Keva notes

The company, which also makes snowmobiles and motorcycles, expects 2011 profit of $3.10-$3.16 a share on sales growth of 30-32 percent.Polaris’ third-quarter net income rose to $67.6 million, or 95 cents a share, from $47.2 million, or 69 cents a share, a year ago.Sales jumped 26 percent to $729.9 million. Sales of off-road vehicles rose 25 percent to $486.2.Analysts had expected earnings of 84 cents a share on revenue of $693.1 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The two hip hop moguls are being sued by musician Syl Johnson, who claims in a suit filed in U.S. District Court in Illinois Friday alleging that West and Jay-Z sampled his 1967 song “Different Strokes” for a tune on their recent collaboration “Watch the Throne.”According to Johnson’s suit, the pair had first solicited permission to sample “Different Strokes” on the song “The Joy” for West’s album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” but were shot down, and the song was left off the album. The tune ended up on “Watch the Throne,” which was released in August.According to the suit, the defendants claim they received permission to sample the song from an entity called the Numero Uno Group, which has never had any authorization to license the tune.”Different Strokes” has been sampled by a number of artists, including Michael Jackson, Kid Rock and Will Smith, the lawsuit states.Johnson, who also names Island Def Jam, Universal Music Group and Roc-a-Fella Records in the suit, is seeking actual and punitive damages to be determined at a jury trial.

* No sign of lingering resistance from Gaddafi loyalists* Fighting continues in Sirte, no sign of NTC advanceBy Barry MaloneBANI WALID, Libya, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Fighters with Libya’s interim government fired their guns into the air and hoisted the country’s new flag over the centre of Bani Walid on Monday to celebrate their capture of one of the final bastions of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists.A Reuters team that drove into the heart of Bani Walid, in desert hills 150 km (90 miles) south of Tripoli, saw no signs of resistance from supporters of the deposed leader who have been holed up inside the town for more than six weeks.”Bani Walid is completely free. It is liberated, 100 percent,” said Mohammed Shakonah, a military commander with the National Transitional Council (NTC).The apparent capture of Bani Walid brought Libya’s new rulers a step closer to being in full control of the vast, oil-producing North African country almost two months after rebels entered Tripoli and ended 42 years of one-man Gaddafi rule.Along with Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, Bani Walid was one of Libya’s last repositories of armed resistance to the NTC.Bursts of gunfire, fireworks, and car horns merged into a cacophony on streets littered with empty bullet casings and lined with buildings damaged or destroyed by the fighting.Some buildings were still ablaze, others were flattened by NATO air strikes. Several shops looked like they had been looted. Thick black smoke billowed in the distance.An NTC fighter in camouflage fatigues and with an AK-47 assault rifle hanging from his shoulder, embraced a medical worker and both men wept in joy.”If Gaddafi could see this, he would give up,” said Abdelfattah, another NTC fighter in the central square.There was no evidence of civilians joining in the street celebrations in Bani Walid, home to the Warfalla, Libya’s biggest tribe, whose members are traditional supporters of Gaddafi.”This is a very important day because it now means Gaddafi doesn’t have even one town in Libya,” said Ayad Sayed al Russi, a senior NTC commander. “We hope that the residents who fled will come back now that the town is free.”The town had been under siege for weeks, with hundreds of Gaddafi loyalists dug into its steep valleys and hills resisting advancing interim government forces.NTC officials had been negotiating with Bani Walid’s tribal leaders for its surrender.SIRTE FIGHTS ONIn Sirte, where Gaddafi loyalists have been under siege for weeks, there was little or no indication of the often disorganised NTC forces making any progress on Monday. Chaos and confusion forced them to retreat in some places.A doctor for the medical aid charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in Sirte has estimated that 10,000 people remain trapped in the city of 75,000. Many are women and children, some are sick or injured.NTC tanks and rockets bombarded a small area of central Sirte where they have boxed in the remaining Gaddafi loyalists. Libya’s new leaders say they will only begin the transition to democracy after they capture the city.Frustration is growing on the front line. Some fighters are irritated that their commanders have not ordered a big push to take the rest of the city.There is also anger between NTC forces from Misrata to the west and from Benghazi to the east, who have accused each other of hitting their allies in “friendly fire” incidents.”What we are trying to do is to limit attacks from the east and west to avoid friendly fire, and instead attack from the south,” said Mohammad Al Sabty, a field commander.”We have lost a lot of martyrs in recent days,” said Mustafa Salim from a Misrata brigade. When Misrata units get close to Benghazi units “it gets harder,” he said. “They fire at us and we fire at them.”Many NTC fighters abandon their positions at nightfall for more comfortable quarters further from the front line. That allows Gaddafi’s men to infiltrate the lines during the night and fire at them, sometimes from behind.Government forces captured 15 Gaddafi loyalist fighters on Monday, all of them black, a Reuters witness said. Gaddafi armed many sub-Saharan Africans to fight for him and black people have been subject to arbitrary reprisals by the NTC forces.Some government fighters present tried to hit the newly captured prisoners, but were held back by more senior officers and the 15 men were marched off to the rear as NTC forces laid down suppressing fire at nearby snipers.The new government’s forces have been accused of mistreating prisoners and Amnesty International said in a report last week it was in danger of repeating some of the abuses of Gaddafi’s rule, particularly through the use of arbitrary detention.British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he would raise the issue at a meeting later in the day with the head of the NTC in Tripoli. “It’s very important they keep the moral authority by treating people well,” Hague told reporters.The often chaotic struggle for Sirte has killed scores of people, left thousands homeless and laid waste to much of what was once a showpiece Mediterranean city where Gaddafi entertained foreign leaders.

