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In the future, you better go green if you want a federal contract.

The General Services Administration has recommended that federal agencies begin collecting greenhouse gas emissions data from their suppliers. This would be on a voluntary basis, at least at first. Eventually, however, agencies could give purchasing preferences to companies with low greenhouse gas emissions.

GSA’s report was in response to an executive order issued in 2009 by President Barack Obama, which directed agencies to make reductions of greenhouse gas emissions a priority. Besides making cuts in their own emissions, agencies also can encourage their suppliers to reduce their emissions.

Suppliers that do so “can gain a competitive advantage not only with their federal customers, but also with their commercial customers and the public, who are increasingly seeker ‘greener’ companies when making procurement decisions,” GSA’s report concluded instant payday loan.

The report acknowledged that small businesses may not have the resources to have their greenhouse gas emissions verified by third parties. The government can ease this burden by phasing in any greenhouse gas emissions reporting program and allowing small firms to use streamlined reporting tools, the report stated.

Meanwhile, Obama asked federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from indirect sources such as employee travel and commuting by 13 percent by 2020. This builds on an earlier directive for agencies to reduce their emissions from direct sources.

See www.whitehouse.gov.

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Brown & Brown Inc. acquired the assets of Synergy Benefits Inc., an employee benefits firm in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area

The purchase price was not disclosed.

Synergy Benefits has revenue of about $1.2 million, a statement said. Bernard Dombrowski and Robert Hayward, principals of Synergy, and their staff will join Brown & Brown Insurance Agency of Virginia’s existing office in Manassas, Va.

Brown & Brown (NYSE: BRO), headquartered in Tampa and in Daytona Beach, offers a broad range of insurance and reinsurance products.

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Baltimore City Council should require that all city workers are paid a higher living wage before it takes a second look at imposing the requiring on large retailers, a key city councilman said.

Councilman Warren Branch, chairman of City Council’s Labor subcommittee, raised the issue during a hearing on a proposed living wage bill. The bill, rejected July 22, would have required retailers grossing at least $10 million in sales a year to pay their employees an hourly wage set by the city. That amount is $10.59 and applies now to city contractors that do business with the city.

Branch said before the city considers the matter again it should ensure its own workers are being paid a living wage as well.

“Shouldn’t we clean our own houses out first before we talk about cleaning someone’s house?” Branch asked at Thursday’s hearing.

The city’s living wage bill does not apply to city employees, whose wages are negotiated by collective bargaining agreements. Temporary workers for the Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Solid Waste are not part of those agreements, department spokesman Robert Murrow said. There are 66 seasonal workers who get paid $7.90 an hour. That amount is

more than the state and federal minimum wage rates of $7.25 an hour but less than the city’s living wage for contractors no faxing payday loan. Another group of 25 tempoary workers with commercial driver’s licenses earn $11 an hour.

Those temporary workers are supposed to become city employees after two years of employment, but many are kept on beyond that date if full-time positions are not available. There are a dozen of those employees, but Murrow said the department is now trying to place them into permanent positions. He said the department has looked at the pay disparity and hopes to pay its temporary workers a living wage when finances permit.

“At this time that might not be fiscally possible but we’re aware of that,” he said.

Branch said he will try to rally City Council to increase those workers’ wages, which he said should happen before it takes another look at requiring retailers to pay a living wage to their employees. “As a collective group, that’s what we should do,” Branch said in an interview.

Council members James Kraft and Mary Pat Clarke also expressed support for the idea. Clarke, who sponsored the defeated living wage bill for retailers, said she will look to Branch to sponsor the wage increase for temporary city workers.

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The leaders of the Group of Eight world economic powers have taken the first steps toward a "broad consensus" on the need to balance growth with shrinking deficits, a senior White House official said Friday.

President Obama attended a luncheon at the G-8 summit in Toronto to discuss economic policies with the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom, according to the official.

The official acknowledged that there were different "points of emphasis" among the leaders at the meeting, which is in its early stages. But he said there is a "convergence of views" and that the president is "confident" about the upcoming meetings of the Group of 20 nations, which includes China, India and other developing economic powers.

"There is broad consensus among G-8 leaders on how to maintain durable growth while reaffirming our shared commitment to fiscal consolidation going forward," the official said.

