does not want to take a stake in the company, Nilsson said.

GM also needs to get its bondholders to restructure the company’s debt. GM owes creditors $43 billion already. Add in money owed to a union-led health-care held in trust and possible government debt of $13.4 billion, and the carmaker’session debt would be in redundance of $60 billion.

As part of the bailout terms, GM has to negotiate the unsecured debt to 30% of its value, exchanging equity to the creditors. That won’t be easy. Sources close to some of the creditors say that the bondholders want to lo deeper cuts from the UAW before they make concessions.

Some creditors take also contacted legal consultation to see what would happen to them if GM didn’t get to a greater degree government help and filed for bankruptcy. That’sitting a sign they may be getting nervous, since unsecured creditors would get paid after secured creditors and the government. "One line from Treasury testament be, ‘If you don’t have us come in and help, your subordinate command have being calm less,’" says Don Workman, a bankruptcy attorney with Baker & Hostetler in Washington. "You have to caper to get paid."

Still, to mollify bondholders and the government, GM will need to get UAW President Ron Gettelfinger to give additional. GM could ask the union for greater co-pays for health care to lower the long-term health-care liability and, from here, by what mode much GM needs to give the unison to start the health-care trust. There could also exist additional work at jobs and wage cuts coming.

If the direction doesn’t think it’session enough, then President Obama’s car czar—a position that has not been filled—could ask entirely sides to accord. in greater numbers. But bigger moves may have to wait till the car czar is appointed and gets a staff in place. "Until you get all the parties in the like room, not a distribute will chance," says David E. Cole, presiding officer of the Center by reason of Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. When it does, GM may have a substantive opportunity to use the threat of government oversight and withholding of bailout funds to finally transform its business.

The fresh program, which includes government spending and private-sector involvement, will buy more toxic assets from banks and relieve consumer and small business lending

By Phil Mintz

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Feb. 10 laid out details of the Obama Administration’s revised bank rescue plan. It includes a program to tackle up to $500 billion in toxic assets on put in the bank balance sheets and up to $1 trillion to patronage consumer and small business lending.

Geithner, promised "comprehensive and forceful" prudence involving a wide range of federal agencies. Addressing a major criticism of previous spending from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, he promised to impose "higher standards for transparency and accountability." The polity has about $350 billion left in the TARP to be deployed.

The stock market, which had been awaiting Geithner’s address and today’s approval by the Senate of a stimulus spending plan, sold off after the harangue, with some critics noting a dearth of details from Geithner and Treasury, specifically in how bad loans will be valued. The Dow Jones industrial average was into disfavor about 4% in early-afternoon trading.

In his remarks, Geithner said that conduct needed to get the credit markets moving again. "Instead of catalyzing recovery, the financial order is working against recovery," he said. "And at the same time, the recession is putting greater pressure on banks. This is a dangerous dynamic, and we need to arrest it."

Geithner proposed a multipart program:

• Banks with assets above $100 billion be disposed subsist required to undergo a "comprehensive stress test" to assess their aptitude to keep lending through a distressing downturn. The government will provide "involving death support for the sake of institutions that need it." Geithner said that restraint investments are designed to subsist a "bridge to secluded capital," and said that government infusions should lead to greater bank lending than would have been beneficial without the capital investments. Government investments made under this program will be placed in a separate entity—the Financial Stability Trust—that will be prize up to manage the government investments in U.S. financial institutions.

• The powers that be, through the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, in partnership with the private sector, will attempt to jump-start a market for troubled real estate assets that are weighing on bank balance sheets. He said the public-private investment store, which would use government funds to leverage personal capital, would initially seek to purchase $500 billion in toxic effects, and could increase that spending to $1 trillion.

"By providing the financing the private markets cannot now provide, this will help start a mart according to the real estate-related assets that are at the center of this crisis" Geithner said. "Our belonging to is to exercise private capital and private asset managers to help produce a market mechanism for valuing the assets." He reported the structure of the program was till now being worked extinguished.

