Bezos Makes First Visit to Washington Post as Owner

Jeffrey P. Bezos, the new owner of The Washington Post, kicked off a packed, two-day visit to the paper on Tuesday, his first since purchasing the newspaper for $250 million on Aug. 5. Mr. Bezos was meeting with managers on the editorial and business sides, according to people with knowledge of his schedule, at times chaperoned by Katharine Weymouth, the publisher and a member of the Graham family from whom Mr. Bezos bought the paper.

On Wednesday, he is expected to meet with reporters, hold a noon lunch with editors, tour the Post’s printing plant in Springfield, Va., and answer questions during a meeting with the newsroom staff at 3:30 p.m.

While Mr. Bezos can often be reticent with the press, he gave an interview to The Post that ran on Monday’s front page and said he was ready for The Post to start a new “golden era” under his ownership. Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com who now serves as the company’s chairman and chief executive, bought The Post as a separate investment from Amazon.

But he told The Post that he planned to bring to the newspaper some of the same approaches that had been successful for Amazon.

“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient,” he said. “If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.”

Mr. Bezos said he did not expect to be involved with the daily operations of The Post. Instead, he said, he will offer his “point of view” and financial support. “I’ll be there with lots of advice from a distance,” said Mr. Bezos.

Mr. Bezos is expected to close on the deal in October. The Graham family had controlled the paper for about eight decades.

Indian Manufacturing Shrinks for First Time in Four Years

BANGALORE, India — Indian factory activity shrank for the first time in more than four years last month, a survey showed Monday, adding to the country’s deepening economic malaise even as the central bank struggles to defend the battered rupee.

The bleak purchasing managers’ index comes hard on the heels of data Friday that showed Asia’s third-largest economy had grown at its slowest quarterly rate in the three months to June since the global financial crisis, suggesting more pain ahead.

The HSBC Manufacturing P.M.I., compiled by Markit, sank to 48.5 in August from 50.1 in July, the lowest reading since March 2009. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a fall to 49.9.

The index, which gauges business activity in Indian factories but not utilities, had been close to the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction since May, but falling orders dragged it under last month.

“Manufacturing activity contracted in August for the first time since March 2009. This was led by a decline in new orders, especially export orders,” said Leif Eskesen, chief economist for India at HSBC, the survey’s sponsor.

The survey showed new export orders shrank for the first time in a year.

In a sign that domestic demand is also faltering, new orders, which include domestic orders, shrank at a faster pace. The index fell for the sixth straight month to 47.5 in August, its lowest since February 2009.

Strategies: Rosy Earnings Forecasts, at Least at First

IS the glass half full or half empty? For several thousand analysts who make a living assessing the value of publicly traded stocks, the answer depends on which week it happens to be.

That’s what a study of the Standard & Poor’s 500 earnings cycle by Thomson Reuters/I/B/E/S shows.

The distant future sometimes looks better than the mundane day-to-day of the moment. For stock analysts who crunch numbers to come up with earnings estimates for individual companies, the far horizon is often just one year down the road. And the numbers show that when analysts estimate quarterly earnings a year in advance, they tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the prospects of companies they cover, according to Greg Harrison, the senior research analyst at Thomson Reuters who did the study.

Mr. Harrison’s day job involves compiling consensus earnings estimates for the overall stock market, figures he derives from the collective appraisals published by thousands of individual analysts. Does the market expect earnings for the S.& P. 500-stock index to rise or fall, and by how much? Have companies met expectations for the quarter, or will they disappoint the market? Some of the answers come from the data he gathers each week.

But while doing his work, he noticed a consistent pattern in the numbers, which he describes in a fascinating study of earnings since 2008, titled “Estimates Too High, Low? Check the Calendar.”

Except for several quarters in the Great Recession, he found, early earnings estimates are generally rosy, and become predictably and progressively gloomier as time goes on. As analysts revise estimates downward, it becomes easier for companies to beat the market consensus, creating what Wall Street calls a “positive earnings surprise” roughly two-thirds of the time.

Positive surprises, of course, are good for share prices. Negative surprises are not. And by being optimistic about the long-term future, and relatively pessimistic about immediate results, the quarterly cycle of stock market earnings estimates has the effect of bolstering the market.

Analysts, of course, are encouraged in this practice by corporate executives who routinely issue warnings — “guidance,” in Wall Street parlance — that their companies won’t really meet the analysts’ lofty targets. The analysts respond by lowering their targets.

Typically, Mr. Harrison finds, analysts are most accurate — neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic — about seven weeks before companies actually release earnings.

“That’s when analysts’ estimates and the eventual, real numbers meet,” Mr. Harrison said. But the analysts don’t leave well enough alone. Instead, they keep cutting their forecasts and end up being gloomier than reality warrants. “By the time earnings season actually ends,” he says, “it turns out that the analysts have been too pessimistic — and we end up with a lot of ‘earnings surprises.’ ”

We’re now near the end of the earnings season for the second quarter. Most big companies have already issued their final numbers for the period, and the current pattern fits the overall picture fairly well, Mr. Harrison says.

On July 2, 2012, for example, when he compiled the first market consensus for the second quarter of this year, analysts as a group were projecting great things for stocks one year ahead. They said earnings would grow at the blistering pace of 14.4 percent in the second quarter of 2013.

Reality hasn’t come close to matching that early optimism — but because analysts repeatedly ratcheted their projections downward, earnings reports have been surpassing the relatively pessimistic estimates of recent weeks.

