Next Up: Casey Taker

Age: 29

Job/employer: Founder/president, Anytakers Sports & Entertainment

What she does: Arranges sports/entertainment travel packages for businesses and individuals

Background: Taker, a native of Raleigh, N.C., graduated from North Carolina State University with a degree in agricultural business management in 2005. She moved to Nashville in 2007.

Career turn: Taker was working at an Italian restaurant after college when the owner of a sports travel company came in. “I probably mentioned that if I could go to Daytona (for the Daytona 500) and the Kentucky Derby, I would consider my life complete,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in sports but really didn’t think it would be my career.” The customer invited Taker for a job interview, leading to a two-year stint as director of events at Innova Sports Tours. She later was national events director for gamedaysports, a New York-based ticket company.

Going solo: She started Anytakers in 2009, with a silent partner’s backing. As the only employee, she uses her network of contacts to arrange unique packages for individuals and corporate VIPs and clients. “I want to bring, especially on the corporate level, new ideas for corporations to entertain their clients, new events they may not have used before,” she said.

Long-term plans: She’s developing strategic partnerships with sports associations and local corporations in hopes of expanding her business and offerings. “In five years we definitely want to have a footprint in the national scene and the opportunity to take things to a more international level and do things overseas,” she said.

Most interesting assignment: Arranging packages to swimming events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That later led to her helping arrange charity events for U.S. swim team members, including Aaron Peirsol.

Sports fanatic: She’s been to our Super Bowls, five Kentucky Derbys, five Masters, four Final Fours and every NASCAR race track at least twice. She also serves on the Music City Bowl Committee, is involved with the Nashville Sports Council and was the event coordinator for the 2010 Combative Motorsports Xperience Tour.

More than sports: Taker is involved with SOLID (Society of Leaders in Development)-Nashville, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and its small business council, and SYNC (Social Young Nashville Circle).

Career advice: “Figure out what you want and learn how to ask for it.”

Some push Fed for stimulus

WASHINGTON — Some Federal Reserve officials pushed in August for a more aggressive response to the economy’s slowdown. They settled for a plan to keep rates near zero for another two years and won agreement to discuss more options at an extended meeting in September.

Minutes of the Aug. 9 policy meeting released Tuesday show that Fed officials discussed a range of actions, including another round of Treasury bond purchases. Some Fed officials said a weaker economy called for such a step.

Fed officials in the end said they planned to keep rates low until at least mid-2013, assuming the economy remained weak. They also added a second day to their September meeting. That raised speculation that the Fed would announce some further action after that meeting.

Three Fed members opposed any steps for fear they could ignite inflation. The 7-3 vote after the meeting marked the first time in nearly 20 years that at least three members dissented from a Fed statement.

Stocks rose modestly after the minutes were released. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 20 points for the day. Broader indexes also gained.

The minutes show Fed officials discussed the two-year plan to keep interest rates near zero, a third round of bond purchases, and shifting the mix of the Fed’s holdings into long-term Treasury securities. Some members also raised the idea of tying record-low interest rates to a level of unemployment or inflation, instead of the set time period.

The bond purchases are intended to keep long-term rates low and aid the economy. The second round of bond purchases, announced last year, sparked a 28 percent rally in the Dow through April 29.

Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said Tuesday that he was one of the Fed officials who favored more aggressive policy actions. He was also one of the seven officials who supported the two-year plan for keeping rates near zero.

“Strong accommodation needs to be in place for a substantial period of time,” Evans said.

Analysts have speculated that such a high level of dissent makes it harder for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to rally support for more action. Others say the August vote shows Bernanke is willing to press forward, even with a divided board.

And at least one of the dissenters may be softening his opposition. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said Tuesday that he would not seek to overturn the August decision at future meetings. He said such a move would undercut the Fed’s ability to take similar actions in the future.

Investors had hoped Bernanke would provide details of the Fed’s next moves during a highly anticipated speech in Jackson Hole, Wyo. But Bernanke offered no new steps.

He did say the central bank would extend its September meeting to two days to allow for a fuller discussion. On Tuesday, the minutes show that the board had pushed for the longer meeting.

A turbulent summer has fueled fears that the U.S. is on the verge of another recession. The economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent in the first six months of this year, the weakest performance since the recession ended two years ago.

A key question is whether consumers and business owners will continue to pull back on spending this fall.

Gold's drop could chip at its safe-haven image

NEW YORK — Maybe gold isn’t so safe after all.

