A minor-league pitcher in his younger days, Richard Armbruster kept playing baseball recreationally into his 70s, until his right hip started bothering him. Last February he went to a St. Louis hospital for what was to be a routine hip replacement.

By late March, Mr. Armbruster, then 78, was dead. After a series of postsurgical complications, the final blow was a bloodstream infection that sent him into shock and resisted treatment with antibiotics.

&S220;Never in my wildest dreams did I think my dad would walk in for a hip replacement and be dead two months later,&S221; said Amy Fix, one of his daughters.

Not until the day Mr. Armbruster died did a laboratory culture identify the organism that had infected him: Acinetobacter baumannii.

The germ is one of a category of bacteria that by some estimates are already killing tens of thousands of hospital patients each year. While the organisms do not receive as much attention as the one known as MRSA &<51; for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus &<51; some infectious-disease specialists say they could emerge as a bigger threat.

That is because there are several drugs, including some approved in the last few years, that can treat MRSA. But for a combination of business reasons and scientific challenges, the pharmaceuticals industry is pursuing very few drugs for Acinetobacter and other organisms of its type, known as Gram-negative bacteria. Meanwhile, the germs are evolving and becoming ever more immune to existing antibiotics.

&S220;In many respects it&S217;s far worse than MRSA,&S221; said Dr. Louis B. Rice, an infectious-disease specialist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland V.A. Medical Center and at Case Western Reserve University. &S220;There are strains out there, and they are becoming more and more common, that are resistant to virtually every antibiotic we have.&S221;

The bacteria, classified as Gram-negative because of their reaction to the so-called Gram stain test, can cause severe pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream and other parts of the body. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive organisms like MRSA.

Acinetobacter, which killed Mr. Armbruster, came to wide attention a few years ago in infections of soldiers wounded in Iraq.

Meanwhile, New York City hospitals, perhaps because of the large numbers of patients they treat, have become the global breeding ground for another drug-resistant Gram-negative germ, Klebsiella pneumoniae.

According to researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, more than 20 percent of the Klebsiella infections in Brooklyn hospitals are now resistant to virtually all modern antibiotics. And those supergerms are now spreading worldwide.

Health authorities do not have good figures on how many infections and deaths in the United States are caused by Gram-negative bacteria. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that roughly 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, from all types of bacteria combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year.

But in Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, Gram-negative infections are estimated to account for two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths each year caused by some of the most troublesome hospital-acquired infections, according to a report released in September by health authorities there.

To be sure, MRSA remains the single most common source of hospital infections. And it is especially feared because it can also infect people outside the hospital. There have been serious, even deadly, infections of otherwise healthy athletes and school children.

By comparison, the drug-resistant Gram-negative germs for the most part threaten only hospitalized patients whose immune systems are weak. The germs can survive for a long time on surfaces in the hospital and enter the body through wounds, catheters and ventilators.

What is most worrisome about the Gram-negatives is not their frequency but their drug resistance business card.

&S220;For Gram-positives we need better drugs; for Gram-negatives we need any drugs,&S221; said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious-disease specialist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., and the author of &S220;Rising Plague,&S221; a book about drug-resistant pathogens. Dr. Spellberg is a consultant to some antibiotics companies and has co-founded two companies working on other anti-infective approaches. Dr. Rice of Cleveland has also been a consultant to some pharmaceutical companies.

Doctors treating resistant strains of Gram-negative bacteria are often forced to rely on two similar antibiotics developed in the 1940s &<51; colistin and polymyxin B. These drugs were largely abandoned decades ago because they can cause kidney and nerve damage, but because they have not been used much, bacteria have not had much chance to evolve resistance to them yet.