On Friday, with 462 members of the S.& P. 500 reporting, Mr. Harrison found that the actual growth rate so far has been only 4.9 percent. Yet 67 percent of those companies beat the analysts’ estimates, producing positive surprises. How was that possible? Analysts collectively dropped their estimates for the quarter to only 2.9 percent on July 1, when earnings season began. The actual results were much better than that.

The rough pattern held for many major companies. Consider General Motors. On July 2, 2012, analysts covering G.M. estimated that it would have earnings per share of $1.25 in the second quarter of 2013. That July, the estimate of Ryan Brinkman, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, was $1.12. G.M. has “best-in-class leverage to global growth markets, ongoing operational turnaround, and improving product cadence,” he wrote.

G.M. has had problems, however. The company acknowledged that it was doing poorly in Europe. By mid-April, after a report that industrywide sales there had plummeted to a 30-year low, and that G.M.’s Opel brand was lagging, analysts’ estimates fell to 73 cents a share. Mr. Brinkman’s was 72 cents. For all analysts, they stood at 74 cents at the beginning of July and edged up to 75 cents the week of July 12.

But that was still way off the mark. G.M.’s actual earnings, released on July 25, were 84 cents a share. Although earnings declined compared with a year earlier, news coverage generally treated the announcement as a positive surprise.

Mark Bradshaw, an accounting professor at Boston College, says what we are seeing is probably overconfidence by analysts and deft maneuvering by corporate executives, who have leeway in adjusting accounting to improve reported profits and in choosing what information to reveal. “For companies, issuing ‘guidance’ has become an art form,” he said. “The analysts seem to try to do what they can, but they’re often at a loss.”

Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, called the earnings season “a Kabuki dance” in which “analysts are trying to forecast; companies are trying on the other side, with accounting choices, to affect those earnings and to lower the forecasts; the companies watch the analysts; the analysts watch the earnings; and it’s all a big game. And it’s a game that the companies generally win.”

Frequent traders scrutinize these rituals, he said, seeking nuance. For them, he said, “it’s not enough now just to beat the earnings forecast. That’s too common. Now, you’ve got to beat the forecast enough — by a big-enough number that it really is a surprise — if you want to stir up the market.”

In his view, most of us would be better off ignoring short-term earnings reports. “None of this matters much to long-term investors,” he said. “It’s the long-term picture that’s important, and that is revealed eventually, even if it isn’t clear now.”

Is the glass half full or half empty? Don’t even try to figure that out during earnings season.

‘NewsHour’ Appoints First Female Anchor Team

The PBS “NewsHour,” which was co-anchored for decades by the two men who created it, will soon be co-anchored by two women.

PBS announced on Tuesday that Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff would take over the nightly newscast in September, putting an end to the rotating anchor format that has been in effect for several years. Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff will also share the managing-editor responsibilities for the program.

The appointments are another milestone for women on television and in journalism, seven years after Katie Couric became the first female solo anchor of a network nightly newscast. PBS noted in a news release that “this will mark the first time a network broadcast has had a female co-anchor team.”

The co-anchor arrangement harks back to the 1970s, when Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil founded the nightly newscast that was later named “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” The two men jointly presented the program until 1995, when Mr. MacNeil retired. Mr. Lehrer continued to anchor it until 2011, when he retired. Their company, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, remains in charge of “NewsHour,” and they were involved in the discussions that culminated in Tuesday’s announcement.

“If Gwen and I can be the team that Jim and Robin were, we will consider that a success,” Ms. Woodruff said in a telephone interview.

Asked what advice the two former anchors had given them, Ms. Ifill said in a separate interview, “They told us to stick close together and to stay friends.”

Ms. Woodruff and Ms. Ifill already are close, having crossed paths in Washington, where they both live, countless times, and having “appeared on endless panels together discussing women in journalism,” as Ms. Ifill put it.

Ms. Ifill, who is black, said that she and Ms. Woodruff were mindful of the broader significance of their appointment.“When I was a little girl watching programs like this — because that’s the kind of nerdy family we were — I would look up and not see anyone who looked like me in any way. No women. No people of color,” she said.

“I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal — that it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all,” she added.

Ms. Ifill, 57, a veteran of newspapers including The New York Times, was a Washington correspondent for NBC before becoming the moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” and a senior correspondent for “NewsHour” in 1999. Ms. Woodruff, 66, was the chief Washington correspondent for “NewsHour” in the 1980s. After a dozen years at CNN and some outside work, she rejoined the program as a senior correspondent in 2007.

Tuesday’s announcement was, among other things, an admission that a rotating anchor format is not preferable for an extended period of time. At the end of 2009, as Mr. Lehrer approached retirement, Ms. Ifill, Ms. Woodruff and three other correspondents — Jeffrey Brown, Ray Suarez and Margaret Warner — started to take turns anchoring the “NewsHour” with him. After he retired, this format remained in place, with two of the five in place each weeknight. “It was a way to give each of them a chance,” said Linda Winslow, the program’s executive producer, praising the lineup of “really powerful people.”

But the arrangement made production of the “NewsHour” unwieldy at times, and it confused viewers, at least some of whom expect to see the same face or faces every night.

Last year Ms. Ifill and Ms. Woodruff were chosen to anchor PBS’s coverage of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. “You never know until you’re elbow to elbow how well it’s going to work,” Ms. Ifill said. “It worked really well for us. We sat next to each other and had a ball.”

They teamed up again on election night. Ms. Winslow said “NewsHour” producers and PBS executives noticed the campaign-year anchor work, and “it just struck us that we were able to promote our product better when we had identifiable anchors.”

And “it wasn’t, to be frank, an unattractive feature that they would become the first female co-anchor team of a nightly newscast,” Ms. Winslow said.