After months of setting record after record, the price of gold plunged $104, or 5.6 percent, Wednesday to finish at $1,757 per ounce. That was the biggest percentage drop in nearly 3 years and a blow to investors who thought the metal could go only one way — up.

“Gold was considered a safe haven for years because it wasn’t popular, but now it’s popular,” said Cetin Ciner, a professor of finance at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. “You can’t have a fad and a safe haven at the same time.”

The drop came on news that orders for long-lasting manufactured goods rose 4 percent in July, which was more than analysts had expected. Investors may also have been selling on news of new rules in China requiring traders to set aside more collateral when borrowing money to buy gold. After gold settled in the U.S. Wednesday, exchange operator CME Group announced it was raising its collateral requirements, too.

Gold a favorite

Considered a safe investment in times of turmoil, gold has become a favorite among investors worried about rising U.S. debt, the possibility of inflation and a spreading debt crisis in Europe. But many investors have simply been looking to profit from gold’s ever-rising price.

In October 2007, gold traded for about $740 an ounce. Two months later, the Great Recession started and gold began creeping up. This summer, the rise accelerated. Gold started July at $1,482.60 an ounce and on Monday hit a record $1,891.90 — a gain of 28 percent in less than two months.

Helping push the price higher lately have been big price swings in the stock market. Frightened investors have been shifting money into assets that seem less volatile, like Treasury bonds and gold.

But now the belief that gold can provide relief from the roller coaster of stocks may be tested.

The danger of investing in gold is that the metal has no intrinsic value. It doesn’t pay interest like a bond, or represent a share of a company like a stock. It is only worth what people believe it’s worth, and that means that prices can rise and fall based on emotion.

“People could start thinking gold is much more risky than thought,” said UNC professor Ciner, who thinks gold is in a “bubble.”

Monty Guild, chief investment officer of money manager Guild Investment Management, is still bullish, though he recently sold some of his gold holdings.

“It went up too far, too fast,” Guild said, before adding that he may buy again soon now that the price has dropped. “I think it could eventually go to $2,200.”

Ailing Jobs quits as CEO at Apple

SAN FRANCISCO — Steve Jobs, the mind behind the iPhone, iPad and other devices that turned Apple Inc. into one of the world’s most powerful companies, resigned as the company’s CEO on Wednesday, saying he can no longer handle the job.

The move appears to be the result of an unspecified medical condition for which he took an indefinite leave from his post in January. Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, has been named CEO.

In a letter addressed to Apple’s board and the “Apple community,” Jobs said he “always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Jobs’ health has long been a concern for Apple investors who see him as an industry oracle who seems to know what consumers want long before they do. After his announcement, Apple stock quickly fell 5.4 percent in after-hours trading.

Earlier this month Apple became the most valuable company in America, briefly surpassing Exxon Mobil. At the market close Wednesday its market value was $349 billion, just behind Exxon Mobil’s $358 billion.

The company said Jobs gave the board his resignation on Wednesday and suggested Cook be named the company’s new leader. Apple said Jobs was elected board chairman and Cook is becoming a member of its board.

Jobs’ hits seemed to grow bigger as the years went on: After the colorful iMac computer and the now-ubiquitous iPod, the iPhone redefined the category of smartphones and the iPad all but created the market for tablet computers. His own aura seemed part of the attraction. Onstage at trade shows and company events in his uniform of jeans, sneakers and black mock-turtlenecks, he’d entrance audiences with new devices, new colors, new software features, building up to a grand finale he’d predictably preface by saying, “One more thing.”

An innovator

Jobs, 56, shepherded Apple from a two-man startup to Silicon Valley darling when the Apple II, the first computer for regular people to really catch on, sent IBM Corp. and others scrambling to get their own PCs to market.

After Apple suffered a slump in the mid-1980s, he was forced out of the company. He was CEO at Next, another computer company, and Pixar, the computer-animation company that produced Toy Story on Jobs’ watch, during the 10 years before he returned.

Apple was foundering before he returned, having lost $900 million in 1996 as Microsoft Windows-based PCs dominated the computer market. The company’s fortunes began to turn around with its first new product under his direction, the iMac, which launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first 12 months.

Apple’s popularity grew in the U.S. throughout the 2000s as the ever-sleeker line of iPods introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget. Apple created another sensation in 2007 with the iPhone, the stark-looking but powerful smartphone that quickly dominated the industry.

The iPad was introduced less than a year and a half ago but has already sold nearly 29 million units.

Right-hand man

As Jobs was praised for his vision, concerns about his health persisted. The January leave was Jobs’ third medical leave over several years. He had previously survived pancreatic cancer and received a liver transplant.

Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research, said Cook is a good choice to replace Jobs.

“He has taken over for Jobs twice in two medical leaves and the company has functioned extremely well,” she said, adding that Cook has been Jobs’ “right-hand guy” for many years.

Cross also said Jobs put in place a “culture of innovation” that will help Apple remain a creative force in the industry.

“Steve Jobs is an extremely strong leader and clearly has made Apple a leading consumer electronics company and one of the most innovative companies in the world,” she said. “However, he didn’t do it alone.”

IBM test chips act more like brains

SAN FRANCISCO — Computers, like humans, can learn. But when Google tries to fill in your search box based only on a few keystrokes, or your iPhone predicts words as you type a text message, it’s only a narrow mimicry of what the human brain can do.

The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain is technological and physiological, testing the limits of computer and brain science. But researchers from IBM Corp. say they’ve made a key step toward combining the two worlds.

The company announced last week that it has built two prototype chips that it says process data more like how humans digest information than the chips that now power PCs and supercomputers.

A milestone

The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year-long project that has involved 100 researchers and some $41 million in funding from the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. That’s the Pentagon arm that focuses on long-term research and previously brought the world the Internet. IBM also has committed an undisclosed amount of money.

The prototypes offer further evidence of the growing importance of “parallel processing,” or computers doing multiple tasks simultaneously. That is important for rendering graphics and crunching large amounts of data.

The uses of the IBM chips are prosaic, such as steering a simulated car through a maze, or playing Pong. It may be a decade or longer before the chips make their way out of the lab and into actual products.

But what’s important is not what the chips are doing, but how they’re doing it, said Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who worked with IBM on the project.

Ability to adapt

The chips’ ability to adapt to types of information that it wasn’t specifically programmed to expect is a key feature.

“There’s a lot of work to do still, but the most important thing is usually the first step,” Tononi said in an interview. “And this is not one step, it’s a few steps.”

Technologists have long imagined computers that learn like humans. Your iPhone or Google’s servers can be programmed to predict certain behavior based on past events. But the techniques being explored by IBM and other companies and university research labs around “cognitive computing” could lead to chips that are better able to adapt to unexpected information.

IBM’s interest in the chips lies in their ability to potentially help process real-world signals such as temperature or sound or motion and make sense of them for computers.

IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y., is a leader in a movement to link physical infrastructure, such as power plants or traffic lights, and information technology, such as servers and software that help regulate their functions. Such projects can be made more efficient with tools to monitor the myriad analog signals present in those environments.

Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said the new chips have parts that behave like digital “neurons” and “synapses” that make them different from other chips. Each “core,” or processing engine, has computing, communication and memory functions.

“You have to throw out virtually everything we know about how these chips are designed,” he said.

“The key, key, key difference really is the memory and the processor are very closely brought together. There’s a massive, massive amount of parallelism.”

The project is part of the same research that led to IBM’s announcement in 2009 that it had simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.

Using progressively bigger supercomputers, IBM had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse’s brain in 2006, a rat’s full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human’s cerebral cortex in 2009.

Area farmers suffer in hot, arid summer

Johnny Howell’s answer was succinct when asked how his 200 acres of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and other produce have fared this summer.

“Lost 50 percent of my crop,” said Howell, who has been farming in southwestern Davidson County for five decades. “Heat and no rain got ’em.”

Other Middle Tennessee farmers share his plight, to varying degrees. This summer’s near-record heat and scant rainfall have combined to shrivel crops, reduce yields and cut into farmers’ livelihoods.

Consumers also will feel the impact, in the form of higher prices at farmers’ markets and grocery stores.

Temperatures in Middle Tennessee have averaged four degrees warmer than normal since June, according to National Weather Service data. Last month was the hottest July in Nashville since 1993 and the fifth-hottest month on record, with temperatures breaking the 90-degree mark on 27 days —10 more than usual.

While such temperatures are typical of Middle Tennessee summers, a hot stretch in July was particularly damaging, agricultural officials said. Overnight heat stunted crop growth and hindered pollination by reducing insect activity, thereby decreasing yields.

“The corn was at a really critical stage when the heat hit,” said DeWayne Perry, Williamson County Extension Service director. “We had those two weeks where we didn’t cool off much at night, and that hurt us.”

Hurting even more has been below-average rainfall since July 1, farmers said.

While the rainfall deficit is less than an inch at the weather service’s official station at Nashville International Airport, farmers in outlying areas say they’ve gotten up to four inches below what’s needed.

Chad Jewell, a corn, wheat and soybean farmer and cattle rancher in Williamson County, said his fields have gotten a half-inch or less of rain since mid-July.

