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According to the firm’s Web site, it plans to offer equipment financing of $5,000 to $250,000 for small businesses.
Allen’s Vulcan Capital has made a diverse set of bets over the years, including investments in telecommunications, cable, sports franchises and more. But expansion into small business lending appears to be a new one.
In addition to Vulcan, LKCM Capital Group participated in the funding of Ascentium Capital.
Interestingly, the news comes just as Seattle’s Lighter Capital — which also offers loans to small revenue-generating businesses — announced an investment competition for $500,000.
TOKYO, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Crude prices, the dollar and bond yields were sharply elevated early on Thursday after OPEC agreed to a deal to reduce output to clear a supply glut that has crunched oil prices and stoked global deflationary pressures.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries on Wednesday agreed to its first output cut since 2008, with Saudi Arabia accepting “a big hit” on its production. Non-OPEC Russia will also join output reductions for the first time in 15 years to help OPEC prop up oil prices.
U.S. crude oil soared more than 9 percent overnight to a one-month high just shy of $50.00 a barrel. The contracts were a fraction lower at $49.22 a barrel early on Thursday. Brent crude were just above $51.00 a barrel after rallying to a six-week peak of $52.37.
The jump in oil prices added to inflation expectations in the United States, which were already high on prospects that president-elect Donald Trump would enact reflationary policies funded by large fiscal stimulus.
As a result U.S. Treasuries resumed their rout, with prices sliding and yields spiking, to send the dollar rallying against its peers. The yield on 30-year bonds, which are most sensitive to inflation eroding their value, climbed about 9 basis points to 2.39 percent overnight, taking it back towards 14-month peaks mark...
“The reflation trade continues to work in earnest, this time Trump has taken a back seat and OPEC and Russia have taken the initiative and lit the fuse under the oil price,” wrote Chris Weston, chief market strategist at IG in Melbourne.
The dollar touched a 9-1/2-month high of 114.830 yen, adding to gains made overnight when it surged 1.8 percent. The euro was steady at $1.0596 after shedding 0.6 percent the previous day.
The dollar index was firm at 101.51 after rallying overnight from a low of 100.84.
The Australian dollar, sensitive to changes in commodity prices and risk sentiment, was up 0.2 percent at $0.7396 after losing more than 1 percent the previous day.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.1 percent.
The region’s stocks failed to draw much incentive from Wall Street, where shares ended mostly lower on Wednesday as drops in utilities and technology offset energy’s surge.
Spot gold was firm at $1,172.46 an ounce after sliding 1.3 percent overnight to a 10-month low of $1,170.35 on the dollar’s oil-induced surge.
Kansas redshirt freshman Dylan Ditzenberger is showered with water after hitting the game winning single in the bottom of the ninth against Oklahoma State at Hoglund Ballpark, April 13, 2019.
After a leadoff walk, Kansas junior Ryan Zeferjahn gave the Cowboys their 15th and 16th home runs of the series by the third at bat of the game.
Zeferjahn settled on the mound after the third run scored to strike out 14 over the next 23 at bats, with just one hit and four walks. He struck out the side in the top of the fourth and sixth innings, throwing less than 15 pitches in each inning.
With one of the best pitchers in the country on the mound, Kansas walked off in the bottom of the ninth to win 5-4 Saturday afternoon at Hoglund Ballpark. The Jayhawks rallied back after a day where it surrendered 14 home runs to the Cowboys during a 27-6 loss on Friday.
Kansas (18-16, 3-8 Big 12) began its rally back with a run in the second with Rudy Karre scoring on an RBI double from Benjamin Sems. The next inning, Conner VanCleave tied the game at 3 with a two-run shot to right, scoring Brett Vosik.
In the top of the fifth, Zeferjahn escaped an inning where he walked two batters to load the bases without a run, striking out Andrew Navagito to end the inning on a checked swing.
The Jayhawks scored their fourth run the next inning, scoring on a sacrifice fly from Dylan Ditzenberger. Nolan Metcalf reached first on an error as a pinch hitter and Blake Shinkle scored as a pinch runner, advancing to third on a passed ball.
Nathan Barry entered in relief for Zeferjahn, who finished six innings with 14 strikeouts, tying a career high.