&S220;You don&S217;t really have much choice,&S221; said Dr. Azza Elemam, an infectious-disease specialist in Louisville, Ky. &S220;If a person has a life-threatening infection, you have to take a risk of causing damage to the kidney.&S221;

Such a tradeoff confronted Kimberly Dozier, a CBS News correspondent who developed an Acinetobacter infection after being injured by a car bomb in 2006 while on assignment in Iraq. After two weeks on colistin, Ms. Dozier&S217;s kidneys began to fail, she recounted in her book, &S220;Breathing the Fire.&S221;

Rejecting one doctor&S217;s advice to go on dialysis and seek a kidney transplant, Ms. Dozier stopped taking the antibiotic to save her kidneys. She eventually recovered from the infection.

Even that dire tradeoff might not be available to some patients. Last year doctors at St. Vincent&S217;s Hospital in Manhattan published a paper describing two cases of &S220;pan-resistant&S221; Klebsiella, untreatable by even the kidney-damaging older antibiotics. One of the patients died and the other eventually recovered on her own, after the antibiotics were stopped.

&S220;It is a rarity for a physician in the developed world to have a patient die of an overwhelming infection for which there are no therapeutic options,&S221; the authors wrote in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

In some cases, antibiotic resistance is spreading to Gram-negative bacteria that can infect people outside the hospital.

Sabiha Khan, 66, went to the emergency room of a Chicago hospital on New Year&S217;s Day suffering from a urinary tract and kidney infection caused by E. coli resistant to the usual oral antibiotics. Instead of being sent home to take pills, Ms. Khan had to stay in the hospital 11 days to receive powerful intravenous antibiotics.

This month, the infection returned, sending her back to the hospital for an additional two weeks.

Some patient advocacy groups say hospitals need to take better steps to prevent such infections, like making sure that health care workers frequently wash their hands and that surfaces and instruments are disinfected. And antibiotics should not be overused, they say, because that contributes to the evolution of resistance.

To encourage prevention, an Atlanta couple, Armando and Victoria Nahum, started the Safe Care Campaign after their 27-year-old son, Joshua, died from a hospital-acquired infection in October 2006.

Joshua, a skydiving instructor in Colorado, had fractured his skull and thigh bone on a hard landing. During his treatment, he twice acquired MRSA and then was infected by Enterobacter aerogenes, a Gram-negative bacterium.

&S220;The MRSA they got rid of with antibiotics,&S221; Mr. Nahum said. &S220;But this one they just couldn&S217;t do anything about.&S221;

Rising Threat of Infections Unfazed by Antibiotics

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - While recent reports suggest that the Federal Reserve may be winning the political turf-battle to become the primary regulator of the country's largest financial firms, the pressure on the central bank by the industry would substantially increase if it happens, according to officials at a Fed conference Friday.

Though the financial industry has grown comfortable with the Fed's monetary policy reputation of "taking the punch bowl" away from a strong economy by raising interest rates to slow things down, no such comfort currently exists with the idea that the central bank will be able to turn bank lending on and off, they claim.

The Fed already faces criticism on interest rates, but the level of protest would be much greater on lending, especially because banks could lobby members of Congress to protest each time the Fed tried to change lending rules, they claim.

Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo, a key negotiator with Congress on the financial reform package, reported to the Fed policy conference sponsored by the University of Chicago on Friday that the Obama administration, members of Congress and regulators have reached a "fair degree of consensus" on elements of financial reform legislation.

Included in the consensus are better capital requirements, a horizontal approach to supervising the largest financial institutions and a sophisticated increased bank and bank holding company supervision to help ensure financial stability, Tarullo said.

Eric Rosengren, the president of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, said becoming a "macro-prudential" regulator, or a regulator with authority over bank health and lending as well as the economy and interest rates, would require a completely new infrastructure at the central bank.

At the moment, the Fed considers its regulatory role to force banks to adequately report their financial positions. A macro-prudential regulator would have to be more forward looking.

The Fed would face "much greater pressure" from banks if the central banks sought to limit potentially risky lending. It would be more severe pressure than the Fed faces when it hikes interest rates to restrain growth, Rosengren said during the conference on Fed policy issues sponsored by the University of Chicago bad credit pay day loans.