President Obama has stressed the need to keep economic stimulus measures in place to prevent a global slowdown. But European nations have been moving toward more conservative fiscal policies as the region grapples with an ongoing debt crisis.

In a letter to G-20 leaders sent earlier this week, the president wrote that safeguarding and strengthening the economic recovery should be "our highest priority in Toronto lowest fee payday loans."

"This means that we should reaffirm our unity of purpose to provide the policy support necessary to keep economic growth strong," he wrote. "In fact, should confidence in the strength of our recoveries diminish, we should be prepared to respond again as quickly and as forcefully as needed to avert a slowdown in economic activity."

Meanwhile, European nations have been cutting back on public spending and raising taxes to cope with massive budget deficits. The euro has been in a tailspin as investors bet against the proposed austerity measures and worry the European Union could slide back into recession.

On Tuesday, the United Kingdom unveiled one of its harshest budgets in decades. The five-year budget, widely anticipated by fiscal experts, may hold lessons for U.S. policymakers who will face similar quandaries about how to rein in debt.

"The president sees deficit reduction as part of a long-term growth strategy," the White House official said. 

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Guilford County School has applied for more than $17 million in federal grants to help it achieve goals contained in the district's strategic plan.

One application is to the Teacher Incentive Fund for $12.5 million to support individual and school-wide incentive programs. A separate grant of $5 million from "Investing in Innovation" or i3 would be directed toward plan goals in recruitment, retention and employee development.

“The Strategic Plan calls for staff to put strategies in place that will lead to increases in student achievement, and educators are the greatest factor impacting student success,” said Amy Holcombe, executive director of talent development. “At least 80 percent of our budget is devoted to people. An investment in educators is an investment in our students.”

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Gov. Bev Perdue confirmed late Thursday afternoon that American Express will build a new data center in eastern Guilford County.

American Express had sought a location for a new $400 million data center that would employ up to 150 people.

“The decision today by American Express is great news for Guilford County and for North Carolina,” Perdue said in a statement. “I spoke recently to the American Express CEO, during the company’s final decision-making process, and emphasized North Carolina’s outstanding work force and business-friendly environment. We clearly made a compelling case to land this important project, bolstering our already-strong reputation as an excellent location for data centers, which bring sustainable jobs and significant investment.”

American Express already employs more than 2,000 people in Greensboro at a customer service center.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday he has concerns about a signature piece of Senate Democrats’ Wall Street reform package that cracks down on complex financial products.

Bernanke wrote about the consequences from a congressional ban preventing banks from trading the complex financial products, called derivatives, in a letter to key lawmakers.

"Forcing these activities out of insured depository institutions would weaken both financial stability and strong prudential regulation of derivative activities," Bernanke wrote to an author of the measure, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

Dodd worked with Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., on the measure, including the swaps ban, which ranks among the top hang-ups that could threaten final passage for the overall Wall Street reform bill.

Progress on the bill has been slow going, and the Senate will continue debating amendments at least through early next week, Dodd said Thursday.

The Fed chair’s concerns about the swaps ban are similar to those raised by other high profile regulators — former Fed chairman Paul Volcker and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair. They all stopped short of blasting the measure.

The tough crackdown in question is the brainchild of Sen. Lincoln, who is facing a contentious Democratic primary in Arkansas on Tuesday in her bid for re-election. The Senate isn’t expected to propose changes to the measure until after Tuesday, congressional aides and lobbyists say.

Congress generally wants to get tougher on derivatives, which are currently traded with no oversight and were a key reason for the taxpayer bailout of American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500). But lawmakers disagree about how much to regulate them.

The measure banning bank swaps goes farther than the so-called Volcker rule, named for the former Fed chief, that would only block some banks from doing such trades for their own purposes and accounts, called "proprietary trading."

The Lincoln proposal blocks banks from all derivatives if the banks want access to cheap emergency loans that the Federal Reserve can make as lender of last resort.

Bernanke said in the letter that banks use derivatives to shed risk that can arise in deals they make over interest rates, currency and other credit risks.

"Use of derivatives by depository institutions to mitigate risks in the banking business also provides important protection to the deposit insurance fund and taxpayers as well as to the financial system more broadly," Bernanke wrote.