Goldsberry recorded the final four outs for Oklahoma State, giving the Jayhawks a chance to walk off in the ninth.
Shinkle reached first for his second hit of the year to lead off the inning, making his way to third the next at bat as Brett Vosik doubled. Ditzenberger returned to the plate needing a simple fly ball to send Shinkle home, then singled down the first base line to give himself both a Gatorade bath and a 5-4 win.
“To get boat raced like that yesterday, it took great chemistry and great toughness to beat (them) after what happened yesterday,” Price said.
The Jayhawks tie the series at one and look for a series win at 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada is introducing substantial new tax measures that will allow investors in new liquefied natural gas facilities to recover their costs more quickly, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Thursday.
Harper told a televised news conference in British Columbia that the tax relief would encourage investment in the LNG industry and boost employment.
The measures could help companies move forward with stalled developments in Canada, even as they cut spending around the world in response to plummeting oil prices.
“The business of shipping natural gas is capital intensive. The bar for entry is high,” Harper said.
Ottawa will establish a capital cost allowance rate of 30 percent for equipment used in natural gas liquefaction and 10 percent for buildings at a facility that liquefies natural gas, Harper announced.
LNG facilities in Canada can currently write off 8 percent of their total capital investment each year.
Harper said the tax relief would be available for capital assets acquired after Feb 19 this year and before 2025.
Last week, Reuters revealed that the government was studying the idea of new tax breaks in the upcoming budget for companies that build LNG plants.
More than a dozen LNG terminals have been proposed in Canada, mostly in the West Coast province of British Columbia. Backed by energy giants like Malaysia’s Petronas, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron Corp. The projects would ship cheaper North American gas to Asian markets.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Justin L. Mack is an award-winning breaking news and public safety reporter for The Indianapolis Star. He also hosts The Drop, a daily web show that wraps up the day’s most talked about stories with a dash of personality. Mack moved to Indiana in 2004 to attend Purdue University. Upo...
I learned that in our state, shoplifting, stealing property of a value not exceeding $200 can get you 30 days in jail and a $650 fine. If the stolen property happens to be valued at $10,000 plus 1 cent or more, jail time of up to 10 years and a $10,000 fine is on the table. I learned that the average lifespan of Americ...
In March of 2009, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for defrauding people out of $65 billion. The justice meted Madoff is the equivalent of 183 percent of a human lifetime. Since there is no such thing as a 183 percent of a human life we need to proportionately reduce the metrics giving us the weird tr...
Granted, I’m just playing with numbers here. But something is being revealed about crime and punishment. If a person steals $200 and the punishment is 0.1 percent of an average lifetime, the extended value of that person’s lifetime is … $194,000.
But if a person steals $10,000, the extended value of that person’s lifetime is only $83,000. The extended value of Bernie Madoff’s lifetime comes to $36 billion. This suggests that it is presumed that Bernie Madoff’s lifetime is 433,734 times more valuable than the person who stole $10,000. This doesn’t bother me much...
Back in the 1980s I lived in a little town called Fort Mill, S.C. Directly across the highway from my home was the entrance to a 2,300-acre scam called Heritage USA, home of the PTL Club.
Heritage USA was a strangely wonderful place. It had a waterslide that at the time was the third or fourth largest in the world. There was a 501 room, five star hotel complete with doormen and valets in the uniforms of the Yeomen Warders or Beefeaters. There was an indoor shopping mall called Main Street USA. The ceili...
In the later part of the 1980s, a young church secretary named Jessica Hahn accused Jim Baker and another preacher, John Wesley Fletcher, of drugging and assaulting her. Baker and Fletcher denied the allegations and went about demeaning her character … then paid her $279,000 … out of PTL funds, for her to keep quiet. S...
It was discovered that Baker was selling “lifetime memberships,” “exclusive partnerships” and timeshares in units that did not exist. It was a massive fraud. Baker used the money to enrich himself and to keep the timeshare Ponzi scheme afloat.
Baker was indicted for eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and 1 count of conspiracy. He was convicted on all 24 counts and sentenced to 45 years in a federal penitentiary. It is estimated that he stole over $158 million from his supporters. In 1992 his sentence was reduced to eight years … two years le...