Charles Evans, the president of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, agreed that financial institutions will not part with the lending punchbowl willingly.

There are a lot of people "with a lot at stake" who would criticize the Fed for an "early call" to curb lending, he said.

Evans pointed to the current circumstance where many small and mid-sized banks are struggling under the weight of bad commercial loans on their books.

Evans said his staff has reported that the Fed would have had to act in 2004 or 2005 if it had wanted to head off the problems in the commercial real estate sector.

In those years, there were few signs anything was amiss in the commercial real estate market, he noted.

Back then, banks were originating more and more commercial mortgage-backed securities but assured regulators that they were hedged, Evans said.

It is only in hindsight that these commercial real estate mortgage securities actually reduced capital.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been pushing hard for the Fed to play a central role as a bank supervisor.

"It is hard for me to understand why in the face of a crisis that was so complex and covered so many markets and institutions, you would want to take out of the regulatory system the one institution that has the full breadth and range of those skills to address those issues," Bernanke said.

Some of the pressure the Fed might face was on display during Bernanke's two days of testimony this week. Member of both parties in the House and Senate complained bitterly to Bernanke that healthy businesses in their district could not access credit.

Some members suggested easing accounting rules to spur lending even though lax accounting is widely considered to be a culprit of the recent financial crisis.

The Fed: Some Fed officials worried about new powers

PHILADELPHIA – Dish Network Corp., the nation's second largest satellite TV operator, reports fourth-quarter earnings before the market opens on Monday.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR: The Englewood, Colo. company is expected to add subscibers in the fourth quarter — the third quarter in a row — partly as a result of an aggressive advertising campaign that compares its cheaper plans to those of fellow satellite TV operator DirecTV Inc.

DirecTV is suing Dish for false advertising over one such commercial, claiming Dish is not using similar TV packages in their comparisons.

WHY IT MATTERS: Dish's market share gain is important in a competitive and mature market where nearly nine out of 10 TV-viewing households already subscribe to either cable, satellite TV or video services from a phone company kerosene heater.

WHAT'S EXPECTED: Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Dish to earn 32 cents per share in the fourth quarter and post revenue of $2.94 billion.

LAST YEAR'S QUARTER: Dish earned $217 million, or 48 cents per share, on revenue of $2.92 billion. That was up from $175 million, or 39 cents per share, on revenue of $2.89 billion in the prior year.

Earnings Preview: Dish Network Corp.

INDIANAPOLIS – Army Staff Sgt. Tom Davis never saw the bomb that destroyed his Humvee as he rounded a corner in Ramadi just a week into his second tour in Iraq in 2006. Davis lost a leg and broke his back and both arms and can no longer walk or work. He'll never know whether he would have been less severely injured if he'd been in a different vehicle.

But his experience, and those of thousands of other Americans wounded in bomb-shredded Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, foretold what now appears to be the official demise of the hulking all-terrain vehicles that came to symbolize the military as much as the rugged Jeeps they replaced.

The Army provided no new money for the Humvee in the service's recent budget proposal. Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, an Army spokesman, says the 2,620 vehicles ordered from Mishawaka, Ind.-based AM General will be the last as the Army moves on to newer designs.

Unless the decision is reversed, the Humvee will end a remarkable 30-year run that extended beyond the battlefield into popular culture.

The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, dubbed the Humvee by soldiers, got its start when the Army began looking to replace the latest version of the Jeep in the late 1970s.

AM General won a prototype contract in 1981 and the company, a spinoff of Jeep, created the boxy vehicle that was more than seven feet wide and made up in utility for what it lacked in aesthetics. Since 1985, AM General has produced 240,000 Humvees.

The vehicle attracted attention during the 1991 Gulf War, but not just in the war zone. Then-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger became so enamored that he persuaded AM General to make a civilian version, and it became a must-have status symbol for car lovers until rising gas prices and the recession sent sales plummeting.