A House bill that passed in December would allow all banks to trade derivatives in a more transparent way. However that bill also allows some trades between some banks and certain companies, such as airlines, to continue without regulation.

But Senate Democrats are tougher on derivatives, in the aftermath of fraud charges that the Securities and Exchange Commission levied against Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) for selling a complex mortgage-related derivative to investors while failing to tell them that a hedge fund was betting against the product.

When asked about negotiations on the derivatives piece on Thursday, Dodd said he understood that discussions were ongoing, but he wasn’t involved in them. 

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If you can’t fight the federal government, you may as well pay ‘em. Especially if you’re Goldman Sachs.

In recent days, Wall Street has been abuzz with speculation that Goldman attorneys have entered preliminary talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission with the hopes of settling the outstanding federal fraud charges now facing the company.

Executives at the New York City-based investment bank have offered similar hints.

"There are a myriad of opportunities out there and I won’t rule any of them out," Gary Cohn, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said at the conclusion of the firm’s annual shareholder meeting last week.

A settlement with the SEC would likely bring to an end at least some of the negative publicity Goldman has had to endure since regulators charged the company and one of its employees with defrauding investors in the sale of a complex mortgage investment dubbed "Abacus."

Determining just how much Goldman (GS, Fortune 500) might be on the hook for however, is not simple.

Some legal experts said that a settlement could exceed the $1 billion the SEC claims that investors lost on the deal. That’s due to the high-profile nature of the case and the lack of bargaining power Goldman may have with regulators.

"As a principal regulator, [the SEC] can negatively impact Goldman’s ongoing businesses," said David Desser, managing director of the Chicago-based Juris Capital, a privately-held fund that invests in commercial litigation. "That is a big hammer that no other litigant has against an adversary in court."

A penalty of more than $1 billion would rank as the largest SEC settlement in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era, eclipsing the $800 million AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) paid to the agency to settle claims related to misstatement of financial results in 2006, according to NERA Economic Consulting.

Others suggest that the SEC may be willing to accept just a fraction of that amount, citing some of its recent settlements as well as the mountain of other enforcement cases the agency has to deal with.

But what Goldman ultimately pays may prove to be of secondary importance.

After all, for a company that is expected to earn $13 billion in pre-tax profits in the next three quarters, according to Thomson Reuters, any fine will likely be quite manageable, especially if a settlement allows Goldman to avoid being in the public spotlight as much it has during the last year.

Instead, legal experts suggest that Goldman may be particularly fearful of any additional demands the SEC may have as part of a settlement.

The agency could, for example, require the company to create greater distance between its mortgage underwriting and trading operations or provide greater transparency to clients about its different investment products.

"Part of it was the difficulty in valuing these derivatives," said Elizabeth Nowicki, a securities law professor at Boston University, who formerly served as a staff attorney for the SEC. "It might be reasonable for the SEC to insist on some best practices disclosures regarding valuation."

Such a move would not be a major departure for the SEC. In the high-profile settlement it reached earlier this year with Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) over bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees, the banking giant was required to implement a number of corporate governance measures through 2013, including giving its shareholders an advisory vote on the pay of its executives.

Any deal that is struck between Goldman and the SEC might also resolve the fate of Fabrice Tourre, the 31-year-old French trader who helped broker the now infamous investment deal.

Most experts agree that if Tourre is included in a settlement, chances are he could face a fine as well as a suspension from the securities industry for as much as a year.

Goldman Sachs, which has already moved to distance itself from the London-based employee, will most certainly be looking for ways to insulate itself from any future legal action.

Experts said Goldman could also push the SEC to include language in any settlement that Goldman neither "admits nor denies" the SEC charges.

James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University, said that the company might also attempt to seek a so-called "global settlement," which would absolve the company of any outstanding current or future federal or state lawsuits over the 2007 Abacus transaction or similar mortgage deals.

That would at least alleviate some of the legal headaches the firm is currently facing.

In two separate securities filings this month, Goldman acknowledged it now faces a variety of related lawsuits, as well as investigations from a number of international regulatory agencies, including Britain’s Financial Services Authority, over the sale of mortgage-related investments.

"[Goldman] wants peace and assurance going forward," said Cox.  

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It’s spring, the eternal season of rejuvenation.