The anchor change became final last week. It might have happened sooner, but “NewsHour” faced a serious financial shortfall earlier this year that resulted in a round of layoffs and the closing of its two bureaus outside the Washington area, where the program is produced. Ms. Winslow said the changes at the anchor desk were unrelated to budget issues.

Mr. Brown, Mr. Suarez and Ms. Warner will remain with “NewsHour,” now as “chief correspondents,” each with an area of expertise “that will also help define the program,” Ms. Winslow said.

In interviews, Ms. Woodruff and Ms. Ifill seemed realistic about the challenge ahead: to not just maintain the nightly audience for “NewsHour” — about one million viewers tune in each night, according to Nielsen — but to somehow expand it.

“This show is not going to be overhauled — we think it’s a treasure the way it is,” Ms. Woodruff said. “But we do want to do some tweaking. I think we have the freedom to do some experimenting.”

Both journalists said they envisaged opportunities for more fully integrating the Web and social media into the program, as virtually all news programs have sought to do in recent years. “We want to go where the viewers are,” Ms. Ifill said, “not think that they’re going to come find us.”

Raskin Would Be First Female Deputy at Treasury

Ms. Raskin is a Federal Reserve governor and a former state banking regulator. At the Treasury, Ms. Raskin would take the position held by Neal S. Wolin since the beginning of the administration.

In a statement about Ms. Raskin, Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, said, “Sarah has a deep understanding of banking and financial regulatory issues as well as a firm grasp of how to run large, complex organizations.” He added, “Sarah has demonstrated a strong commitment to protecting consumers, and she shares my conviction to do everything possible to increase job creation, accelerate economic growth and strengthen the middle class.”

A person with knowledge of the process, but without permission to speak on the record about personnel policy, said Mr. Lew had put forward Ms. Raskin’s name for the job and was particularly interested in her administrative abilities. The deputy secretary takes a large role in running the sprawling department, with tasks as diverse as the minting of currency and the collecting of taxes.

Mr. Lew also appreciated her knowledge of financial markets and regulation given the enormous continuing task of putting into effect the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law, this person said.

Ms. Raskin is lawyer who was trained at Harvard and who worked as a Maryland state regulatory official before joining the Fed in 2010. She had earlier worked on Capitol Hill and at the Promontory Financial Group, a consultancy.

Ms. Raskin’s move to the Treasury would leave yet another vacancy at the central bank. The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, is widely expected to leave at the end of his term in January, and Elizabeth A. Duke, a Fed governor, plans to step down in late August.

The search for a new Federal Reserve leader has raised questions about the relative dearth of women in top economic policy-making positions. Janet Yellen, the Fed vice chairwoman, is considered a contender for the top job. Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and economic adviser to Mr. Obama, is also considered a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Bernanke.

Some Democratic members of Congress and economists have urged Mr. Obama to appoint Ms. Yellen, while several current and former White House aides are said to be pressing for Mr. Summers.

DealBook: JPMorgan and Wells Fargo Feel First Chill of Rising Interest Rates

Leslye Davis/The New York TimesJPMorgan’s profit on mortgages fell 14 percent in the last quarter.

Even as two of the nation’s largest banks reported record profits on Friday, beneath the rosy earnings were signs that a sharp uptick in interest rates could spell trouble ahead for Wall Street and the broader housing market.

Kicking off bank earnings season, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo handily beat analysts’ expectations. Profit at JPMorgan surged 31 percent, bolstered by gains in the bank’s trading and investment banking business. Wells Fargo, the biggest home lender in the country, posted a 19 percent increase in its second-quarter profit.

The gains were spread across the banks except for one important source: mortgage banking. The results showed that refinancing activity slowed, as did demand for mortgage loans.

The results could worsen. If rates continue to rise, fewer borrowers are likely to refinance or buy a house. And if the mortgage bond market weakens, banks will take a smaller gain when selling the mortgages.

While these concerns have loomed for months, the earnings on Friday offered the clearest picture yet of how the interest rate turmoil could affect the banks, whose fortunes hinge in part on their lending businesses.

“We’re trying to be clear with you that this would be a significant event,” Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, said on Friday, referring to the potential effect of rising rates on the industry. She cautioned analysts that the volumes of mortgage refinancing could plunge by an “estimated 30 percent to 40 percent” in the second half of this year.

The results from JPMorgan and Wells are a barometer for the housing market because the two banks together account for the majority of all mortgages in the United States. In recent years, the recovery in the market has fueled the earnings of both companies and has also played a significant role in the broader economic rebound.

Mark Lennihan/Associated PressJohn Stumpf, chief of Wells Fargo, noted that higher rates reflected a mending economy. “I’ll take that trade all day,” he said.

Until now, the banks have benefited from government policies intended to stimulate the economy in the wake of the financial crisis. As the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in recent years, for example, it spurred millions of borrowers to refinance their home loans to take advantage of the lower costs.

But the Fed has signaled in recent weeks that it could ease its stimulus as the economy continues to recover. The warning has prompted investors to drive up interest rates around the globe. Since Fed officials first hinted that they might retreat, the rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has risen to 4.78 percent from a low of 3.54 percent.

The banks’ second-quarter results show the early results of the sudden surge. In the second quarter, Wells Fargo received $146 billion worth of quarterly home loan applications, down from $208 billion in the period a year earlier. Its mortgage originations totaled $112 billion, down from $131 billion.

At JPMorgan, mortgage originations rose 12 percent in the quarter, to $49 billion, but overall profit in mortgage banking fell by 14 percent, to $1.1 billion.