By Rob Cox The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Imagine if Merrill Lynch had been smarter, like Goldman Sachs, a few years ago. The investment bank would have realized it was holding too many dodgy mortgage securities and sold them off to buyers who didn’t yet think the market would blow. Those clients might have then landed in trouble. But Merrill would have avoided a fire sale to Bank of America. That’s the basic premise behind the latest film to emerge in the financial crisis genre, “Margin Call.” The movie, which premiered at Sundance and is slated to open in U.S. theaters next week, presents, however clumsily, a fictional morality tale with real parallels in the Wall Street banking panic that began in 2007. The plot is simple. Indeed, for anyone with a modicum of understanding of financial business it is downright simplistic. Kevin Spacey stars as Sam Rogers, the head of a big trading desk at an investment bank located, in the first of a handful of incongruities, in One Penn Plaza. The bank has just fired Eric Dale, one of its key risk management executives. But before disappearing to his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, Dale, played by Stanley Tucci, hands a hotshot associate a memory stick with a file, cautioning him that its contents could be dangerous. In fine clichéd fashion, the whiz-kid, Peter Sullivan, holds a PhD in rocket propulsion. And cast in the role is Zachary Quinto, reprising his role as Star Trek’s Spock, but this time in pinstripes and human ears. After much cogitation and scribbling of numbers, Sullivan discovers that the firm is sitting on a time bomb of mortgage-backed securities whose implied losses are greater than the entire market value of the company. No numbers are provided. But we know it’s bad because grown men are gasping at Bloomberg terminals and saying really profane things. And so the action begins — insofar as eight hours of conference room meetings constitute action. Tense discussions ensue between a risk manager played by Demi Moore and a senior executive, with an uncanny resemblance to JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon, who ignored her warnings. Jeremy Irons hovers above in his usual role as a morally-challenged and ruthless leader, in this case CEO John Tuld, who somehow gets to fly a helicopter onto the roof in apparent defiance of New York City laws. Of course, all this sounds a bit like the story of Merrill Lynch. The firm found itself with tens of billions of dollars of similarly dodgy mortgage securities it couldn’t sell and whose losses threatened to overwhelm its capital. As Lehman Brothers was going under, Merrill had to sell itself to BofA in a hurry three years ago in September. But “Margin Call” posits a different end for its fictional firm. Over the course of a few hours, Chief Executive Tuld, whose name rather obviously rhymes with that of Lehman’s disgraced ex-boss, convinces his troops that they must sell every lick of MBS on the balance sheet, knowing full well that the assets are essentially worthless. Though Spacey objects on principle, by morning, and before the market opens, he rallies his sales team with a rousing, twisted Wall Street version of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech. A crowded conference room stands in for Agincourt. The tradeoff is made plain: sell this dodgy stuff and you save the firm. But know that your clients will never talk to you again. In the moralizing tone that has become a hallmark of all financial crisis genre films, particularly the polemic “Inside Job” that won the Oscar for best documentary, everyone does what they’re told because they are paid handsome bonuses. They can then blow it all on “hookers and booze,” as Paul Bettany’s character Will Emerson did with some $76,500 of his earnings. The firm lives to fight another day in the markets, and its executives must live with the consequences, though it’s not clear what these may be apart from some burnt relations with other people who would probably have done the same. But J.C. Chandor, who wrote the screenplay and directed “Margin Call,” suggests this is just how Wall Street works. And there is ample evidence from the crisis to lend credence to much of his oversimplified finger-pointing. In reality, dumping massive amounts of mortgage bonds in a heartbeat before everyone else had worked out they were toxic would have been nearly impossible. But the fictional dilemma is one worth considering — at least for the director it was. His father was a senior executive at Merrill.

