Business Markets

LITTLE FALLS Depositors who had money in Home Savings of America bank in Little Falls will be getting checks for their insured funds from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The FDIC on Friday closed Home Savings and said it would mail funds to depositors. The FDIC did not find another lender to take over the banks operations.

The agency said it needs to obtain information from Home Savings customers to determine the number of uninsured deposits at the bank, which also had three branches in California. The FDIC insures up to $250,000 per depositor.

The bank had $434.1 million in assets and $432.2 million in deposits.

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be $38.8 million. Home Savings of America is the 11th FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the second in Minnesota.

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According to research done by Populus, almost 90 per cent of employers said training apprentices resulted in better motivation among their workforce.

This is one of the reasons why the Welsh government is urging employers to offer more apprenticeships despite the tough economic climate.

Figures show the number of apprenticeships in Wales dropped by 15 per cent over the past three years from 42,590 in 2007/08 to 36,380 in 2009/10.

Jeff Cuthbert, Welsh Deputy Minister for Skills, suggested companies would be more productive if they offered apprenticeships.

Mr Cuthbert said, ‘Research shows that apprenticeships are good for business. Employers who use this form of training say it leads to better motivated workforces and an improved bottom line.’

The Welsh Government’s research among employers who had trained apprentices showed 77 per cent believed it made their firms more competitive, with 76 per cent saying it led to higher overall productivity. Nick

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A worker repairs the Sears sign outside the Sears Grand store in Solon, Ohio. Sears Holdings Corp. said Thursday it will separate its smaller hometown stores, outlets and some hardware stores in a deal expected to raise $400 million to $500 million as it seeks to regain profitability and market share. Retail experts, however, said the company needs to make its stores more attractive to new customers.  CLEVELAND, Ohio — Sears Holdings Corp., reeling from a $2.4 billion loss in its critical fourth quarter, on Thursday announced plans to split off some its Sears Hometown and Outlet stores and sell off 11 others to raise much-needed cash.

However, retail experts were generally unimpressed with that strategy to turn around the ailing company.

Sears has been struggling to reverse years of falling sales, but its most recent losses were the biggest since Kmart Holding Corp. and Sears, Roebuck and Co.

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Personal branding. We all would like to believe that we make an impact on our customers and connections lives. But do we really?

Are you developing a personal brand that resonates? Personal branding, like its corporate cousin, is based on a fixed set of brand values that are the foundation for your brand. Having and abiding by these values, gives you rules to live by. They must be lived up to even if youre hurting and are tempted to bend them to suit a situation. Your values help to define your personal brand.

In developing a personal brand, I advise people to do it using a differentiation strategy. Look around you, what is the norm? If youre a real estate agent, what is the general perception of the real estate agent? How can you take that perception and mold it into an advantage for you. If it is negative, can you rise above it and make a negative into an opportunity?

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Farming leaders at the NFU conference in Birmingham have urged the Government to “stick to its guns” over controversial reform of the planning system to help the countryside prosper.

Speaking at the ICC, National Farmers’ Union president Peter Kendall said the 100 billion British food and farming industry could help kick-start economic recovery, but warned the Government must match its rhetoric on the importance of agriculture with action to cut regulation and support farmers.He said getting planning permission for buildings such as poultry sheds, on-farm packhouses for vegetables, polytunnels or livestock housing was probably the “single most frustrating process” farmers had to go through.

The Government is attempting to simplify more than 1,000 pages of planning regulations into a single 50-page document, because it says reform of the system is needed to boost “sustainable growth”, but the changes have prompted fears it could put much of the countryside at risk of inappropriate development.

Speaking at the NFU annual conference, Mr Kendall said: “I urge the Government to stick to its guns.

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But as he gears up for the annual face-to-face meeting with shareholders, a few issues may be causing him angst. Chief among them are in China, where poor labor conditions are in the spotlight and Apple’s iPad trademark is under attack.

The meeting this Thursday comes days after Apple touched a new lifetime high of 526.29 before receding slightly. The stock may get a boost next month, when Apple is expected to unveil a new version of its best-selling iPad.

Apple shares have seen a blistering rally in the past seven weeks, gaining 100 and making Apple the most valuable U.S.

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CoreSite Realty Corporation (NYSE: COR), a U.S. provider of powerful, network-rich data centers, today announced that Eucalyptus Systems, creators of the most widely deployed on-premise cloud computing platform, has launched a new enterprise-class cloud test lab offering at CoreSites Bay area data center campus to address the growing demand for cloud computing technologies. The Eucalyptus Cloud Test Lab provides enterprises with a secure, fully functional hosted infrastructure as a service cloud to validate their cloud application migration strategies prior to implementation.  The official product launch date is set for March 1, 2012.

Eucalyptus Cloud Test Lab is a complete cloud-ready data center solution with fast and easy setup. The solution, which includes hosting, hardware and Eucalyptus open source cloud software, enables customers to configure virtual cloud resources, experience full elastic-compute resource management, and demo their applications on private cloud software. To redu

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