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The Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock blogs about the business world
Jay Hancock
Losing Black & Decker a bad sign for Md. business
November 6, 2009
It wasn't on the agenda, but the loss of Black & Decker's headquarters was drinks-and-hors d'oeuvres chatter at the Maryland Chamber of Commerce's policy conference in Cambridge on Thursday.
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Why merge now? Age, economy seem obvious answers
November 4, 2009
It was the first thing analysts asked Black & Decker boss Nolan D. Archibald about the Maryland company's sale to The Stanley Works.
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O'Malley tried, failed to stop jump in BGE rates
November 3, 2009
The video, lovingly promoted by Maryland Republicans, has gotten nearly 4,000 hits on YouTube. It's a 2006 ad for the successful gubernatorial campaign of Martin O'Malley.
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PSC's restrictions not so onerous for Constellation and EDF
October 31, 2009
If EDF Group and Constellation Energy wanted to use Maryland regulators as an excuse to scrap their $4.5 billion deal, the regulators let them down.
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Unexpected economic woe: Americans saving, not spending
October 30, 2009
Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, meet your nightmares. Yours, too, Gov. Martin O'Malley. And yours, President Barack Obama and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
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Peltz could mean a bumpy ride for Legg Mason
October 28, 2009
Legg Mason chief Mark Fetting seemed thrilled Monday when he announced that billionaire investor Nelson Peltz would take a seat on the big money manager's board.
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Corporate America gets a lesson from the pay czar
October 23, 2009
Corporate America is shocked at pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.
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Erickson's smart bets soured along with nation's economy
October 21, 2009
If any business proposition ever looked like a sure thing, betting on aging Americans, rising home values and the advantages of tax-exempt companies might have been it.
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Where are good times for those not on Wall St.?
October 16, 2009
It's the end of the world as we know it, and the Dow Jones average feels fine.
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We need financial reform, and we need it fast
October 9, 2009
Maybe we'll get financial reform this year after all. Obama administration officials are invading Capitol Hill to get Congress off its behind.
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O'Malley fights the danger of energy jobs
October 7, 2009
Gov. Martin O'Malley and the Public Service Commission are doing their best to save Maryland from Constellation Energy.
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Educating Md. students in finance is the smart move
October 2, 2009
Washington is proposing rules, restrictions and the creation of an entire federal agency to stop dumb consumers from repeating the mortgage disaster or something just as bad.
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Time to let the tax credit for 1st-time homebuyers expire
September 30, 2009
The economy will not begin to recover until home prices stop falling. That's what smart people counseled a year ago as things collapsed from Wall Street to Los Angeles, and they were right.
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Tuition freeze leaves many Md. students out in the cold
September 25, 2009
There are probably people who are very happy that Towson University looks harder to get into these days than nearby Goucher College, but I doubt they include the 6,928 applicants whom Towson rejected for its 2009 freshman class.
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Hale facing long odds in bailing out 1st Mariner
September 23, 2009
The last time regulators ordered Ed Hale to fix a money-losing bank or have it seized by the government was the early 1990s.
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Biotech growth needs time and patience from investors
September 18, 2009
Another year, another disappointment for the industry that people keep calling the future of Maryland's economy.
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Feeding frenzy in Washington
September 16, 2009
Politicians and regulators are swarming CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield again, this time in Washington.
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Don't wait for government money, Hopkins business school dean says
September 4, 2009
When Yash Gupta was dean of the business school at the University of Southern California, "I would get five phone calls a day from different businesses," he says.
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Md. treats painful recession better than most of its peers
September 2, 2009
Look at it this way: We could be California. Or Arizona or New York.
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Older, younger workers in a job jam
August 30, 2009
Patrice Brown and Jerry Bannister don't know each other, but they're on opposite sides of an economic canyon that divides young from old and makes this recession different from any other in the last six decades.
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Health care myths obscure the much tougher decisions
August 26, 2009
Health care reform lies are fairly easy to dispose of. There are no "death panels" in the legislation being considered in Washington, despite continuing insistence to the contrary from people who want to incite fear and draw attention to themselves.
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Premium costs make health care reform's 'public option' seem reasonable
August 21, 2009
Joining employers across Maryland who are feeling another year of health-insurance pain, Groove Commerce will see its medical premiums rise 20 percent on Sept. 1.
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Adieu, Constellation deal with EDF, and 3rd atomic plant
August 19, 2009
This is a column about how Constellation Energy Group and Electricite de France are going to scrap the $4.5 billion deal that has filled headlines, politics and regulators' files for eight months.
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What neither side will admit about health care 'rationing'
August 14, 2009
Democrats are against health care rationing if it's done by insurance companies. Republicans are against it if it's done by government.