"Everybody points at a Hummer," said Eric Sitterle of Cincinnati, who serves on the board of Hummer Club Inc., the vehicle's fan club. The group organizes off-road events all over the country. "It's the most exciting thing you've ever been on — at three miles per hour."

Few would use the word "exciting" to describe the military Hummer.

It was developed as a light utility vehicle and not intended as an armored car, said James Atwater, assistant curator at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum in Fort Eustis, Va payday advance.

The lumbering, low-riding vehicles became an easy target for insurgents, who attacked U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, hidden along roadsides.

A mounting death toll from IEDs — more than 1,700 in Iraq alone as of January 2010 — sparked calls for better protection for soldiers. The Army ordered armored versions of the Humvee, but "there were shortcomings when you added armor to a vehicle like this that's not designed from the ground up for that," said Atwater.

Davis, of Angola, Ind., said the Humvees were fine during his first deployment in 2003. "We rode in the back of the open Humvee at night because the IEDs weren't a real threat," he said.

But that began to change. The powerful IED that detonated under the passenger seat of his Humvee in 2006 hurled the vehicle two stories into the air, killing the vehicle's gunner and badly injuring Davis.

"Maybe if I'd been in a Bradley, I wouldn't have been hurt as much," said Davis, 32, a father of four.

Cummings, the Army spokesman, said the Army is moving to the larger and more heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs.

The Army budget released last week still includes $989 million for maintaining the existing Humvee fleet. And Atwater said he thinks the Army will still use Humvees for missions on which it is impractical to drive a massive MRAP, which has huge tires more often seen on trucks in demolition derbies.

AM General, the sole manufacturer of the Humvee, says it is talking with the Army and hopes to maintains vehicle production into 2011. Congressional representatives including Indiana Democrat Joe Donnelly, who represents the area, have pledged to try to maintain a military role for the Humvee. The Army purchases more than half the Humvees AM General produces, but the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy also buy some.

AM General also makes the Humvee's civilian counterpart, the H2 Hummer, as a contract assembler for General Motors. Hummer sales peaked at 71,524 in 2006 but dropped to 9,046 in 2009. GM plans to sell the brand to a Chinese company.

Indiana-made Humvee could soon be an Army relic

LONDON &S212; As governments seek to root out and smother what they see as excessively risky and questionable financial market activity, the world of currency &S220;carry trades&S221; has found its way onto their radar.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Britain&S217;s top financial regulator, Adair Turner, branded carry trades &S212; borrowing in currencies with the lowest interest rates to invest in higher-yielding ones &S212; as &S220;economically valueless.&S221;

&S220;If I could wave a magic wand here, and greatly reduce the carry trade, I&S217;m pretty certain the world would be a better place,&S221; the Financial Services Authority chairman said.

Strong stuff &S212; and he is far from alone.

Haruhiko Kuroda, the Asian Development Bank president and the former top Japanese financial diplomat, described such transactions as a &S220;naked trade&S221; that required the utmost caution.

And for all its speculative lure, there is some logic to the authorities&S217; wishing this financial game away. Already some considerable effort is being put into frustrating it worldwide.

For decades, the carry trade has been a lifeblood of global foreign exchange markets, which in London alone turn over more than $1.5 trillion every day, according to the latest figures. Some estimates have carry trade-related deals making up as much as 15 to 20 percent of total market activity, but the overall size of outstanding carry trades at any one time is almost impossible to calculate.

Although it is classic hedge fund territory, proprietary traders at banks &S212; currently under notice from President Barack Obama in his attempt to limit banks&S217; risk-taking activities &S212; have been major proponents. And using &S220;cheap&S221; currencies like the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc to play higher-yielders &S212; often in emerging markets and developing countries &S212; has been a speculative strategy for decades.

But near-zero U.S. interest rates last year saw the dollar become the financing currency for these trades. And the latest wave, which prompted the U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini to warn of the &S220;mother of all carry trades,&S221; has been met with some fierce resistance both from emerging economies fearful of overvalued currencies and local market bubbles and from chastened developed country regulators.

