Boeing’s military division makes the well-known Chinook transport helicopters, as well as the C-17 transport and the F/A-18 fighter-bomber.

The job cuts will start with 10 percent of the group’s executives. Boeing didn’t say how many more workers will lose jobs. It will consolidate six divisions of the business into four.

Boeing said in July that layoffs were likely because of expected government spending cuts. The Pentagon has been looking for savings in weapons spending, including pressing for better prices on the C-17 and the F-15E fighter.

The military aircraft unit provided about 20 percent of companywide revenue in the first half of this year, and its profit margins fell. Defense is about half of Boeing’s business, with commercial aircraft making up the other half.

The military aircraft unit earned $320 million during the first half of this year, up from $310 million during the first half of 2009.

Boeing is bidding on what would be a major contract to make a new tanker for the Air Force. It’s competing with European defense contractor EADS, the parent of Airbus, to build 179 planes for the $35 billion program. Boeing has said it expects the Pentagon to pick a winner in November. The Boeing plan is based on its civilian 767 airliner.

Starting Oct. 1, the four new divisions will be St. Louis-based global strike; Ridley Park, Pennsylvania-based mobility; Seattle-based surveillance and engagement; and St. Charles, Missouri-based missiles and unmanned airborne systems.

The company said the new structure is aimed at making the military aircraft business focus on capabilities instead of products.

“This reorganization, coupled with our productivity goals, will reduce organizational complexity and allow us to be more efficient,” Boeing Military Aircraft President Chris Chadwick said.

Shares of Chicago-based Boeing fell $1.22 to close at $63.42 on Tuesday. The defense division is based in St. Louis.

Google announced in July that it was buying ITA Software, one of the Web’s key providers of airline travel software, for $700 million.

The concern is that Google could create a travel website, with ITA at its heart, and then use its dominance of search to steer potential travelers to its site rather than Expedia Inc, Orbitz Worldwide Inc or other online travel agencies.

“A number of companies including Microsoft have had informal discussions” with the Justice Department, said a source familiar with the department’s investigation.

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission divide the work of antitrust enforcement, with Justice shouldering the FTC aside to take charge of the Google-ITA probe. “Both the FTC and DOJ wanted the deal. There was pushing and shoving to get it,” said a Washington antitrust source.

Expedia President and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview published September 1 that the company had been in touch with the Justice Department.

“We shared our views with them. But it is not up to us to push the DOJ one way or the other. They will make up their own minds,” Khosrowshahi told TNOOZ.

Khosrowshahi noted that both Google and ITA were powerful in their areas.

“Obviously, Google is the dominant search provider in the U.S., and in Europe that extends to travel, which is our category. And, then you got ITA which is arguably the dominant flight search technology that is selling to third parties. To the extent those two come together, there are some potential concerns about what that combined company can do. And the DOJ asked us various questions. We answered the questions,” he said.

The Justice Department declined comment and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

West has served as marketing chief for three years, and will now head the gum, candy, chocolate and business global category teams, along with Kraft’s multi-billion-dollar marketing division. She will continue reporting to chief executive officer Irene Rosenfeld.

Kraft confirmed West’s promotion, but did not provide further comment.

West’s new role will involve overseeing Kraft’s recently acquired Cadbury businesses, as well as Kraft’s pre-existing chocolate interests and European biscuit businesses. Her moves will be closely watched — analysts expect Kraft to create a highly competitive gum environment, thanks to Cadbury’s sugar-free gum brands like Stride, Trident and Dentyne.

A popular and charismatic executive, West is widely credited with restoring Kraft’s marketing credentials. Prior to taking on the CMO role, West was president of its North American beverage division.

Some of the other positions she has held include president of U.S. grocery, senior vice president of meals, vice president of marketing and consumer promotions, vice president of business development in North America, and category business director for Jell-O.

West began her career as an associate brand manager for Maxwell House in 1986, when it was a General Foods company.

Subsequent offerings of the government’s holdings may be profitable depending on how investors trade the newly listed stock, the sources said.

But the question of whether taxpayers are ultimately made whole on GM’s $50 billion bailout could be left open for years, the people said.