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Push to give shareholders say on CEO pay rankles GOP
August 12, 2009
The wise Adam Smith figured out two centuries ago why boards of public companies would let CEOs haul away truckloads of money that ought to belong to the shareholders.
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Let's cut spending and raise taxes
April 18, 2009
Thoughts on taxes, tea parties and Washington's looming fiscal disaster.
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Rouse risked designs, not finances
April 17, 2009
James Rouse took risks with malls and marketplaces, not finances. General Growth Properties did the opposite.
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Slots bid process wipes out hoped-for benefits
February 11, 2009
Legalizing slot machines was supposed to save Maryland horse tracks, help Maryland schools and keep the Preakness in Baltimore. That it might fail on all counts, in a kind of grotesque trifecta, is probably what everybody involved with it deserves.
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Discord perils fuel fund's goal
January 10, 2009
The late Victorine Q. Adams helped black politicians challenge Baltimore's white establishment in the 1950s, became the first black woman on the City Council in the 1960s and founded one of the nation's first nonprofits to help people pay energy bills in the 1970s.
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Biggest winner in Constellation deal is Buffett
December 18, 2008
"Warren Buffett loses out to the French" was the gist of several headlines yesterday on Electricite de France's deal to invest $4.5 billion in Constellation Energy Group.
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EDF's offer appears to have a shot
December 10, 2008
Electricite de France's proposal to invest $4.5 billion in Constellation Energy Group's nuclear-generation business looks like it has a shot.
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Constellation offer: pot of gold or elusive rainbow?
December 4, 2008
Like the Wizard of Oz, Electricite de France looked into the souls of everybody connected with Constellation Energy Group and offered to grant their greatest desires.
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Constellation brought the near-collapse on itself
September 19, 2008
Would Constellation Energy's near-collapse and emergency sale have been necessary if the General Assembly hadn't resisted and ultimately quashed its planned merger with Florida's FPL Group two years ago?
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Point's future is up to Annapolis
March 26, 2008
The global economy has done its part: Russia's OAO Severstal has agreed to buy the Sparrows Point steel mill and invest in badly needed upgrades.
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Ground rent law violates the principles of due process, fair play
December 13, 2006
Because Deloris McNeil missed paying a $96-a-year ground rent bill, she lost the Fayette Street house she had bought for $44,500 and lived in for years. The tiny, delinquent bill morphed into creditor-seizure powers that trumped fair play, common sense and fundamental rights.
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However it's spun, Baltimore is losing a headquarters
December 20, 2005
As sales of key corporate citizens to out-of-town landlords go, the merger of Constellation Energy with FPL Group isn't that bad. So why are they trying to spin us like a dynamo in a heat wave?
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U.S. probes grant to city nonprofit
October 2, 2005
The U.S. Education Department's inspector general is investigating whether a senior official of the agency improperly helped the National Federation of the Blind win a key federal grant around the time she was discussing taking a job at the Baltimore-based nonprofit.
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Big rise in Md. tax revenue is partly credited to home sales
July 31, 2005
WHAT'S BEHIND the surprising spurt in Maryland tax collections and what Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. calculates is a billion-dollar budget surplus?
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Reform goes back to start on nonprofit boondoggle
July 20, 2005
FAITHFUL READERS know about a $2 billion federal boondoggle called the Javits-Wagner- O'Day program, which pays peanuts to disabled people working on no-bid government contracts, enriches nonprofit executives and operates with little oversight or control.
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A warning to charitable donors and a case for tougher disclosure laws on nonprofits
June 19, 2005
RIIIING. IT'S the National Federation of the Blind of Oregon, calling across that state. They want money "to help the blind of the area," according to a fund-raising script from 2003.
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Nonprofits seem in no big hurry to fix their problems
March 2, 2005
The nonprofit-industrial complex knows it has a problem.
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Chimes, other charities are object of badly needed reform
December 5, 2004
FEDERAL authorities have launched a tax probe of Baltimore-based Chimes Inc. and have proposed sweeping governance standards, including executive salary limits, for Chimes and other nonprofit groups that get $2 billion annually from taxpayers to employ the disabled.
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The lights start to flash at end of the blackout
August 20, 2003
IN ECONOMICS there's a heads for every tails, a pull for every push, and the happy reciprocal of the Blackout of 2003 will be the purchase of billions of dollars' worth of electrical transmission hardware.
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Citigroup gets a black eye in Rusnak caper
May 28, 2003
JUST WHEN you thought it was safe to walk down Wall Street again without two Dobermans to repel the white-collar muggers, Allied Irish Banks brings new allegations of misdeeds against Bank of America and Citigroup.
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Bailout pays airlines for years of bad management
September 30, 2001
AS HE pursued his doomed merger with United Airlines earlier this year, US Airways chief executive Rakesh Gangwal said "there is no Plan B" if regulators were to block the deal.