The big problem with currency carry trades is that they are inherently unstable. Although they can prove lucrative for short-term players able to get in and out of positions quickly, they fly in the face of basic interest rate theory short term personal loans.

In a global market, the main reason one currency offers a higher interest rate than another is that it is compensating the holder for exchange rate risk. The interest rate premium on a currency merely reflects its implied depreciation over time.

So leveraged trades exploiting higher rates are workable only as long as you duck out before the inevitable currency move wipes out your interest gain, which can create violent herding.

The initial buying of the high yielder has the perverse effect of pushing the risky currency higher &S212; giving the impression of a one-way bet and complicating policy for any developing country, as the overvalued exchange rate hammers the country&S217;s export competitiveness.

The situation can persist for several months and even years, but the unwind is then all the more sudden and vicious as the leveraged positions all head for the exit at the same time.

And this is what Mr. Turner at the Financial Services Authority was railing against.

&S220;It&S217;s a form of speculative activity where you can&S217;t work out what the value is to the real economy,&S221; he said, adding that speculators relied on being able to get out of the trade before the &S220;train wreck.&S221;

The problem for regulators is the difficulty in locating and estimating the outstanding size of these trades. Studies by the Bank for International Settlements and others say it is impossible to nail down exposure at any given point in time, and estimates vary. Mr. Kuroda of the Asian Development Bank said the size of the yen carry trade at its peak before the credit crisis was in the region of $1 trillion. Chinese officials have reportedly claimed that the recent dollar carry trade was as high as $1.5 trillion.

But if the size of the overall trade is not easy to gauge, some say they can estimate &S220;crowdedness&S221; of these trades from monitoring hedge fund and speculative positioning data.

A paper last month by a New York University professor, Richard M. Levich, and a hedge fund manager, Momtchil Pojarliev, said their use of this data could at least provide regulators of pre-bubble warnings to allow them to &S220;counsel&S221; banks and funds on the risk.

Reuters

Inside the Markets: Regulators Tackle 'Carry Trades'

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Treasury prices extended losses on Tuesday, pushing yields up for a second session, after the government received tepid demand at its sale of 3-year note , the first of three major debt sales this week.

Yields had crept higher during the session, following reports that the German government is working on a rescue package for Greece, mired in fiscal and debt problems. Heightened prospects for European stability made investors more willing to move holdings into riskier assets and away from the relative safety of U.S. debt.

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Yields on benchmark 10-year notes rose 6 basis points to 3.62%.

Yields on 2-year notes increased 7 basis points, reaching 0.83%.

A basis point is 0.01%. Bond prices move inversely to their yields.

The Treasury Department sold $40 billion in 3-year notes at a yield of 1.377%, a little higher than traders anticipated in what CRT Capital Group call a "soft" auction. See results of Treasury auctions.

Bidders offered to buy 2.83 times the amount of debt being sold, compared to an average of 3.01 times at the last four auctions of the securities.

Indirect bidders, a class of investors that includes foreign central banks, bought 51.2%, compared to an average of 54.1% of the last three sales. Direct bidders, a group that includes domestic money managers, bought 10.1%, versus 11.2% on average.

A higher proportion of an auction going to indirect and direct bidders is deemed good for the government and the market because it indicates better demand for the debt by investors who will tend to hold the new securities.

It's also better for the bond market because it leaves less in the hands of primary dealers, which tend to turn and sell some of the new debt into the market, pressuring prices free credit report without a credit card.

"The so-so-results are a little disappointing relative to expectations this morning," said analysts at Action Economics. "But the stats aren't too surprising given the market volatility headed into the bid deadline."

The U.S will also auction off $25 billion in 10-year notes on Wednesday. The final sale in the government's quarterly refunding auctions, for $16 billion in 30-year bonds , will come the following day.

Market Edge: How fast is China likely to cool?

There's overheating in certain parts of the Chinese economy, such as the property sector, but that doesn't mean it can be called a bubble, according to Richard Gao, lead manager of the Matthews China Fund. Laura Mandaro reports.

