Provident Fin. plans IPO amid thin backlog

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Provident Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:PROV) is likely to be the first initial public offering of 2003, one of only 27 companies planning to go public in the early part of the year.

According to financial Web site marketwatch.com, that's the smallest number of planned IPOs in the pipeline for about a year.

It said Provident, which is based in Jersey City, N.J., plans to offer 59.6 million shares at $10 each on Jan 7. as the company converts from a mutually owned organization.

Shares will be offered first to qualifying depositors, as well as the company's stock ownership plan, employees, officers and directors, and only then "possibly" to the public, the IPO filing said.

The shares will trade under the symbol PFS on the New York Stock Exchange.

Quiet share trading seen as 2002 ends lower

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Stocks are likely to end 2002 with their longest losing streak in 61 years on Tuesday and what trading there is will probably be dominated by last-minute tax-loss selling.

According to CNN, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500 "are all but certain to end 2002 lower, their third straight year of losses, something that hasn't happened since 1939-1941. The Nasdaq composite has never fallen for three consecutive years."

One stock likely to see activity is Tyco International (NYSE:TYC), which said on Monday that an internal investigation into its accounting revealed no "systemic or significant fraud" but did find at least $382 million in accounting errors for 2002.

Tyco told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had corrected the errors and they weren't material to its overall finances. The shares rose in after-hours trading.

One report due out Tuesday will be from the Conference Board, which is to release its Consumer Confidence index. CNN says that index probably rose to 86.0 in December from 84.1 in November.

And 2003? One strategist told CNN that there haven't been four down years since the Depression, "and we're not in a depression. So I've got to make a bet that 2003 will be an up year, but it's going to be backloaded, in the second half of the year."

Indonesia growth likely to slow in 2003

JAKARTA, Indonesia (Dec. 31) UPI -- Economic growth will fall to about 3 percent next year, from an estimated 3.8 percent this year, because investment isn't reviving and exports are weak.

The Jakarta Post reports Tuesday that domestic consumption, which supported growth in 2002, will probably also ebb. Further, it says, political tension is likely to rise ahead of the 2004 general elections.

The Post also said that current growth levels weren't creating jobs and that "many who lost their jobs during the late 1990s economic crisis would remain out of work. Experts have said the country needs to post economic growth of about 6 percent or 7 percent to absorb the millions of unemployed people."

Foreign direct investment fell by 11 percent to $5.4 billion in January-September from $6.08 billion in the same period in 2001. And export revenue fell 2.8 percent to $42.5 billion in January-September from the same period last year.

Fed could cut staff as check usage falls

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Staff at the 12 regional branches of the Federal Reserve Board could face job cuts because of the declining volume of checks being processed.

These regional banks handle about 40 percent of the nation's checks, The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO) reports Tuesday -- and more than 5,000 of the Fed's 23,000-plus staff help process these checks. But fewer transactions are being settled by paper checks these days, meaning less work for these employees.

A Fed survey found that checks were used in almost 60 percent of all non-cash retail transactions in 2000, the Post says, but that share had been falling after it reached a peak in the 1990s.

Most of the employees work night shifts, physically processing the checks by putting them through machines that route them to the banks where they were drawn and keeping totals of the amounts credited and debited to each bank.

The Post says that under the law, the Fed is required to make a profit on its check-clearing and other payment services. "The law was passed to ensure that the central bank charges a high enough price for services that private companies or organizations would not be at a competitive disadvantage," it said. But profits from the Fed's fee services are below target.

Most U.S. homes have cable, satellite TV

ATLANTA, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- American homes that rely solely on free-to-air television stations are increasingly rare.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says that less than 20 percent of U.S. homes that have TVs lack cable or satellite services. Citing data from the Federal Communications Commission, it says that more than 88 million homes have cable or satellite TV service, up 2.7 percent in the past year.

That's a big change from 1987, when just under half of all U.S. homes lacked cable -- the only major alternative then available to free-to-air stations.

The newspaper says that this broad access to programs on cable and satellite "has added to criticism that much of the programming on government-supported public broadcasting, including kids shows and cultural programming, is redundant.

"And the availability of niche cable networks bolsters decisions by broadcast networks to scale back some programming, such as gavel-to-gavel coverage of political conventions, that cable networks can now provide."

Argentine firms default on $1.6 billion debt

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Dozens of private-sector Argentinean companies defaulted this year on about $1.6 billion in debt.

Institutional Investor says that out of 90 companies surveyed by an economic think tank, Fundacion Capital, 49 had failed to pay either principal or interest on a debt. Out of this group, 35 went into default and 15 switched their liabilities into pesos.

The survey found that the corporate debt market improved during the second half of the year. Another $4.9 billion in private debt payments (principal and interest) fall due in 2003.