It could take more than three years for the Treasury to sell down its remaining stake in GM after the IPO, one person said. That would push a final accounting into the next presidential term.

A decision to price the initial GM shares below the cost to taxpayers would follow the usual Wall Street practice of giving the first investors in a new stock a discount, but it could also help allay investor concern in the face of the slow recovery of the U.S. economy and flat auto sales.

Preparations for GM’s IP0 remain confidential. Both GM and the U.S. Treasury have declined to comment, citing restrictions by U.S. securities regulators.

The Obama administration has pledged to exit its investment in GM as quickly as possible while holding out the prospect that taxpayers could ultimately be paid back in full.

Treasury spokesman Mark Paustenbach declined to comment. GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson also declined to comment.

GM plans to begin a roadshow for its IPO immediately after the November 2, U.S. midterm congressional elections, paving the way for a stock debut on November 18, sources have said.

GM in August filed paperwork for an IPO that could potentially be worth as much as $20 billion, making it one of the biggest IPOs of all time.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is now reviewing the automaker’s S-1 filing.

Analysts and potential investors have projected a market value for GM of between $50 billion to around $90 billion, based on projections for the automaker’s cash flow, comparisons with rival Ford Motor Co and trading in bonds in the old GM, which are convertible into shares in the new company.

A market value at the high end of that range would be above the roughly $70 billion in market capitalization that GM needs to achieve for the U.S. government to break even on its $43 billion remaining investment in the automaker.

But IPOs typically price at a discount of 10 percent to 15 percent to theoretical fair value to reward investors for taking a risk on a new issue and pave the way for future stock floats. In tough market conditions, that discount can be even larger.

“You have to sell people on the notion that there is an upside to what they are buying,” one of the sources said.

Another of the sources said the discount could be as much as 20 percent on the GM IPO compared with the U.S. Treasury’s break-even point.

Preparations for the GM stock offering remain in the early stages. A number of the sources cautioned that the size and value of the deal and the size of the stake to be sold by the U.S. government have not been determined and will not be set for weeks.

GOVERNMENT STAKE IN ‘GOVERNMENT MOTORS’

The U.S. government pumped $49.5 billion worth of taxpayer money into the automaker and took nearly 61 percent of its common stock.

GM has paid back $6.7 billion in debt to the Treasury and returned another $700 million in interest and dividends. The U.S. government also holds $2.1 billion in perpetual preferred shares in the automaker.

That leaves the government with a roughly $40 billion investment in the GM common stock that will debut in an IPO along with a new class of preferred shares that will convert into common shares under a mandatory provision.

In the days leading up to GM’s August S-1 filing, Republican Senator Charles Grassley asked a special Treasury Department watchdog for an analysis of the GM IPO and how much money would be returned to taxpayers.

In its pitch to potential investors, GM will tout its global reach, recent gains in quality and pricing in its home market, and its sharply lower cost of operations after its 2009 bankruptcy, sources have said.

GM’s $1.3 billion second-quarter profit was its biggest since 2004, when industry-wide U.S. sales were near 17 million vehicles compared with the 11.5 million sales rate of August.

But GM will have to address investor concern that growth in industry car sales in the U.S. in the second half of 2010 and into 2011 will likely be slower than analysts had expected just a few months ago.

At the same time, GM will have to confront a pension shortfall that remains a liability from its pre-bankruptcy operations.

GM eliminated about $40 billion in unsecured debt and other obligations in bankruptcy, but the automaker still needs to address a pension shortfall estimated at about $26 billion.

A successful IPO would be a political victory for the Obama administration and would help GM distance itself from critics who dubbed it “Government Motors” after its bailout.

Green will retire from the bank by the end of the year –  HSBC did not announced a specific date — and take up his new post in 2011.
Prime Minister David Cameron said Green will make an “invaluable contribution” to driving economic growth in Britain as the government seeks to open new trade links, promote British business overseas and maximize inward investment.

The new job is unpaid but includes an appointment to the House of Lords, because ministers must be drawn from Parliament.