On Friday, JPMorgan executives said the slowdown could be even more extreme than previous forecasts have suggested. While both banks might be able to seize on the uptick in interest rates to create a bigger spread between the income they derive from lending and the ultimate cost of borrowing, those benefits proved elusive.

Net interest margin, a critical measure that reveals how much profit banks earn on their loans, fell at JPMorgan, settling in at 2.60 percent for the quarter, from 2.83 percent in the previous quarter. At Wells Fargo, it was 3.46 percent, down from 3.48 percent in the first quarter.

The results suggested that the surge in interest rates came too late in the second quarter to significantly affect the banks, but that the increase could cause deeper problems in the second half of the year.

Christopher Whalen, an investor and housing market analyst at Carrington Investment Services, said that the numbers that Wells and JPMorgan presented were a “very big deal.”

“Everybody in the mortgage industry is going to have to reassess their view of this year and next,” Mr. Whalen said.

Rising rates, though, might help other parts of the banks’ business. Within its fixed-income trading operations, for example, JPMorgan reported an 18 percent increase in revenue. Fees in JPMorgan’s investment banking unit surged 38 percent, to $1.7 billion.

Wells Fargo executives played down the significance of the rate change, noting that mortgage rates were still extremely low by historical standards. John Stumpf, the bank’s chief executive, pointed to the interest he paid for his own mortgages.

“If you were in the mortgage market before 2000, you know that these are unbelievably good rates,” Mr. Stumpf said. “My first mortgage was at 8.5 percent. My second one was at 11.5 percent, and I thought those were great rates at those times.”

Mr. Stumpf noted that the uptick in rates stemmed from the Fed’s indication that the economy was improving. Housing prices are rising and demand for homes has soared.

As the improvements continue, he said, a growth in loans for new home purchases will more than make up for any losses in refinancing.

“I’ll take that trade all day,” Mr. Stumpf said. “It’s good for America, it’s good for the economy and in the long term, it’s good for our business.”

Wells’s overall loan portfolio, which includes commercial and consumer lending, actually rose 3 percent to $802 billion in the second quarter. A bump in credit cards and commercial lending — and record origination of auto loans — further offset the home loan slowdown. The bank’s total average deposits reached $1 trillion, up 9 percent from a year ago.

But important drivers of the returns at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan did not stem from substantial growth in the underlying businesses. Instead, they came from reduced expenses.

Wells Fargo, for example, reduced a crucial expense — building a reserve for bad loans. This move reflected improvements in the quality of loans.

In the second quarter, JPMorgan also lifted its profits by reducing loan-loss reserves by $1.5 billion. The bank defended the practice, saying it pointed to the improving condition of its loans.

Yet Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, conceded that fresh loan growth was still “soft.”

Nathaniel Popper contributed reporting.

Douglas J. Dayton, First President of Target, Dies at 88

The cause was cancer, his family said.

Mr. Dayton was one of six grandsons who went into the family business started by George D. Dayton, a New York banker and real estate investor. George Dayton moved to Minnesota in 1881 and by 1903 had established the Dayton Dry Goods Company.

Six decades later, after the dry goods store became a department store called the Dayton Company with locations around the Twin Cities, Douglas Dayton was made president of the company’s new subsidiary, a discount chain.

In May 1961, a year before the first Target store opened in Roseville, Minn., Mr. Douglas told The Minneapolis Tribune that the company would “combine the best of the fashion world with the best of the discount world, a quality store with quality merchandise at discount prices.”

By the next year, customers in Duluth were so impressed that they began calling their store “Tarzhay.” Mr. Dayton soon boasted to his skeptical brothers that Target would become a $100 million business.

It did in 1968. By 1975, Target had become the family company’s top revenue producer. By the late 1970s, its revenue exceeded $1 billion.

Even when competitors like Kmart initially grew at a faster rate, Mr. Dayton expressed confidence in Target’s strategy.

“I am thoroughly convinced that we are selling a superior product that will bear the test of time,” he told other executives in 1968, according to “On Target: How the World’s Hottest Retailer Hit a Bull’s-Eye,” a 2003 book by Laura Rowley.

Mr. Dayton left Target in 1968 to become vice president of the parent company, which had been renamed the Dayton-Hudson Corporation after a merger with another department store chain. By the late 1970s, most of the Dayton family members had given up their management positions. Douglas Dayton left the company in 1972. From 1974 to 1994 he ran a venture capital firm, Dade Development Capital.

In Target’s early years, Mr. Dayton worked closely with another executive, John F. Geisse. In 1982, Mr. Geisse helped found another discounter, the Wholesale Club, which later merged with the Sam’s Club division of Wal-Mart.

Douglas James Dayton was born on Dec. 2, 1924, in Minneapolis, the youngest of five brothers. His father, George N. Dayton, became president of the family business in 1938. Douglas Dayton graduated from the Blake School and attended Amherst College before joining the Army in 1943.

His survivors include his wife, Wendy; three sons, David, Steve and Bruce; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth; six grandchildren; and a brother, Bruce, who served on the board of Target until 1983.

Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota is Douglas Dayton’s nephew.

DealBook: Merger Activity Was Down but Not Out in First Half

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Employment Law: DOJ Settles Its First ADA Hepatitis B Bias Claim

On March 5, the U.S. Department of Justice reached a settlement with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The settlement agreement resolved allegations that UMDNJ rejected applicants to its medical school and school of osteopathic medicine because the applicants have hepatitis B.

Bits Blog: Microsoft Names First Female Finance Chief

Microsoft Amy Hood, Microsoft’s new chief financial officer.