I began thinking about Jim Baker this week when I read a report in the April 9 edition of the Mexico News Daily about this guy who in 2006 sold $32 million worth of condo/hotel units that didn’t exist … except in an artist rendering. According to the report, the guy didn’t even have a legal right to build condos, or se...
What has been the justice meted out for this behavior? None … he was given a key position in Washington, D.C. … the extended value of this guy’s life … priceless.
Go figure. This is all I have learned today.
A new PBS series is aiming to flip the script on a conventional nature show by including one species most of these programs tend to leave out: humans.
The five-part series, Earth: A New Wild, which airs beginning on February 4, will feature a mix of human interest stories and nature footage with the goal of showing how humans and nature depend on each other. The series is ambitious, as host M. Sanjayan, a top staffer at the nonprofit environmental group Conservation ...
The preview above, first shared here, shows Sanjayan visiting 14 baby Giant Pandas at the China Conservation & Research Centre for the Giant Panda at Wolong National Nature Reserve. Sanjayan told Mashable that the story of China's efforts to breed Giant Pandas and reintroduce them into the wild offers one example of ho...
"Here's this animal that's almost cartoonish — that has these Facebook pages and birthday parties and you know, iconic cartoonish — it doesn't even look like a real animal," Sanjayan said. "Yet the Chinese have now cracked the code on how to breed them. And actually how take a captive-born animal and put it back in the...
Promotional photo for Earth: A New Wild, which premieres on PBS on Feb. 4, 2015.
Giant pandas are one of the world's most threatened species, largely due to destruction of its habitat. Only 1,600 are believed to still roam the mountainous regions of China. And to make matters worse, the species has an exceptionally low reproductive rate. Female pandas only ovulate once a year, meaning that they hav...
Yet, Sanjayan said China has managed to perfect the technique for breeding these animals and reintroduce them into the wild, something that has challenged conservationists for years.
When the show set out to film in China, Sanjayan said there were plenty of negative stories the team could have done about the pollution that is pervasive across the country. They chose to highlight the pandas because they wanted to do something people wouldn't expect.
"I admit I was a little reluctant to go do the story partly because it's a panda and it's all cute and cuddly and I'm like, 'Yeah I'm not so big into that. Why can't we go do like tigers?'" Sanjayan said. "But I have to tell you when they put me in a room with 14 baby pandas, you melt — they truly are magical animals a...
The clip is one of many stories that will be featured in the five-week-long series. In others, Sanjayan shows how tigers coexist with communities in densely-populated Bangladesh, learns about an Arctic tradition of castrating reindeer with one's teeth and visits an Amazonian tribe that has never had any human contact w...
The series was born out of Sanjayan's frustration with most nature shows on television today. The host said these shows tend to fall into one of two broad camps: There are documentaries with sweeping shots of pristine wilderness and no civilization in sight, and then there are the the shows where the host will go out a...
Conservationist M. Sanjayan interacts with a young Giant Panda in the new series Earth: A New Wild.
"I didn't think either of those were accurate," Sanjayan said. "That's not really an accurate portrayal of the natural world at all to the people who are trying to save it. So what I wanted to do is tell the story of how nature is and not how we want it to be."
But Sanjayan also wanted to avoid making a straightforward show about conservation. While global issues like climate change and overpopulation do inevitably come into play in his series, they serve as a larger backdrop for the more immediate individual stories that he tells.
"We didn't want to make an environmental show. In other words, we didn't want to do a film that just reduced everything to talking heads and charts," Sanjayan said. "We don't shy away from showing you the bad stuff... we show you what's happening in the Colorado River, we show what overfishing does to sharks. We do do ...
And while the realities might sometimes look bleak, Sanjayan said there is a sense of optimism pervading the series. He does believe that humans can successfully coexist with nature and that many of the stories he tells through his show offer living proof of this.
Sanjayan said he and other conservationists used to believe the key to getting people to care about the environment was just showing viewers the beauty of nature with a reverential approach, but now he says that's not enough. He wants the new series to inject a sense of self interest into conservation — to show how muc...
"When you start framing ourselves as part of the picture, then the reasons for protecting nature really become self-serving," Sanjayan said. "So for me, doing a natural history show that really has the human story within it makes a lot of sense because that's how I feel about the natural world with humans as part of th...