All the sales are the same record-high size as during the previous quarterly refunding in November.

Traders typically try to sell existing holdings of debt to be able to purchase the newest, most liquid securities. That tends to push yields up and lower prices at the auction.

Greek rescue plan

Treasurys had earlier extended losses after the Financial Times Deutschland and Reuters report cited German political leaders as saying that euro zone-countries have decided in principle to aid Greece. See more on Greek rescue efforts.

In morning trading, markets had latched on the travel plans of Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank's president, as a sign that authorities are serious about coming up with a way to rescue Greece as the nation's debt prices have plunged. See more on Trichet.

"We are bearish generally with supply and with rumors that Trichet is likely to strike a deal on Greece's debt plan," Thomas di Galoma, head of fixed-income rates trading at Guggenheim Partners, wrote in a note.

Bond Report: Treasurys down after auction, news of Greece plan

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. – A town fire official in Connecticut says fewer than 50 people have been injured an explosion at a power plant under construction. Multiple people have died, but officials say they don't know how many.

Al Santostefano, the deputy fire marshal in Middletown, tells The Associated Press that 50 construction workers were in the section of the power plant where the explosion happened, and some people survived, so the number of injured is fewer than 50.

Santostefano says dogs are at looking for victims in the rubble, but there are no signs of life best payday advance.

He says workers were purging the gas lines at the time of the explosion.

The 620-megawatt plant was being built to produce energy primarily using natural gas.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell is on her way to the scene.

Officials: Fewer than 50 hurt in Conn. explosion

Hot News: Toyota drivers pull in for repair; Prius fix looms

WASHINGTON – Republicans sparred with President Barack Obama in their Saturday media addresses over proposals to create jobs, further evidence of the difficulty of bipartisan solutions to the nation's pressing problems.

Obama pushed Congress to use $30 billion that had been set aside to bail out Wall Street to start a new program that provides loans to small businesses, which the White House calls the engine for job growth. Republicans, meanwhile, taunted Obama with a familiar refrain: Where are the jobs the president promised in exchange for the billions of dollars already spent?

The barb came a day after the government reported an unexpected decline in the unemployment rate, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. It was the first drop in seven months but offered little consolation for the 8.4 million jobs that have vanished since the recession began.

"Even though our economy is growing again, these are still tough times for America," Obama said. "Too many businesses are still shuttered. Too many families can't make ends meet. And while yesterday, we learned that the unemployment rate has dropped below 10 percent for the first time since summer, it is still unacceptably high — and too many Americans still can't find work."

To help the recovery, Obama asked Congress to use leftover money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to provide to small banks so they can make more loans to small businesses. Republicans have criticized the move, arguing any money leftover from the bailout should be used to reduce the budget deficit.

In the weekly GOP address, Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas chided Obama for proposing a 2001 budget last week that would increase spending, taxes and the national debt business card.

"Americans are still asking, 'where are the jobs?' but all they are getting from Washington is more spending, more taxes, more debt and more bailouts," Hensarling said.

The Republican attack came even as key Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are working on a bipartisan jobs bill. The senators hope to unveil legislation as early as Monday that would provide tax breaks to businesses that hire unemployed workers, extend unemployment payments for those whose benefits have run out, and renew a program that offers the jobless a subsidy for health insurance premiums.

Senate passage of a bipartisan jobs bill would mark an important political victory for Obama. But Saturday's radio and Internet addresses showed that bipartisanship won't be easy.

The White House has repeatedly argued that the $787 billion economic stimulus package enacted in February helped save the economy from complete collapse. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told ABC News there is a much lower risk of a double-dip recession "than at any time over the last 12 months or so."

Hensarling, however, said the stimulus package and the growing government debt have added to the country's economic problems.

"Democrats chose to go it alone and jam through their stimulus," Hensarling said. "What did the American people get? A bill for $1.2 trillion and 3 million more jobs lost."