• The government will use approximately $1 trillion to living consumer and faint business lending through an swelling of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). There will be an increase in the federally guaranteed portion of Small Business Administration loans, along through an expedited approval process.

• Geithner also promised a "comprehensive plan" to cleverness the foreclosure crisis by bringing down pledge payments and mortgage rates. He said details of that plan would be developed in excess the nearest few weeks.

The Financial Services Roundtable, a trade organic structure, applauded the public-private aspect of the design. "The plan is bold and large enough to address the moot point. By helping banks, small business, and consumers, it speeds targeted relief to all sectors of the system," Steve Bartlett, the group’s president, said in a prepared report.

Join a discussion about whether the U.S. should nationalize severed U.S. banks.

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NEW YORK — There’sitting a portion riding on Amazon.com’s recently made known Kindle electronic main division reader.

The $359 gadget, unveiled Monday by Chief Executive Jeff Bezos at the Morgan Library in New York, isn’t going to make the mere book world go digital. It’s likely to be purchased mostly by prosperous technology and book enthusiasts, the crowd who embraced the first version introduced in 2007.

But the intriguing device, and its underlying business innovations, are burnishing the Seattle company’s reputation as a pioneer in online commerce.

It’s also a discriminative characteristic of whether the 14-year-old company can sustain an entirely new and complicated hardware business.

Perhaps most important for Amazon’s broader walk of life, the Kindle is an opportunity for the company to further cement relationships with book publishers and help circumscribe how books are sold in coming generations.

Remember, the Kindle, which decision ship Feb. 24, isn’t just hardware. It’s also a software and services platform that people — and publishers — will practice to build and horsemanship libraries stored and updated by Amazon’s network.

Amazon also is extending the Kindle platform — and its “Whispersync” wireless synchronization software — to fickle phones.

That would allow devices to communicate through single another so that you could read a book, say, on one device and pick up where you left off on another.

In an parley, Bezos wouldn’t say much about plans to put the same software put on computers while well, but it’s clearly part of the plan to have Kindle software on many more devices than the Kindle itself.

This comes as publishers grapple with the corresponding; of like kind concerns about digital piracy and slowing sales that have affected the symphony and movie industries. To them, Amazon offers a way to sell digitally protected copies without the high cost of typography presses.

Sony, Google, Apple and other companies are introducing devices and software for reading printed material on phones and other mobile devices, some of which may subsist more attractive and less expensive than the Kindle.

But when you think of Kindle not just as a device but a bundle of services — including an electronic bookstore with 230,000 titles, a high-speed wireless association and a litany of reading-oriented features, all embodied in a $359 gadget — Amazon seems to have a lead over the competition.

Here’session an edited version of a conversation about Kindle 2.0 with Bezos:

Q: What’s it going to take for this to really take off — lower price?

A: It is taking off. [laughs]. No, I abject it very sincerely. We have two times been sold out during the holiday mature, which is a darn good sketch, and it was not our mark out. In both cases, we had made way besides devices than we thought we would indigence and we still sold out.

Q: Maybe I should rephrase that. When will it become a mainstream device?

A: Well, if you’re a reader, it’s a purpose-built lection design. So is it for everybody? Maybe not. Will it ever exist for everybody? Maybe not.

But if you like to read — newspapers, books, magazines — this is a great device to take. If you’re that somebody, I would say it is mainstream already against the right audience.

Q: I didn’face to face want to bring up the iPod comparison, but I noticed the brushed metal remote and curved edges. Do you guys have a little iPod envy?

A: … [H]ave you held it in addition? It’session beautiful. I can take no credit for it since I had nothing to do with it [laughs], but I can be a proud father [laughs afresh]. But the engineering team did a remarkable work at jobs on this ruse.

As you can mark, it’s very, excessively thin — for a 3G wireless device. This is a difficult technical achievement. Our customers are the beneficiaries.

Q: Will you admit the software you have upon the body a Kindle and set it onto something like a netbook?

A: That’sitting what Whispersync [technology in the Kindle] is about. … We want to make Kindle a bookseller’s shop — the largest e-bookstore in the world, with 230,000 titles and growing. We want to make those titles also available on a parcel of deviating devices and then be simultaneous them with Kindle.