And that has some hoping, at last, for a rebirth of the housing market.

It has been a rough two years, with buyers and sellers battered by a wave of foreclosures, tight credit and uncertain job prospects. Government support — in the form of tax credits and federal backing for mortgages — has helped keep sales moving. But now those supports are ending, making this spring a key test of whether the housing market can walk on its own again.

"The next 60 days, they should tell us where we’re going," said Letty Demay, president of the St. Louis Association of Realtors. "Hopefully we’re going to see a good year."

Despite the long, grim slide, there are reasons for optimism: Chief among them is the fact that, for people with cash and confidence in their jobs, it is a good time to buy a house.

Between low prices, rock-bottom interest rates and the tax breaks for first-time homebuyers, housing is as affordable as it has been in years. Prices in St. Louis are back at 2004 levels, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and data tracked by Wells Fargo say the number of St. Louisans who can afford to buy is near 18-year highs.

That is driving a surge of interest this spring. Area real estate agents are busier than they have been in quite some time, Demay said. Phones are ringing. Houses are getting shown.

"I think overall we’ve got a stronger market than we’ve had in the last 18 months," she said.

And while that strength hasn’t yet shown up in sales numbers, which are not yet available for March, it is beginning to show in homes under contract. In the first week of April, the number of pending sales in St. Louis County — homes that are in contract but not yet closed upon — was nearly back to 2008 levels, after plunging 42 percent last year, according to data from Kelsey Cottrell Realty.

The market is strongest at lower price points, where the $8,000 tax credit has more impact and financing is easier to come by. The share of listings under $300,000 that are in contract is actually higher than it was two years ago, said the firm’s co-owner Kevin Cottrell. He said his agents were seeing something they hadn’t in quite some time: homes selling not in weeks, but in days.

"If they’re priced right, they won’t even make it to the weekend," he said.

But some of that strength comes from supports that are soon to be pulled out.

Homes must be in contract by April 30 to qualify for the $8,000 tax credit; and unlike last fall, when it was first set to expire, there is little momentum in Congress for another extension.

Meanwhile, interest rates are widely expected to rise after the Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage-backed securities at the end of March.

So far, rate increases haven’t happened — Freddie Mac’s average 30-year fixed rate mortgage climbed from 5.08 percent to 5.21 before falling back to 5.07 a week later — but many experts think they will creep up over the next few months if the economy improves. Some predict six percent by year’s end.

That’s still low by historic standards, but over 30 years every 1 percentage point increase adds roughly 10 percent to the cost of the loan.

That, as much as anything, may push more people to buy this spring, Cottrell said, even if they don’t hit the tax credit’s timeline.

"What does your total cost of ownership look like if rates go above 6 percent?" he asked. "It’s really not about the $8,000 credit, it’s about what you’re going to spend to own the thing."

But the recovery is still tentative, and nobody is expecting the market to roar back, especially in the area that most interests sellers: price.

Prices have bounced back a bit in the past six months but are still well off their mid-decade peaks. Median prices in St. Louis have dropped 6.5 percent over the past three years, said David Stiff, chief economist for Fiserv, a financial data firm. He said he expected a roughly 1 percent decline in both 2010 and 2011. It’ll be 2014 before prices fully rebound here, he said.

"Unemployment is still quite high, and that will remain a drag on housing demand," Stiff said. "We’re expecting prices to bottom out at the end of the year. And then I think it’ll be a pretty slow recovery."

Still, he said, the housing market is on the way to recovery. There may be some stops and starts. Sales may drop again after April 30. But a recovery is coming.

"We’re far closer than we have been," Stiff said.

Just how close, we will find out soon.

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A federal grand jury returned indictments against two Roseville residents, charging them with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that Nicholas Summerlin and Angelica Parson, both 22, sold illegal copies of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection 3, Microsoft Office 2007, and Rosetta Stone language software. The software had a combined retail value of $561,430.

Both received a cease-and-desist letter from Rosetta Stone, but they allegedly kept selling their pirated software in 330 transactions in 2008 and 2009.

The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Unit of the Sacramento U.S. Attorney’s office is prosecuting the pair, said a release from Benjamin Wagner, U.S. Attorney in the California Eastern District, based in Sacramento.

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