He realizes his idea might be a hard sell to bottom line-conscious TV networks, given the multimillion-dollar budget he needed to make the show. He said he was lucky that PBS was willing to take on the risk, and give the show the resources it needed.
"Television executives really like simple ideas, and this is a more complicated much more nuanced idea," Sanjayan said.
He's hoping that the end result will be something that could break the mold for natural history film-making.
"[PBS] may end up with something actually genre-busting, something that really does look and feel different," Sanjayan said. "The thing that I like about this show that we just pulled off is that I think it will break some new ground and in some ways, it might bring back really good storytelling, which has sort of been...
This isn't Sanjayan's first foray into television. He was one of many hosts of "Years of Living Dangerously," the Emmy-winning Showtime series that focused on global warming.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Forced to back down on a government shutdown, President Donald Trump is shifting his story regarding his campaign promise to build a border wall. He’s also once again inflating the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
The president insists he never proposed a concrete wall, promoting instead a “see-through” barrier made of steel. That’s a change on how he talked in the past. He repeatedly pledged in 2016 to build a “big beautiful wall” and have Mexico pay for it, conjuring up images of an imposing, “concrete plank” structure along A...
His retreat in the partial shutdown capped a head-spinning week in which Trump also repeated questionable assertions that a border wall would stop crime and drugs from “pouring in,” declared that the remains of U.S. service members are “back home where they belong” from North Korea even though that mission already has ...
TRUMP: “We have billions of dollars coming into our treasury — billions — from China. We never had 10 cents coming into our treasury; now we have billions coming in.” — remarks at a meeting with Republican lawmakers Thursday.
Tariffs are a decidedly modest portion of revenue in modern times and Trump has not changed that with the escalation of his trade dispute with China. Customs and duties generated $41.3 billion in revenues last year, up from $34.6 billion in 2017 (far more than 10 cents). That $6.7 billion increase occurred in part beca...
TRUMP: “There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS.” — tweet Sunday.
THE FACTS: It’s not that high, according to his own Homeland Security secretary as well as independent estimates.
At a House hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen acknowledged the number was “somewhere” between 11 million and 22 million, lower than Trump’s 25 million. Trump has previously asserted there were 30 million to 35 million here illegally.
TRUMP: “These barriers are made of steel, have see-through visibility, which is very important. …We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea. We never did. We never proposed that. We never wanted that, because we have barriers at the border where natural structures are as good as anything that w...
THE FACTS: Actually, he did pledge a wall made of concrete along the southern border. It’s true he did not say there needed to be 2,000 miles of it.
TRUMP: “What’s happening is the drugs are pouring in. And, yes, they come through the ports of entry, but the big trucks come through areas where you don’t have a wall and you have wide-open spaces … They’re loaded up with drugs.” — remarks Thursday in meeting with Republican lawmakers.
THE FACTS: His suggestion that a wall would stop most drugs from “pouring” into the U.S. defies his government’s findings on how the illegal substances get in. Most of it is smuggled through official border crossings, not remote stretches of the border.
TRUMP: “Walls work … We really have no choice but to build a powerful wall or steel barrier.” — remarks Friday in Rose Garden.
Few people dispute that barriers can contribute to a drop in crossings. When barriers were built in the Border Patrol’s Yuma, Arizona, sector in the mid-2000s, arrests for illegal crossings plummeted 94 percent in three years. When barriers were built in San Diego in the 1990s and early 2000s, arrests fell 80 percent o...
TRUMP: “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!” — tweet Sunday.
Between his new collaboration with Sting; an appearance at the Grammys; a new Netflix movie, Game Over, Man!; and a performance at Queen Elizabeth’s birthday party, Shaggy’s 2018 is shaping up to be surprisingly huge. Turns out, he’s as surprised as anyone at the year he’s having.
CHRIS EUBANK JR is in the best shape of his life heading into his huge super-middleweight showdown with foe James DeGale this evening (Feb 23) at The O2.
Eubank Jr. arrived in his flashy new McLaren supercar as the Brighton star opened his gym to the media last week to go through a power-packed session with trainer Nate Vasquez in the ring and with long-time trainer Ronnie Davis closely watching on.
The Brighton star displayed his ripped physique ahead of the 168-pound battle for supremacy and looked sharp and powerful on the hand mitts, while slamming power shots into the body belt with just over a week left until the big fight.

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