If you’re in line at the grocery store and you want to read a hardly any pages on your phone, you can go right to what you left off … and then when you become on the frontier home, perhaps you pick up your Kindle and keep reading there.

Q: Is there pressure adhering Amazon from publishers to price the Kindle at, say, $199 to increase the platform’s reach?

A: We can’t offer this on the side of the sake of $199. … If we could get this device cheaper we would. But we can’confidentially. There’session a lot of technology pushed into this little minikin package. It is what it is.

When you buy a 3G phone, by the way, you’re signing up for a two-year contract with a $60-a-month bill. They’re subsidizing the cost of the hardware with the $60 a month or whatever it is you’re paying.

[The Kindle] is sold with not at all annual contract and not at all monthly toy. You buy this fanciful conception and whatever you buy — a newspaper subscription — you pay for that. You buy a book, you pay for that.

We’re not asking people to symbol up for a two-year contract.

Q: Did you have to build something like this to maintain Amazon’session position as a bookseller?

A: To get this whole ecosystem to toil, we had to make an integrated, seamless rendering experience. Keep in mind we had tried the unintegrated, unseamless approach because we’ve been in electronic books for years and it didn’t work, nobody cared. So it’s the seamlessness, of putting the whole thing together and workmanship it really easy and clean for people, that’s making it work.

Q: Did you think you had to have the hardware or a person of consequence other would — and take from your part business?

A: … [W]e strong attachment being pioneers. We are always focused attached looking into disrepute new alleys. Most of the alleys we appear down turn thoroughly to be blind alleys, but every formerly in a while we pass down one that turns into a big broad way of approach. You can pursue the competitor strategy of end following … you dress in’t be favored with to spend all this money on those blind alleys. When you see somebody do something successful, you jump on it and copy it as quickly as possible. There’s matter of no consequence wrong — that’sitting a valid business strategy. It happens not to be ours.

We’ve been very customer-focused for our recital and we like inventing new things. The kind of people we’ve attracted over the years like to invent new things, so for us this totally about the future and all about optimism.

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com

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WASHINGTON — All-Star shortstop Miguel Tejada has been charged through lying to Congress about steroids. Tejada is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday where he is expected to plead guilty.

The charges against Tejada, who publicly plays for the Houston Astros, were outlined in documents filed in Washington treaty courtyard on Tuesday.

The documents indicate that a plea agreement has been reached with Tejada.

Messages left for his attorney, Mark Tuohey, were not immediately returned.

The documents were filed a day after superstar Alex Rodriguez admitted to past use of doing enhancing drugs.

Going well beyond its current Windows Mobile software, Microsoft will try to extend its desktop dominance by a "Windows phone." Is it too late?

By Peter Burrows

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Microsoft (MSFT) executives have long spun visions of a universe where computer users can seamlessly certain quantity accusation between a PC, the Web, and a cell phone. But the company has made little progress in making that faculty of seeing a reality—at least until now.

On Feb. 16, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will take the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to announce a greater overhaul of the company’sitting fickle strategy. Some of the new initiatives are purely catch-up. Ballmer disposition unveil one online app store that lets users of Microsoft-powered phones download tools, games, and other apps. (Apple opened its own app store in July, and Research In Motion (RIMM), Nokia (NOK), and others consider announced plans with regard to their own app stores.) Ballmer will in like manner proclaim a new advantage called My Phone that lets mobile-phone users automatically sync photos, contacts, videos, and other files to a personalized Web site and then gain access to that content from a PC or any Web-connected design.

But throughout the next year and a half, the visitors likewise hopes to create what it hopes will become a major recent category of consumer device—the "Windows phone." Until now, the company has been content to be a supplier of an operating system, called Windows Mobile, to phone makers such as Samsung and Sony-Ericsson, which in turn branded and sold the devices because they saw fit. The reliance is to convince PC owners that a Windows phone is the most sensible careful to go through their Windows computers. "We’re going to double-down on the Windows brand," says Todd Peters, superintendent of marketing for Microsoft’s mobile communications business. He says to expect a major advertising push. "When people go shopping in the future, we want them to ask specifically for a Windows phone."

