Toyota introducing hybrid pickup

The concept truck, to be shown at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, features a hybrid drive and Prius styling.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Toyota Motor Corp. plans to introduce a concept hybrid pickup truck featuring improved fuel economy and lower emissions at the 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, the automaker said Friday.
The A-BAT concept vehicle is equipped with Hybrid Synergy Drive, Toyota's third-generation gas-electric hybrid powertrain technology, according to the company. Its trapezoidal profile was borrowed from the Prius, another hybrid Toyota vehicle.
"This concept is the next evolution of the compact truck," said Kevin Hunter, president of Calty Design Research, Toyota's North American-based research and design center, in a statement.
The four-passenger pickup features a 4-foot bed, while a translucent roof panel slides open to allow for tall cargo inside the cab. The bed can be extended by 2 feet by folding down the pass-through midgate into the cab and by another 2 feet by opening the tailgate.
The truck uses a unibody platform for improved handling and a smoother ride. Inside, there is a retractable portable navigation unit with a 7-inch screen and wireless Internet, while the center console houses a portable battery pack.
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Both the driver and front passenger have large display screens to view the status of their high-tech gadgets and climate and audio settings.
The A-BAT has solar panels atop the instrument panel to capture sunlight and convert it to energy, to assist in charging the navigation unit, battery pack and backlit information displays, Toyota (TM) said.

No fraud in $1.5B Genesco buyout: Judge

Rival retailer The Finish Line must complete buyout after its case, alleging Genesco fraud, is dismissed.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A judge ruled Thursday that Genesco executives did not commit fraud during negotiations over a $1.5 billion acquisition and that fellow mall retailer The Finish Line must complete the purchase.
Nashville Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle dismissed Finish Line's claims that Genesco withheld key financial information that could have signaled worse-than-expected earnings after the deal closed in June.
Lyle said Indianapolis-based Finish Line and investment bank UBS were sophisticated enough to know what they were getting into with the $54.50-per-share purchase.
The buyout was conducted by "teams of lawyers, advisers and handlers being paid enormous sums to orchestrate the procedure for obtaining information" she wrote.
"This milieu is UBS' home territory," Lyle said.
UBS has filed a separate federal lawsuit in New York asking that its commitment to finance most of the deal be declared void because the combined entity would go bankrupt and default on its debt payments.
That case is still pending, but Lyle disagreed that the combined company would be doomed.
"The merger has a reasonable chance of succeeding," she said.
UBS (UBS) issued a statement saying it disagrees with the court and believes "there are material issues in our client's and UBS' favor in this matter."
"We have consistently stood with our client in its position on this transaction and have been prepared to fund the transaction if the conditions of the financing are met."
Nashville-based Genesco operates 2,000 retail stores in the United States and Canada under brand names like Journeys, Johnston & Murphy and Hat Shack, and is about twice the size of Finish Line.
Genesco rejected a slightly less generous buyout offer from Foot Locker (FL, Fortune 500) in favor of the highly leveraged deal from Finish Line (FINL).
Lyle said making Finish Line simply pay damages to Genesco wouldn't have been enough to repair the harm done by the attempt to get out of the deal.
"Genesco's business has been irreparably harmed as a result of the stalled merger," Lyle said in the ruling. "Genesco's business is in a state of limbo."
Target 'first casualty of the holiday season'
The negative effects of the court battle included dwindling stock prices, damaged vendor relationships and low employee morale, she said.
Genesco's (GCO) earnings swung to a loss in the second quarter and dropped 65 percent in the third quarter, but Lyle declined to find that Genesco had suffered a specific financial flaw that prevents it from making money.
"Genesco's decline in performance in 2007 is due to general economic conditions such as higher gasoline, heating oil and food prices, housing and mortgage issues, and increased consumer debt loads," she said.

Why companies need owners

Today's CEOs are accountable to no one, says shareholder activist Bob Monks.
By Marc Gunther