Microsoft named Amy Hood, an executive at the company, as its chief financial officer, the first woman to hold the top finance job at Microsoft.

Ms. Hood, 41, joined Microsoft in late 2002 and was most recently the chief financial officer of Microsoft’s business division, the unit that oversees its lucrative Office suite of applications. She replaces Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer who announced recently that he was resigning to spend more time with his family.

A number of women have risen to Microsoft’s top ranks, but like most technology companies, its senior leadership is still dominated by men. One exception is Lisa Brummel, who, as chief people officer, runs the company’s human resources department. Late last year, Microsoft appointed two women, Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, to run the engineering and finance operations of the company’s Windows division, one of its most important units.

As chief financial officer, Ms. Hood will play a bigger role in helping Microsoft adapt to major changes in its business, most notably the shift to mobile devices from PCs and the transformation of traditional software into cloud services. In a sign of these changes, for the last six months, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer, has begun talking about Microsoft as a devices and services company.

Ms. Hood will also serve as Microsoft’s ambassador to Wall Street, which has for years looked skeptically at the company’s efforts to enter new businesses like Internet search. After a recent solid earnings report from Microsoft, investors have become more bullish on the company’s prospects. Its shares now trade near their 52-week high.

In an e-mail to Microsoft employees on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer said Ms. Hood had helped lead the change of Microsoft Office into a cloud service. He said that he worked closely with her on two big acquisitions, that of Skype and Yammer, and that her critical thinking would be an important skill in her new job.

“Amy is a great collaborator with a history of successful cross-group projects, and I am looking forward to having her as a member of my leadership team,” Mr. Ballmer wrote.

Disruptions: New Motto for Silicon Valley: First Security, Then Innovation

The Twitter account of The Associated Press was among many recently hacked.

At Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., are stark white posters with bright red statements like “Done is better than perfect” and “Move fast and break things.”

These disruptive philosophies embody the spirit not just of Facebook but of Silicon Valley. Yet today, when technology companies have become the prime targets of rogue governments and hackers, the ideologies that drive these companies to provoke could end up disrupting these companies.

Conversely, the signs sitting in security research firms across the country warn, “Carelessness causes security incidents.”

Although technology companies say they take security seriously, protecting their customers seems to come second to announcing new products. Take Twitter, where people’s accounts are frequently hacked. In the last few months alone, this has happened to Burger King, BBC, NPR, The Associated Press and a slew of celebrities and users. In that time, Twitter has proudly announced updates to features on its mobile and desktop apps, introduced a music Web site and redesigned its company blog. But it still hasn’t released two-factor authentication, a security tool used by the rest of the industry to deter hackers.

Although Twitter declined to comment, I’m sure most of the people on the site who have seen their accounts pilfered over the last several years would rather have two-factor authentication than a shiny new Twitter blog.

One solution is a bill crawling through Congress over the last two years, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as Cispa. The bill would make it easy for tech companies to share information about computer security threats with government agencies, helping fortify against cyberattacks.

But privacy groups say that Cispa is not a solution to the problem, and that instead it hands the highly sensitive personal data we want protected to the government.

“It has to be the obligation of these tech companies to build in security from the very beginning before we start moving into solutions about bringing the government into the private sector,” said Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based advocacy group financed by a broad coalition of technology and telecommunication companies. “You want to see these very innovative companies step up and become the leaders in security solutions first.”

Cispa’s creators and defenders see it differently. They argue that companies are not simply fortifying against a child in his bedroom who is trying to get into their servers for fun. Today’s hackers hail from foreign governments like those in China, Syria and Estonia, and are adept at getting what they want.

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who was one of the authors of Cispa, recently said that “our government, our industries and your personal information will be subjected to hundreds of thousands of attempts at hacking” in a single day. “We are in a stealthy cyber war in America. And we’re losing.”

He thinks the government can solve that problem.

Kelsey Knight, director of communications for Mr. Rogers, said in a phone interview that Cispa could stop “90 percent of the current security breaches” that happen today. “Then, in reverse, these companies would be able to share their threat of information and code back to the government and that will add to the list of zeros and ones that we can keep defending against together.”

Ms. Knight noted that start-ups cannot defend themselves against today’s advanced attacks because the cost can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. She said Cispa and other government groups can help.

One thing is clear: today’s tactics are not working.

During the State of the Union address this year, President Obama cited the need to protect “national security” and “privacy” while defending against cyber attacks. The president has also been meeting with chief executives to discuss ways to combat the threat of computer warfare and corporate espionage.

Cispa, now in the Senate, could take months, if not years, if it is to emerge at all from Congress. Until then, advocacy groups believe it falls to the start-ups to put more effort into security.

“The ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy is not a philosophy that has necessarily been good for our privacy,” Ms. Harris said. “I certainly believe that government and companies should be working together, but information sharing is just a very small part of the cyber security puzzle. It’s companies investing the resources to strengthen their own security first.”

Maybe it’s time for companies in Silicon Valley to replace those posters with ones that say, “Move slowly and protect your users.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

DealBook: Regulators to Send First Batch of Checks to Troubled Borrowers

Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressA foreclosed home in Queen Creek, Ariz. Major lenders agreed to a $9.3 billion pact with regulators to settle claims of foreclosure abuses.

The nation’s top banking regulators have some good news for some troubled homeowners: the checks will be in the mail soon.

Months after brokering a multibillion-dollar settlement with banks over mortgage foreclosure abuses, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are set to dole out roughly $1.2 billion in the first batch of payments. By April 12, the regulators expect to mail 1.4 million checks. An additional round of checks will be sent out by the middle of July, according to the regulators.