HSBC did not announce a successor to Green. Speculation has centered on John Thornton, a non-executive director who heads the bank’s remuneration committee, and Simon Robertson, HSBC’s senior non-executive director.

HSBC, under Green and Chief Executive Michael Geoghegan, weathered the credit crisis without government help. Instead, the bank turned to its shareholders to raise 12.5 billion pounds ($19 billion).

Green became CEO  just as HSBC was concluding its takeover of Household International Inc., the Illinois-based consumer lender. The acquisition made HSBC the biggest subprime lender in the U.S., which led to billions in losses when the credit crisis hit.

HSBC is closing down Household, recently selling parts of it to Spanish bank Santander.

HSBC, like Barclays, has expressed concern about possible regulatory changes. Some members of the government have advocated rules to separate retail and investment banking, which is seen to carry greater risk.

Such a rule “has significant implications clearly for where we may choose to headquarter our institution,” Stuart Gulliver, head of HSBC’s investment banking division, told an industry conference last week.

HSBC’s decision to move Geoghegan to Hong Kong also fueled speculation about a possible shift to the east, although the chairman and company headquarters remained in London.

Green, 61, who is also a Church of England priest and chairman of the British Bankers’ Association, joined HSBC in 1982 and was chief executive from 2003 to 2006.

He began his career, however, at the Ministry of Overseas Development, then jumped to the private sector with McKinsey & Co. in 1977.

He will replace Mervyn Davies, former chairman of Standard Chartered bank, who is returning to the private sector.

Last year, Green apologized for banking errors that contributed to the global credit crisis, but defended the industry as essential.

“The banking industry has not covered itself in glory to say the least, and indeed the industry collectively owes the real world an apology for what has happened, and it also owes the real world a commitment to learn the lessons,” he said in the October interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.

Green said bankers needed to learn lessons about governance and ethics to avoid a repeat of the crisis.

“You can’t do all this simply by setting rules and regulations, you have to expect the leadership in the industry to nurture a real culture of ethics and integrity and that’s actually a continuing priority, perhaps the greatest priority of all as far as I am concerned for the boards of banks,” he said.

The complaint filed Tuesday in a California state court comes a day after Oracle hired Hurd as co-president to help lead the database software maker as it tries to muscle in on more of HP’s turf.
The lawsuit shows the growing rancor between the companies,  long-time partners that are now competing in the market for computer servers.

HP claims that Hurd wouldn’t be able to perform the job at Oracle without spilling HP’s trade secrets and violating a confidentiality agreement. Hurd signed such an agreement as part of a severance package from HP that could top $40 million.

The suit mentions that Hurd was responsible for preparing HP’s strategic plans and was privy to a “highly confidential” analysis of Oracle’s competitiveness against HP.

The Fed — the U.S. central bank — kept the discount rate unchanged at 0.75 percent at its Aug. 10 meeting. The Dallas and Kansas City Fed boards requested an increase to 1 percent, while the other 10 regional Fed banks sought no change.
The minutes of the Fed’s August discount rate meeting said the regional Fed directors noted a slower-than-expected pace of recovery in output and employment.

Some directors noted slightly higher growth in certain sectors, such as manufacturing, while others noted consumer spending had softened.

“The housing sector continued to be depressed, and labor markets remained weak. Overall, directors anticipated only modest near term expansion,” the Fed said. “With inflation subdued and inflation expectations stable, most directors recommended that the current accommodative stance of monetary policy be maintained.”

The Fed at the Aug. 10 policy meeting left the federal funds rate, its main policy tool, unchanged in the zero to 0.25 percent range, but moved to reinvest maturing mortgage-backed securities into Treasury debt to push down borrowing rates further.

Before the credit crisis in 2007, the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate was a full point. There is disagreement at the Fed as to whether that gap should be returned to that level, a debate that has likely taken on new importance given a recent weakening in the economic data.

“As another step toward restoring a pre-crisis discount rate structure, some directors supported increasing the primary credit rate by 25 basis points (to 1 percent) at this time,” the meeting minutes said.

However, the Fed said directors emphasized that an increase in the spread “would not represent a change in monetary policy, but rather a move toward normalization of the primary credit rate.”