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- "What this company needs is an owner," declared Sam Zell, after completing the $8.2 billion deal that put him in charge of the Tribune Co., which owns newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. "It needs someone who accepts the responsibility for what this company does."
How true. Whether Zell, as a committed owner, will help save newspapers is an open question. But the fact that the real estate billionaire has a lot of skin in the game - $315 million of his money, plus the right to buy up to 40 percent of the company down the line - means that he, and his people, will be very focused on getting the job done.
All companies need owners who are engaged, committed and, ideally, thinking about long term. So argues Robert A.G. Monks, the shareholder activist, author, lawyer, entrepreneur and corporate director in a new book, called "Corpocracy: How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World's Greatest Wealth Machine - and How to Get It Back" (Wiley, 2007, $29.95).
Corporacy is not a pretty word, but this is not a pretty story. Shareholders of most Fortune 500 companies are so dispersed and unorganized and disempowered that CEOs are accountable to no one but themselves, Monks argues.
"A venture with one million shareholders ultimately has no real owner," he says.
The result, he argues, are the by-now familiar horror stories about excessive CEO pay, lavish severance payments for failed leaders, rejiggering of stock options and the like.
Monks writes: "History will look back on the 1990s and early 2000s as a time when the principal officers of public American corporations transferred from shareholders to themselves approximately $1 trillion - or 10 percent of the market value of public exchanges. This must be the largest peacetime movement of wealth ever recorded, and it was accomplished through stealth that amounted to theft and in a spirit of regulatory permissiveness that certainly rises near to the level of criminal neglect."
Such rhetoric aside, Bob Monks is no wild-eyed left-winger. He believes that capitalism and corporations "provide the best chance for humankind to improve its lot on earth." But like Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose administration created the Securities and Exchange Commission and modern-day securities law, Monks is a product of the world of the well born, the WASP establishment and Harvard University who wants to save capitalism from its own excesses. A biography of Monks published a few years back was called "A Traitor to His Class."
At 74, Monks has toiled for decades in the field dryly known as corporate governance, which, in fact, is all about power and accountability. He is a founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, a company formed to advise shareholders on proxy votes; of the LENS Fund, a successful activist investment fund; and of The Corporate Library, which analyzes corporate governance and ranks boards of directors. All these enterprises aim to shift the balance of power away from hired managers and toward active owners.
Surveying the landscape of corporate governance today, Monks is outraged. He skewers familiar targets - the Home Depot (XOM,Fortune 500) shareholder meeting where most of the directors didn't bother to show up, the imperial leadership of former ExxonMobil (XOM,Fortune 500) CEO Lee Raymond, the $198 million payout to former Pfizer (PFE, Fortune 500) CEO Hank McKinnell after five years of sub-par performance. Recent SEC rulings that make it all but impossible for shareholders to nominate their own candidates for corporate boards mean that shareholder democracy remains an oxymoron.
Monks finds a few heroes, as well. He's a fan of Warren Buffett, the model of an active owner, and of Jeff Immelt, the General Electric (GE,Fortune 500) CEO who works without an employment contract and for a modest wage, by today's standards. He praises institutional investors like Hermes Investment Management Co., a British pension fund, and the Norwegian Government Pension Fund because they make long-term capital investments and actively exercise their ownership rights. He calls on public-purpose organizations like Harvard and the Gates Foundation, which owns billions of dollars of equities, to do the same.
At the heart of his life's work is Monks' belief that engaged owners (as opposed to speculators or short-term shareholders) are more likely to guide corporations in ways that align with the common good. This, he says, is because owners who take a long-term view want more than a return on their investments; they want to live in a healthy, just and peaceful world, and so they want corporations to be a force for good.
This argument is hard, if not impossible, to prove, but there's logic to it. Homeowners, after all, are more apt than renters to take care of their property, invest in their neighborhoods and exercise their duty as citizens.
But even if corporations with engaged owners act no more responsibly than others, there's little doubt that CEOs, like the rest of us, benefit from strong oversight. Just the fact that Sam Zell is minding the store should bring new energy to Tribune.

Stock comeback seen

U.S. futures edge higher as talk of bank asset sales could help markets recover from selloff on Pakistan strife.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Wall Street is set to recover slightly Friday after a big selloff on the assassination of Pakistan's ex-prime minister, with talk of big bank asset sales helping to boost futures.
At 6:25 a.m. ET, Nasdaq and S&P futures were higher.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that major U.S. and European banks, including Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Britain's HSBC (HBC), are considering the sale of branches and various units. The sales would be an effort to recover from the hit the banks have taken in 2007 from the global credit crunch.
Asian markets tumbled in the first trading following the slaying of Benazir Bhutto. Japan's Nikkei index was down 1.7 percent in the final trading session of 2007, with the Nikkei ending the year 11.1 percent lower than a year earlier.
Oil was slightly higher. U.S. light crude gained 7 cents to $96.69 a barrel in electronic trading.
The dollar fell against the euro and yen.
After the opening bell, the government will issue its report on new home sales for November. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com expect a decline in the annual rate to 715,000 from 728,000 in October.
Among stocks in the news Friday: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), Genesco (GCO) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).