___

On the Net:

Obama address: http://www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: http://www.youtube.com/RepublicanConference

Obama, GOP sparring over job creation proposals

Hot News: Pfizer Misses Estimates, and Shares Slide

NEW YORK – Oil prices fell Friday for the third straight day, weighed down by a stronger dollar and persistent doubts about the health of the global economy.

Benchmark crude for March delivery lost $3.38, nearly 5 percent, to $69.76 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It fell as low as $69.50 a barrel, the lowest since Dec. 15.

Energy prices started the year on a high note, surging as economists predicted that China, India and other developing nations would aggressively boost petroleum imports to feed their growing economies.

But China has since taken steps to control risky bank lending and cool off its economy. And Greece, Portugal and Spain have pushed the euro lower as they struggle to handle massive budget deficits.

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback versus other major currencies, jumped Friday to its highest level since July. Oil, which is priced in U.S. currency, tends to fall when the dollar strengthens and makes barrels more expensive for holders of foreign money.

Even a surprise drop in the unemployment rate — from 10 percent to 9.7 percent — wasn't enough to encourage investors. Manufacturers and retailers may have added jobs, but the government report showed the economy has a long way to go.

Meanwhile, Americans are burning much less fuel than previous years check cash advance. The Energy Information Administration said this week that U.S. petroleum consumption has dropped for four straight weeks.

"There's a lot of oil sloshing around out there," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates. "If I were to give a fair price for oil it would be closer to $60" a barrel.

Retail gasoline prices increased this week for the first time since the middle of January. The national average added a half penny at $2.664 a gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service.

A gallon of regular unleaded is 2.1 cents cheaper than a month ago, but it's 75.7 cents more expensive than the same time last year.

In other Nymex trading in March contracts, heating oil dropped 7.8 cents at $1.8576 a gallon, and gasoline fell 7.6 cents to $1.8748 a gallon. Natural gas added 11.1 cents to $5.527 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In London, Brent crude gave up $2.28 to $69.85 on the ICE futures exchange.

___

Associated Press writers Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary and Alex Kennedy in Singapore contributed to this report.

Oil tumbles again, below $70 a barrel

AUSTIN, Texas – Forestar Group Inc. said Wednesday it swung to a loss in the fourth quarter as the real estate and natural resources developer took a write-down on a condominium development and booked a charge for an environmental remediating project.

Forestar lost $7.4 million, or 20 cents a share, in the three months ended in December. That compares with a profit of $1.7 million, or 5 cents a share, in the prior-year period.

Revenue fell to $31.4 million from $37 million a year earlier.

The results included $6.3 million in charges related to a write-down on a condominium development in Austin and costs for environmental remediation at the company's San Joaquin River project near Antioch, Calif.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company would break even for the quarter on revenue of $29 fast cash loans.5 million.

Forestar develops real estate and mineral and fiber resources.

Each of those business lines generated lower revenue during the quarter than in the prior-year period.

The real estate segment lost $2.5 million compared with earnings of $3 million a year earlier.

Total quarterly earnings for the three segments fell to $2.2 million from $11.9 million.

For the full year, Forestar earned $59.1 million, or $1.64 a share, compared with $12 million, or 33 cents a share, in 2008. Revenue for the year fell to $146.2 million from $160 million.

Shares fell 75 cents, or nearly 4 percent, to close Wednesday at $18.09.

Forestar swings to a loss in 4th quarter

WASHINGTON – The head of a federal safety panel said Tuesday the pilots of a regional airliner that crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., nearly a year ago made critical errors showing "complacency and confusion that resulted in catastrophe."

National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Deborah Hersman said safety issues raised by the accident go beyond the mistakes that caused the crash. The board is meeting to determine the probable cause and make safety recommendations following the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by regional air carrier Colgan Air Inc. of Manassas, Va.

The crash is considered one of the most significant accidents in recent years because it revealed what some safety experts and pilots unions say is a safety gap between major airlines and the regional carriers. Among the concerns raised by the accident is whether pilots with low-fare airlines are vulnerable to fatigue, long-distance commutes and inadequate training.