That would certainly be a change. Although it was a pioneer of the so-called "smartphone," Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software has little of the brand cachet of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry or unruffled Palm Inc.’s products. "We haven’t done a good work at jobs of positioning [our mobile products], period," says Robby Bach, president of the Entertainment & Devices Div., which includes the mobile effort. "Most family who see a calm Windows Mobile phone don’t equitable know it’s a Windows Mobile phone. We acquire to bestow. very clearly the value in that."

If successful, the Windows phone idea could extend the lock that’s helped Microsoft become one of the great cash-generating machines in business history. Consider the reach of Microsoft’s franchise. Windows runs on any estimated 1.1 billion PCs in use around the world. Roughly 500 million people use Microsoft’s e-mail or twinkling of an eye messaging services. And while Microsoft’s share of the smartphone affair has fallen from to 36% from 45% in the past two years, according to Nielsen Mobile, more than 20 million phones have been sold in the past year that are based on its Windows Mobile software. But even Microsoft executives concede that the partnership has to succeed fast. "What happens in the next three to four years will determine what happens for the nearest decade or more," says Microsoft Senior Vice-President Andy Lees, who was hired by Bach a year ago to run the variable communications business.

Analysts inquire profits from the new version of Amazon’s e-book reader, but they stop direct of calling it a major disruptor like Apple’s music player

By Douglas MacMillan

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The unveiling of a hotly anticipated new issue. An exuberant chief charged with execution thumbing from one side slides. A surprise appearance by an A-list guest.

Amazon’s (AMZN) Feb. 9 introduction of the Kindle 2 had every one of the makings of a product launch out by means of consumer electronics wunderkind Apple (AAPL). "That was in harmony to the performances at iPod launches," says Ross Rubin, consumer technology analyst through NPD Group.

That’s where the comparisons with Apple should end. As much as some might try to draw parallels between Amazon’s approach to books and Apple’session take on music, analysts are clear that the latest generation of Amazon’s sleek, white little electronic book reader is no iPod for the book nature.

With this update of the Kindle, Amazon doesn’t appear to subsist poised to shake up the publishing industry the way Apple upended digital minstrelsy. "I think they ultimately believe that publishing will go digital and they want to subsist a mime in the emporium when it does," says Gartner (IT) analyst Van Baker. At the same time, the society is showing itself reluctant to push too aggressively into the supreme distinction—most noticeably, by pricing the Kindle 2 at $359, the same price as its progenitor. "They have power to sustain this price point for the foreseeable coming events. It’s just not going to have explosive growth," Baker predicts.

Though Amazon has not yet released facts adhering sales of the Kindle, analysts before that time believe the resort is turning virtuous profits. On Feb. 2, Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney projected the company sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008, based on the number of device activations disclosed by Sprint (S), its wireless service provider. That would bring return from Kindle to around $153 million. That’s less than 1% of Amazon’sitting $19.2 billion lump sales, but enough to require the harvest race profitable, analysts say.

Mahaney had projected that Amazon could see as much as $1.2 billion in Kindle-related revenues by 2010. The shape is based on Mahaney’sitting expectation that the device would reach down in price to $298 with the launch of the Kindle 2. The price divide didn’t happen—perhaps, he says, because a number of customers were already on waiting lists to buy the former version for its original reward—still it may soon. "I would expect them to lower the price at some point over the next 6 to 12 months," Mahaney says.

But Amazon is in something of a catch-22. Lowering Kindle’s price too much might threaten Amazon’s print main division business, says Jeffrey Lindsay, analyst with New York-based Sanford C. Bernstein. "They don’t want to check the book publishers and they don’t want to cannibalize their own book sales," Lindsay says. He estimates that the company makes around 5% to 10% higher margins on print books than it does on digital downloads to the Kindle, which run encompassing $9.99.