The settlement, which scuttled a deeply flawed review of millions of loans in foreclosure, will ultimately provide $3.6 billion in cash relief to borrowers who entered foreclosure in 2009 or 2010.

Among those borrowers in the first group to receive relief are the 1,082 service members who were foreclosed on illegally by banks. Under the settlement, each borrower will receive about $125,000, the largest amount of relief.

Homeowners who were foreclosed on even though they never missed a mortgage payment will also receive a check in the first round of payments. The comptroller’s office said that there were 53 such borrowers, whose homes will receive $125,000. Another 626 homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed on will receive $5,000 to $15,000 in relief because their foreclosure was not completed or was reversed.

The largest category of borrowers slated to get money are the more than half a million homeowners who were deprived of a loan modification or other loss mitigation assistance. The 568,476 borrowers that fall into that group are to receive $300 each.

For millions of Americans battling to save their homes, the checks are the first federal lifeline in years, according to housing advocates.

In January, the comptroller’s office scuttled the foreclosure review, which was hobbled by delays and inefficiencies. Instead, the regulator brokered a $9.3 billion settlement involving $3.6 billion of cash payments and other forms of relief. The review, which was hastily dismantled, was ordered by bank regulators in 2011 amid mounting concerns that banks were churning through piles of foreclosure files without reviewing them for accuracy.

The independent consultants hired to pour over millions of loan files only reviewed a sliver of the foreclosed loans. As homeowners languished, regulators opted to end the review in favor of the settlement. Even so, many homeowners have been waiting to receive relief.

The announcement of the payments comes just days before the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the foreclosure review. Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report that took aim at the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The regulators, the report found, created a dizzying bureaucratic process that ultimately slowed relief to homeowners. Problems with the review began almost from the outset in November 2011, the report said.

First Quarter

The two largest mutual funds specializing in health care — from Vanguard and T. Rowe Price — both have new managers.

Sluggish economic growth seems to be with investors for the long haul. So portfolio managers, noting record corporate profits, are puzzling out ways for shareholders to benefit.

NBC’s Ratings Plummet From First to Worst

The ratings of last September through December, when NBC shocked the television industry by winning 13 of 15 weeks, have dissipated to numbers so small they have not been seen before by any broadcast network — certainly not during a rating period known as a sweeps month, when networks present their strongest programming.

When the official numbers are completed Thursday, NBC will finish this sweeps month not only far behind its regular network competitors, but also well behind the Spanish-language Univision. No broadcast network has ever before finished a television season sweeps month in fifth place.

NBC executives expected a falloff after the N.F.L. season, but last December they expressed hope that some momentum could be sustained. Now, the network is playing by the silver-linings playbook.

“This February was tough, but thankfully the fall did as well as it did,” said Jeff Bader, the chief scheduling executive for NBC. “If we had the fall we were expecting — which was an improvement, but not to be No. 1 — this month would have been a lot harder to take. This is just frustrating.”

It is also likely to be costly. NBC executives previously acknowledged that their entertainment operation has been losing hundreds of millions a year. The financial picture is exacerbated by the dearth of popular shows NBC owns that it can sell in syndication, an area that generates hundreds of millions in profits for competitors, especially CBS.

Advertising executives note that ratings this month on many shows are so low they may force NBC to offer a spate of what are known as make-goods — free commercials to cover shortfalls from rating guarantees. And in less than three months NBC must unveil a new schedule for advertisers, one that will emphasize the improvements of last fall, but will also contain a short list of holdover shows with attractive ratings to sell. That will put great pressure on the lineup of new shows NBC selects.

The network’s prime-time record this month is a litany of ratings sorrows: Shows that looked like hits last fall, like the new comedy “Go On,” have collapsed. New shows, like the comedy “1600 Penn,” started weak and have fallen fast. NBC even had the lowest-rated new network drama of all time, “Do No Harm,” which was rated 0.9 in the 18-49 category for its premiere this month and fell to 0.7 in its second week.

It was canceled after two episodes.

Perhaps more painful, because it was the favorite project of NBC’s top programmer, Robert Greenblatt, has been the fate of the Broadway drama “Smash.” Introduced last winter with great expectations — and a hugely expensive promotion campaign — “Smash” returned three weeks ago to audience indifference. Last week’s episode could not eke out even a 1 rating among viewers aged 18 through 49, the audience NBC sells to advertisers.

Over all, the network’s ratings have fallen so far that no episode of any show on NBC in February came within one million viewers of a show on PBS: “Downton Abbey.” And forget approaching the numbers of a cable hit like AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”

Nothing NBC has put on in prime time has matched even the appeal of the “Talking Dead,” a show with people simply discussing “The Walking Dead.” That show managed a 2.2 rating in the 18-49 audience. NBC’s best prime-time number for the month has been a 2.1, achieved by episodes of “The Biggest Loser” and “The Office,” a comedy that is about to go off the air.

Remarkably, the best-rated show on NBC all month has been “Saturday Night Live,” which produced two original versions in February, both times hitting a 2.3 rating, topping everything else on the network. “SNL,” though, is not even in prime time — and it is 38 years old.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of an actress in the canceled show “Do No Harm.” She is Stephanie Roth Haberle, not Stepanie.

Yale Law Hires Its First Hispanic in a Tenured Position

By Karen Sloan All Articles 

The National Law Journal

January 14, 2013

Yale Law School's Cristina Rodriguez

It's official: Yale Law School has its first tenured Hispanic faculty member. Dean Richard Post announced last week that Cristina Rodriguez will join the faculty on January 28.