On Feb. 12, 2009, Flight 3407 was approaching Buffalo-Niagara International Airport when the twin-engine turboprop experienced an aerodynamic stall and dove into a house. All 49 people aboard and one man in the house were killed.

Investigators pinned the cause of the crash primarily on errors by the pilots. They said Captain Marvin Renslow should have been able to recover from the stall if he had taken the correct actions, but that he did the opposite of what he should have done.

In the final seconds of the flight, two pieces of safety equipment activated — a stick shaker to alert the crew their plane was nearing a stall and a stick pusher that points a plane's nose down so it can recover speed, investigators said. The correct response to both situations would have been to push forward on the control column to increase speed, they said.

But Renslow pulled back on the stick shaker, investigators said. When the plane stalled and the pusher activated, and then reactivated two more times, Renslow again pulled back all three times.

"It wasn't a split-second thing," NTSB safety investigator Roger Cox said. "I think there was time to evaluate the situation and intitiate a recovery, but I can't give you a number of seconds"

Seventy percent of pilots who had experienced the stick-pusher activation in training responded by pulling back instead of pushing forward — the opposite of the correct response — even though they knew ahead of time to expect a stall, investigators said.

The first officer, Rebecca Shaw, 24, should have stepped in to push the plane's nose down herself when Renslow responded improperly, but she may not have because she was a relatively inexperienced pilot, investigators said low cost payday loans.

Shaw, 24, had earned less than $16,000 the previous year, which may have been why she lived with her parents near Seattle and commuted across the country overnight to Newark, N.J., to make Flight 3407. She felt sick but didn't want to pull out of the trip because she had already traveled so far, according to a cockpit voice recorder transcript.

It's not clear how much sleep either pilot received the night before the flight.

Federal regulators and lawmakers promised swift action after the Feb. 12, 2009 accident, but nearly a year later, key safety reforms haven't been implemented.

Since then, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Randy Babbitt has persuaded regional airlines to make a series of voluntary safety improvements. FAA has also increased inspections of their pilot training programs. But the agency is still drafting regulations to address the most critical safety issues raised by the accident. Final action is at least months away, and perhaps even years.

Hersman said the NTSB board will follow up with a forum this spring on pilot and air traffic controller professionalism and with another forum on partnerships between major airlines and regional carriers, which increasingly handle the airlines' short haul-flights.

Karen Eckert of Williamsville, N.Y., whose sister Beverly Eckert was killed in the crash, said the victims' families are frustrated by the slow pace of the federal response to the crash. She noted, for example, that an earlier version of the crew-training proposal gave airlines five years from the proposal's effective date to comply.

"That's a very long time when there are lives that can be lost," she said.

On Capitol Hill, the House passed legislation aimed at forcing FAA to strengthen regulations. There's no disagreement over the need for legislation, but action has been slowed by unrelated Senate disputes. It remains unclear when a bill might be enacted.

"Here we are, almost a year later, and fundamentally nothing has changed in terms of the conditions that caused that accident," said former NTSB board member Kitty Higgins. "The only thing that has changed is public awareness."

The last six fatal domestic airline accidents involved regional carriers. The NTSB has cited pilot performance as a factor in three of those accidents.

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On the Net:

http://www.faa.gov

http://www.ntsb.gov

Safety reforms lag a year after NY plane crash

WASHINGTON – Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says the country would have suffered Great Depression-era joblessness, near 25 percent, if the government hadn't arranged the financial system bailout.

Paulson made a stellar defense of that bailout, known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, in an interview Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America." He said that he and other top policymakers had no choice but to intervene when they did.

Paulson said the economy is recovering but that "it's got a good ways to go installment payday loans." And he said "we have not fixed the problems we need to fix." Paulson also defended the bailout of the giant insurance company American International Group, saying it would have been a "disaster" if it had been allowed to fail.

Paulson says economy recovering, defends bailout