During the press event for the Kindle 2, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos aforesaid that e-books now make up 10% of the retailer’s one sales. If Lindsay’s math is right, Amazon’s margins are squeezed as that percentage grows.

Exclusive modern research shows how much graduates of top office schools earn over the hunt of their careers

By Lindsey Gerdes

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What’s your MBA really worth? Well, a lot depends on what you mean. In their marketing materials, elite business schools focus on starting salaries, which can be perfectly impressive. But what about 5, 10, even 20 years out? For a long time, that’s been terra incognita—a no-man’s-land of guesswork and supposition. Not anymore.

New research commissioned by BusinessWeek suggests that when it comes to the post-MBA earnings accrued by means of graduates of top business schools over the span of their careers, not all schools are created equal. Some schools that start completely strong with six-figure salaries sometimes stammer and stall, leaving grads with less-than-impressive salaries after 20 years in the workforce. And some schools where grads earn modest salaries out of the gate end up with the strongest of finishes, in some cases doubling their cash compensation after 20 years and overtaking better-ranked rivals. (See our interactive table MBA Pay Through the Years at 45 Top Programs.)

The research comes from PayScale, which collects salary given conditions from individuals through online pay comparison tools. BusinessWeek asked PayScale to plodding student into its database of 80,000 graduates of 45 top MBA programs and calculate their median cash compensation—salaries and bonuses—during the first five years of their careers and after they accept an average of 5, 10, 15, and 20 years subordinate to their belts. BusinessWeek then used that facts to reckon any reckon of median cash earnings over the perfect 20-year span.

The data admit from more inherent limitations—it doesn’t include stock or options, and the pay facts for some smaller schools at the 20-year mark may be based on fewer than 100 pay reports. It also does not track the same graduates over confinement; it reflects the experience of individuals who graduated at mutable points everywhere the last 20 years.

But like a rough benchmark to the earning power of MBA graduates who go put on to become top executives, it’s enlightening. While for the in the greatest degree part the new research confirms that you get what you indemnify for—graduates at expensive top-ranked programs such as Harvard Business School and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School fare the best long after graduation—it also produced a number of surprises.

After 20 years, graduates of three schools have cash compensation that is double, or more than double, the sort of today’session students constitute at graduation, and none of them are high-profile schools: Georgia Tech, University of Connecticut, and George Washington University. The graduates of 10 schools—including No. 15 Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business—had median cash compensation at the 20-year mark that is not any better than the kind of Harvard Business School grads make shortly after graduation. And at the No. 5 University of Michigan Ross School of Business, to what median turn into money compensation since new graduates was a estimable $109,000, the punish for graduates through 20 years’ experience was just 28% more, or $140,000—the worst showing among the top 10 schools.

The stimulus bill that passed a Senate criterion vote is missing $80 billion in spending that is included in the House version. What gives?

By Moira Herbst

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After several days of tense negotiations, the Senate’s $838 billion household stimulus bill passed a procedural vote, clearing the way for a ultimate vote on the bill Feb. 10. If it passes, being of the kind which expected, the Senate bill will be reconciled with the House rendering passed Jan. 28, what one. totaled $820 billion in expenditure and duty cuts.

At the core of cropped land bill, the House and Senate versions are similar in weak glue and intent. But the difference— about $80 billion in expenditure cuts in the Senate bill—is attracting attentive criticism from Democrats and from some economists who worry that provisions with the most bang for the taxpayer lye are getting short shrift.

The crux of that debate is whether spending or a combination of tax cuts and incentives is more effective at stimulating the economy. Meanwhile, there are broader questions about in what way effective the stimulus package can be in the face of the enormity of the economic problem.

"I am not getting in addition excited end for end this [stimulus bill]," says Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta. "I don’t know if this amount of money spread superior two or three years can make ready enough of a difference."

While a number of economists have expressed similar concerns, some say the overall hatch is a indispensable starting point. A reflect upon released Feb. 6 by Standard & Poor’s, which like BusinessWeek is a division of The McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP), found that overall the stimulus sketch out will aid economic recovery. Specifically, it will likely hit President Obama’s target of creating 3 million jobs by 2010. "A major incitement initiative is the wisest course at this conjuncture," says David Wyss, S&P’s chief economist. Still, Wyss estimates that it determination take a year, if not longer, for the potential benefits of any incentive bill to befit clear.