Rodriguez, an expert on immigration law, has taught at New York University School of Law since 2004. She took a leave from NYU in 2010 to become deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel.

"Cristina is the nation's leading theorist of immigration law," Post said in a written statement. "Her work is both practical and cutting edge, and she brings a wealth of experience and knowledge. She is a superb teacher, and I expect that she will be a mentor to generations of students."

The Yale Daily News reported in March 2012 that the law school had offered Rodriguez a tenured post. That news came out of a town hall meeting between administrators and students about faculty diversity.

Law school faculties are slowly becoming more diverse, although minority groups remain underrepresented. Statistics from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) show that as of 2008 -- the most recent numbers available -- nearly 72 percent of law professors nationwide were white. Of law faculty holding tenure or tenure-track jobs, 80 percent were white.

The AALS annual meeting in New Orleans earlier this month featured a day-long slate of panels discussing minority faculty and student recruitment. A 2010 study underwritten by the American Bar Foundation and the Law School Admission Council found that lower percentages of women and minority law professors thought the tenure process was fair.

Harvard Law School garnered attention in 2011 when it granted tenure to Jeannie Suk, making her the first tenured Asian-American woman on its faculty. (Harvard has approximately 138 full-time faculty members, compared to Yale's 74, according to the American Bar Association.)

Rodriguez, who received her J.D. from Yale, was a visiting professor there in fall 2009. She will teach constitutional law, administrative law and immigration law.

Conn. Public Sector Attorneys to Get First Raises Since 2009

A recent national study has found that pay for prosecutors and public defenders has barely budged since 2004. The situation is only a little better in Connecticut, where the public sector attorneys last got a raise in 2009.

But that's about to change. Next summer, Connecticut prosecutors and public defenders are slated to receive a 3 percent raise, adding about $1,850 annually to the current entry level salary of $61,900. Veterans with 10 years experience will see salaries increase from about $91,600 to about $94,000.

Jack Doyle, a prosecutor and president of the Connecticut Association of Prosecutors, the bargaining unit for the 250 prosecuting attorneys in the state, calls the raise overdue. He notes that other state workers have, overall, averaged 3.5 percent annual pay increases over the past decade.

"I can tell you prosecutors do believe they are underpaid and undercompensated, based on their jobs and what they do," Doyle said. "We don't get compensatory time or overtime or extra duty pay that police get. At the same time, prosecutors have been threatened, harassed and even attacked."

The issue of salaries for court personnel recently came to a head in Connecticut when Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers requested an 11 percent pay raise for judges next July, followed by 5.5 percent increases in each of the next three years. Her proposal, which was met with sharp questions by a newly formed Judicial Compensation Review Board, calls for Superior Court judges to go from earning $146,780 currently to $191,890 in 2017.

Rogers notes that Connecticut judges have not had a pay increase in five years and that their current salaries rank them 45th nationally, when adjusted for the cost of living. She says comparatively low salaries are driving experienced judges out of the court system and making it harder to attract top-notch lawyers to the bench.

The recent study, by the National Association for Law Placement, makes the same argument about low pay and the ability to attract and retain public sector lawyers. After all, the study notes, the starting median salary at private firms with 50 or more lawyers is about $80,000. And some large firms continue to pay $160,000 to new associates, the NALP said.

New prosecutors and public defenders in Connecticut make nearly $12,000 more than the national median of $50,000, according to the NALP. After 10 years, Connecticut pay increases to $91,627, while the national average is $76,000. In Connecticut, someone with 20 years' experience caps out at $129,000; the NALP did not provide a comparable figure.

While Connecticut salaries are significantly higher than the national average in raw dollars, the NALP does not factor in the cost of living in each state, as the judges' rankings do.

LAW SCHOOL COSTS

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Andrew Brimmer, First Black Member on Fed Board, Dies at 86

His death, after a long illness, was confirmed by his daughter, Esther Brimmer.

Dr. Brimmer, an economist, held a number of high-ranking posts in Washington and taught at Harvard, but the economic conditions of poor, powerless, uneducated blacks was an abiding concern. He spoke about what he called the “schism” between blacks who were educated and had marketable skills and those who did not. In later years he spoke frequently about how government policies no longer supported programs to help blacks enter the economic mainstream.

Dr. Brimmer was the assistant secretary of commerce for economic affairs when President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to the Fed board in 1966.

At the time, the Federal Reserve was bitterly divided over monetary policy. The chairman, William McChesney Martin Jr., threatened to resign if Mr. Johnson appointed a liberal who would vote in favor of lower interest rates.

At Dr. Brimmer’s swearing-in ceremony, the president said he did not expect Dr. Brimmer to be “an easy money man or a tight money man.” Rather, Mr. Johnson said, “I expect him to be a right money man.”

The Wall Street Journal expressed skepticism, with a front-page article headlined “Desire to Aid Negroes Could Make New ‘Fed’ Member More Liberal.” It quoted an anonymous source saying that the appointment was yet another example of Mr. Johnson’s political foxiness. “The president has Martin in a box,” the source told The Journal. “If Martin resigned now, it would look like it was because he didn’t want a Negro on the board.”

Early in his tenure, Dr. Brimmer followed the lead of Mr. Martin and other “tight money” board members by supporting a gradual increase in interest rates to fight inflation. But when Congress raised taxes in 1968 and cut spending to cut inflation, he was one of the first Fed governors to call for lowering rates.

At the Commerce Department, Dr. Brimmer’s primary responsibility was to reverse the country’s balance-of-payments deficit. He spent a good deal of time persuading American businesses to voluntarily slow their use of dollars in foreign investments. He also encouraged foreign companies to use their own currency to make investments in the United States.