The three factories, which have a combined production capacity of 650,000 vehicles a year, have not been impacted directly by the floods, the company had said. Toyota is the top automaker in Thailand, a major export base for the firm.

MSICPL’s ratings are driven by Fitch’s expectation of continued strong support from its ultimate parent - Morgan Stanley (MS, Long-Term Issuer Default Rating (IDR): ‘A’/Stable; Viability Rating: ‘a’; Short-Term IDR: ‘F1’). The former’s systems and operations are well integrated within MS’s, and MS has invested over INR1.5bn in MSICPL in FY10 through Morgan Stanley India Company Private Limited. The ratings may be downgraded if the linkages of and support from MS are deemed by Fitch to have deteriorated or if MS’s ratings are downgraded to India sovereign rating of ‘BBB-‘Funding profile is well-matched due to shorter tenor of assets compared with liabilities. It also has back-up liquidity in the form of fixed deposits, bank lines and mutual funds. Leverage is currently below 2x.Return on average assets (using an average of assets at end-financial year) dipped in FY11 to 1.38% from 2.43% in FY10 due to rising interest costs, although supported by improved operational efficiency. Fitch notes that profitability may be volatile in near-term as the current global economic slowdown impacts business volumes.MSICPL is engaged in financing MS’s private wealth management clients in India against liquid securities (primarily shares) as well as in trading fixed income securities.Fitch has taken the following additional rating actions on MSICPL’s instruments:Proposed INR7.93bn long-term fully principal protected market-linked debentures: assigned a final rating of ‘Fitch AAAemr(ind)’INR2.07bn fully principal protected market-linked notes (issued and outstanding): affirmed at ‘Fitch AAAemr(ind)’INR20bn short-term debt: affirmed at ‘Fitch A1+(ind)’INR10bn long-term debt affirmed at ‘Fitch AAA(ind)’The suffix ‘emr’ denotes the exclusion of the embedded market risk from the rating. Ratings of the equity-linked debentures is an ordinal assessment of the underlying credit risk of the instrument and does not factor in the market risk that investors in such instruments will assume. This market risk stems from the fact that coupon payment on these instruments will be based on the performance of a reference index or equity share.

“Deference to authority is deeply engrained in most of us. As a leader you need to fight it in your direct reports. If people automatically defer to your judgment, you may miss out on critical feedback.Make it easy for people to speak up, and remember to actively ask for their opinions. When talking about projects give some initial thoughts, but then ask for help fleshing out ideas. Recognize people who speak up and reward those who challenge you.Most importantly, try not to react immediately if you start to feel threatened, or you risk shutting down the discussion.”- Today’s management tip was adapted from “The Dangers of Deference” by Ron Ashkenas.(For the full post, see: here)