Critics of the Senate bill are concerned that spending cuts will be displaced by dint of. consumer-oriented demand breaks in spite of house and auto purchases. These measures, which together require to be paid about $45 billion, could also fail to cause to approach buyers who weren’t before that time planning on a legislative body or car purchase.

In another departure from the House bill, the Senate bill devotes $70 billion to "patch" the alternative minimum tax, saving more than 20 million middle and upper-income taxpayers a 2009 lay upon increase averaging in an opposite direction $2,000. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman equates these tax measures with a "comforting the comfortable space of time afflicting the afflicted" strategetics. The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimates that the Senate bill would create between 430,000 and 538,000 fewer jobs than the House bill. Michael Ettlinger, vice-president for economic policy at the center, calls the Senate bill "a stumble backward" from the $820 billion House legislation.

The House and Senate versions of the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act include aid on the side of the unemployed and lower-income individuals. Each includes about $80 billion in unemployment insurance extensions, increases, and modernization; bread for drilling and employment services; a series of low-income housing measures; food stamps; a Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and block grants for community services and development.

However the Senate bill cuts concerning $40 billion in education aid to states, reducing it from $79 billion to $39 billion. The House provides $19.5 billion to build and repair school and university facilities, which was stripped from the Senate bill.

Another difference between the bills is that the House interpretation would establish a temporary election for states to provide Medicaid coverage to more lower-income workers who have become doing nothing for the period of the recession but who normally wouldn’t qualify. (Both House and Senate packages would also remodel the cost of COBRA health coverage as being unemployed workers, but most low-income workers aren’t eligible for COBRA.)

The question of whether tax cuts or spending can better incense the economy will continue until a bill reaches President Obama’s desk. But in which case economists and lawmakers continue that debate, another problem still hinders economic recovery: the credit crisis. Says Dhawan: "If we be sufficient not clear up the banking combination of parts to form a whole, nothing else matters."

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COLUMBIA, S.C. — Crisp bills pasture on the Ping-Pong condensed statement. But the players crowded right and left weren’t using paddles.

The game that Monday night in November was high-stakes “beer pong,” a intemperate habits animals of the chase in which players lob Ping-Pong balls into plastic cups.

Michael Phelps was betting big — and losing.

“I apothegm Phelps pull to the end a roll, a bank-wrapped $2,000,” said Michael Whitworth, who had been invited to a house near the Five Points area of the incorporated town after his band played a show at 5 Points Pub (now Sudworks Taphouse).

“He said, ‘I’ll match the $2, 000,’ ” Whitworth continued, referring to Phelps. “Good ol’ Phelpsie lost it, too.”

Some in the house that night knew Phelps, but most of the the community were drop-ins checking out what was called “The Michael Phelps Party.” Besides Whitworth, two people told The State newspaper in Columbia that they aphorism Phelps betting money while playing beer pong.

The two asked for anonymity out of fear they would be caught up in Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott’s investigation into Phelps’ marijuana use that night.

Well after midnight, a female South Carolina student said she saw a young woman she did not know snap a cellphone photo of Phelps smoking from a bong, a marijuana water pipe.

Was that the photo the British tabloid News of the World published Feb. 1, denting the Olympic man of superhuman achievements’sitting men image and putting tens of millions of dollars in endorsement deals in jeopardy?

That puissance never be known.

The photo that got Phelps, 23, in trouble could have been taken by a single one of the dozens of partyers at the house that night — or on other nights when Phelps was in Columbia the first week of November.

A student at Ole Miss, for model, wrote steady an Internet message board that a intimate of his took the photo and “is real upset encircling the whole thing on this account that he swears he didn’t sell it.” That friend — South Carolina bookish man Cason Milner — first denied, then told a reporter from The State he took a photo of Phelps at that house on his iPhone.