“The beans are starting to dry up, wilt and die,” he said.

At the mercy of a higher power

The arid weather has left nearly two-thirds of Tennessee — including Sumner and Wilson counties, almost all of Davidson County and the western half of Williamson County — “abnormally dry,” according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor index, issued last week. A week before that, less than a third of the state was considered abnormally dry.

There’s little Middle Tennessee farmers can do about the lack of rain, as few have water wells for irrigation. Many also are reluctant to tap ponds, rivers and other surface water bodies during dry spells because of their low water levels.

“We’re at the mercy of the good Lord,” said Brian Sanders, who has grown corn, soybeans and wheat and raises cattle on 1,700 acres, primarily in Williamson County, for more than 30 years.

He said he expects to harvest 30 bushels of soybeans per acre this year, well below the 50 bushels he normally gets. For corn, he planned on 120 to 160 bushels per acre but now expects 80 to 100.

Although corn and soybean prices are well above normal, Sanders said higher growing costs — fertilizer prices have doubled in recent years, for example — will erode his bottom line.

“If I eke out a profit, it will be very small compared to going to a job in town,” he said.

Tennessee’s weather troubles won’t have much impact on retail food prices because the state accounts for a small portion of U.S. food production. But bad weather in major agricultural states such as Illinois, Iowa and Oklahoma will mean higher grocery bills.

Prices for corn, used for everything from animal feed to cereal, has surged by 70 percent a bushel in the past year. That led farmers to plant more corn this spring and less soybeans and wheat, driving up prices for those crops and food in general. And corn prices haven’t dropped despite the larger-than-usual crop because worldwide demand is outpacing supply.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects grocery prices will rise by 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent this year and at least another 3 percent in 2012. That’s on top of a 5.4-percent increase since mid-2010. Restaurant prices are projected to rise by slightly smaller percentages.

Low rates hurt savers, may stall economy

WASHINGTON — Super-low interest rates haven’t done what they usually do after a recession. They haven’t ignited economic growth or revived the home market or persuaded consumers to spend freely again.

They have, though, caused misery for retirees and others who depend on interest income. Such income plummeted 27 percent from 2008 to last year.

Now, some economists worry that low rates might be hurting the economy itself — defeating the purpose of the Federal Reserve’s low-rate policies. When savers earn less, they spend less. And spending by individuals drives about 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

Those concerns arise 2 years after the Fed pushed short-term rates to near zero, part of an effort to combat the gravest recession since the 1930s. It’s kept rates there since.

The Fed is “turning the faucet, and nothing’s coming out,” says William Ford, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “I don’t see any pluses on the plus side of the ledger … But they’re ignoring the strong negative effect that they’re having. They’re killing savers. Retirees are earning nothing on their life savings.”

The Fed this month announced plans to keep short-term rates near zero through mid-2013 unless the economy improves. And in a speech today, Chairman Ben Bernanke will likely lay out options for lowering long-term rates even further below the current near-record lows.

One option is a third round of Treasury bond purchases by the Fed. Such purchases would be intended to nudge rates even lower, to encourage spending and borrowing and raise stock prices. But additional rate declines would likely also further drive down rates on savings vehicles.

Low rates have already hurt retirees and other savers. Savings accounts, on average, are yielding 0.15 percent, 1-year CDs 1.15 percent and even 5-year Treasury notes only 1 percent.

Americans’ total interest income dropped from $1.38 trillion in 2008 to $1.01 trillion in 2010, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. That time span has coincided with a period in which the Fed kept its main interest-rate lever, the federal funds rate, at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent.

Seniors suffer

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Julie Moscove, 69, has watched her monthly interest income drop from more than $2,000 a few years ago to perhaps $400 now.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Moscove, who’s semi-retired but still runs the Tattoo-A-Pet registry business. “I cut coupons now.”

Moscove has little appetite for risk after having been burned by stocks when the dot-com boom went bust a decade ago. So she’s resigned to accepting negligible returns just to keep her money safe.

Pension funds are also being hurt. Largely because of low rates, the nation’s 100 biggest pension funds were $254 billion short of what they need to meet obligations to retirees at the end of July. That was up from a $186 billion shortfall in June, according to the consulting firm Milliman.

Low rates are a tool that Fed officials have long used to boost weak economies. In recessions past, when the Fed slashed rates, a drop in borrowing costs led companies to hire and expand.

It hasn’t worked that way this time. This recession followed a devastating financial crisis that damaged the banking system and made lower interest rates less effective.