In a speech in December 1965, he reported that his efforts had resulted in a drop in direct American investments overseas, to $515 million in the third quarter of that year from $1.12 billion in the first quarter.

That work built on his interest in foreign affairs, which started when he went to India with the Fulbright Program and wrote papers on the Indian economy.

As a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the late 1950s, he was part of a team that visited Sudan to explore the feasibility of a central bank there. He later wrote an article on banking and finance in Sudan for The South African Journal of Economics. He became known as the international monetary policy expert on the Federal Reserve Board.

Dr. Brimmer served a little more than eight years of his 14-year term, leaving the board in 1974 to join the faculty of the Harvard Business School and start a consulting firm, Brimmer & Company. His academic career also included study in India at the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Bombay.

In 1995, he was chosen to head a five-member financial control board to help the District of Columbia deal with a financial crisis. He stepped down after a contentious three years in the job.

Andrew Felton Brimmer Jr. was born on Sept. 13, 1926, in Newellton, La. After graduating from high school he went to Washington State, where one of his sisters lived. He joined the Army near the end of World War II and attained the rank of staff sergeant, remaining in the United States.

Besides his daughter, who is the assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the State Department, he is survived by his wife, Doris Scott Brimmer.

Dr. Brimmer attended the University of Washington in Seattle on the G.I. Bill of Rights, earning an undergraduate degree in economics in 1950 and a master’s degree the next year.

He then went to India before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he earned a doctorate. In 1965, Dr. Brimmer was part of a federal delegation sent to Los Angeles after rioting in the Watts neighborhood left 34 people dead and tens of millions of dollars in property damage. He commissioned a Census Bureau study that found that the purchasing power of the average family in Watts had declined by $400 in the five years before the riots while incomes had risen in the rest of America.

“I do feel that the economic plight of blacks is a serious matter,” he told The New York Times in 1973. “So I bring the same economist’s tool kit to that subject as other economists bring to examine other national economic problems.”

First Risperdal Trial Ends With Settlement

The first trial in which evidence was taken in the mass tort litigation over Risperdal, the antipsychotic drug that plaintiffs have claimed causes males to grow breasts, was settled as part of a group of five cases that resolved this week for undisclosed amounts, according to the plaintiffs' lawyers and a statement from the drugmakers.

Obama and Romney Hold First Debate

Mitt Romney and President Obama challenged each other on many issues.

DENVER — Mitt Romney on Wednesday accused President Obama of failing to lead the country out of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, using the first presidential debate to invigorate his candidacy by presenting himself as an equal who can solve problems Mr. Obama has been unable to.

President Obama and Mitt Romney squared off on Wednesday night in Denver in the first of three presidential debates.

The president implored Americans to be patient and argued that his policies needed more time to work, warning that changing course would wipe away the economic progress the country is steadily making. The two quarreled aggressively over tax policy, the budget deficit and the role of government, with each man accusing the other of being evasive and misleading voters.

But for all of the anticipation, and with less than five weeks remaining until Election Day, the 90-minute debate unfolded much like a seminar by a business consultant and a college professor. Both men argued that their policies would improve the lives of the middle class, but their discussion often dipped deep into the weeds, and they talked over each other without connecting their ideas to voters.

If Mr. Romney’s goal was to show that he could project equal stature to the president, he succeeded, perhaps offering his campaign the lift that Republicans have been seeking. Mr. Obama often stopped short of challenging his rival’s specific policies and chose not to invoke some of the same arguments that his campaign has been making against Mr. Romney for months.

At one point, Mr. Romney offered an admonishment, saying, “Mr. President, you’re entitled, as the president, to your own airplane and to your own house, but not to your own facts, all right?” He forcefully engaged Mr. Obama throughout the night, while the president often looked down at his lectern and took notes.

A boisterous campaign, which has played out through dueling rallies and an endless stream of television commercials, took a sober turn as the candidates stood at facing lecterns for the first time. Mr. Obama, who has appeared to take command of the race in most battleground states, seemed to adopt an air of caution throughout the evening that left some of his liberal supporters disappointed in his performance.

“Are we going to double down on the top-down economic policies that helped to get us into this mess,” he said, “or do we embrace a new economic patriotism that says, ‘America does best when the middle class does best’ “?

For much of the debate, the candidates commandeered the stage, taking control away from the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS, as they kept trying to rebut one other. At times, the moderator seemed as if he had walked off the stage, a result of new rules that were intended to allow for a deeper and more freewheeling discussion.

On a basic level it was a clash of two ideologies, the president’s Democratic vision of government playing a supporting role in spurring economic growth, and Mr. Romney’s Republican vision that government should get out of the way of businesses that know best how to create jobs.

Mr. Romney sought to use his moment before a prime-time audience of tens of millions to escape the corner Mr. Obama and his allies have painted him into, depicting him as an uncompromising adherent to policies that have been tried before. He instead turned the focus on his opponent’s record.

“You’ve been president four years. You’ve been president four years,” Mr. Romney said at one point. He ticked through a list of promises he said Mr. Obama had not lived up to, and said, “Middle-income families are being crushed.”

Neither candidate delivered that knockout blow or devastating line that each side was hoping for. Still, style points went to Mr. Romney, who continually and methodically pressed his critique of Mr. Obama. The president at times acted more as if he were addressing reporters in the Rose Garden than beating back a challenger intent on taking his job.

Throughout the evening, Mr. Romney escaped Mr. Obama’s attempts to pin him down on which deductions he would eliminate in his tax proposals.