Economists: future deficits top US fiscal problem

NEW YORK — The biggest fiscal challenge facing the U.S. is the size of projected deficits in the 2020s and 2030s, according to a survey of business economists.

The National Association for Business Economics surveyed 220 of its members in July and August. The survey found that members were more concerned about the size of deficits in the next two decades than current deficits or deficits over the next 10 years: 43 percent of the economists named budget gaps in the 2020s and 2030s as the top fiscal challenge, compared with 37 percent who chose projected deficits over the next 10 years.

The policy survey found that no consensus on the best way to address those deficits.

The NABE said 39 percent of those surveyed felt the best way to address the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio in the next few decades is a mix of spending restraint and increased revenue. It said 32 percent believe the best single tool would be greater spending restraint, and 20 percent said enacting policies designed to encourage economic growth would be the best tactic.

Ballooning costs for Social Security and Medicare as the U.S. population ages are expected to result in growing long-term budget deficits.

The NABE said there is broader agreement about monetary policy, as a majority of panelists think the Federal Reserve's current policy is "about right." But the respondents widely diverged on when they think the Fed will stop its policy of buying bonds to prop up the economy.

The Fed's bond buying has helped keep U.S. interest rates near record lows. But speculation about when the Fed will slow or stop the program has fed volatility in the financial markets.

About 39 percent of survey respondents think the Fed will begin slowing the program in the fourth quarter of this year. Some, about 7 percent, think it won't happen until 2015 or later. About 39 percent think the Fed will wait until 2015 or later to begin raising its interest rate targets, its traditional tool for balancing economic growth with keeping inflation in check.

Majorities also said that a path to citizenship or other legal status for people who entered the country illegally will strengthen economic growth, and that the 2010 Affordable Care Act will increase federal spending on health care.

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Startups gain appeal as some Japan Inc. names fade

TOKYO — In a shabby back-alley office in Shibuya, a Tokyo district known for youth culture and tech ventures, defectors from corporate Japan are hard at work for a little known company they fervently believe will be the country's next big manufacturing success.

Like a startup anywhere in the world, its bare bone setup crackles with an optimistic energy and urgent sense of purpose. What's different, for Japan, is that this startup's talent is drawn from the ranks of famous companies such as Mitsubishi, Michelin and Nissan.

Kohshi Kuwahara, 26, worked for more than two years at electronics giant Panasonic Corp. before hopping to Terra Motors Corp., a little know venture that pays far less but is out to conquer the world with its stylish electric scooters. As with his colleagues at Terra, he resiled from the hidebound culture of big Japanese companies and felt a deep sense of frustration at their eclipse by rivals such as South Korea's Samsung and America's Apple.

"If you're stuck in a system that promotes just by seniority, it's living a slow death like animals on a farm," said Kuwahara. "I wanted to be in a tough competitive place."

Despite having some of the developed world's least hospitable conditions for starting a new business, Japan's "salaryman" culture of guaranteed lifetime employment at a household name corporation is no longer the unquestioned ideal.

Ventures are sprouting again after a decade marred by some high-profile failures and a striking aspect is their focus on manufacturing. Facebook and Google they are not. They are Sony and Toyota, all over again — but with young fresh faces.

Terra Motors founder and president Toru Tokushige, 43, said one sign of progress for startups is that these days they have no problems recruiting quality people.

A few years ago, all he could hire were what Japan categorized as the losers, those who had no hopes of getting hired at an established company. As Sony Corp. and other mainstream brands lose their luster, Terra is gaining a chance to shine.

Tokushige's 15 employees now hail from top-name companies, and the interns are enrolled in Hitotsubashi, one of Japan's top universities.

He acknowledges that plans for his tiny company to break into global markets still sound a little crazy by mainstream Japanese standards. But he believes his way of doing business is superior to bigger companies, where decision-making tends to be bureaucratic, slow and oriented toward avoiding risks.

"Mainstream companies started out as ventures. That means old-time Japanese did it," he said of the humble beginnings of Honda, Sony, Panasonic and All Nippon Airways. "We can do it, too."

At their former employers, Tokushige's workers felt stifled, although they were promised stability, status and money. They knew what they could contribute was limited, while at Terra, they can hope to make a crucial and tangible contribution.

"What we want to do is create another Sony or another Honda," said Kazuaki Konno, 35, an engineer who worked previously at Nissan Motor Co. and Boston Consulting before joining Terra.

At a shareholders' meeting in June, Sony President Kazuo Hirai was asked by an investor about an alleged exodus of talent from the company. The investor expressed worries about continued creativity at Sony. Hirai reiterated he would do all he could to keep innovation going, but he did not deny the allegation.

Such defectors are setting a trend, said author Ryuichi Kino, who has written books about the Japanese auto and nuclear industries, and is working on a book about the advent of career switches and job-hopping in Japan.

"These people are searching for their place. For those with talent, they would rather go where they are wanted than endure suffering where they are," he said.

The office of Terra Motors is a tiny room in a building in the crammed slummy Shibuya district known as "Bit Valley," Japan's equivalent of Silicon Valley for housing startups.

Recently, Terra came out with an electric scooter targeting emerging markets that connects to smartphones to gather location-based and electricity-consumption data. They charge from a regular plug outlet.

Terra, set up in 2010, received investment capital from top funds, including one run by former Sony President Nobuyuki Idei. It already has top market share in electric scooters in Japan, and is eyeing overseas markets including Vietnam, India and the Philippines.

Its success so far is against the odds.

The World Bank, in ranking the ease with which a new business can be started, scored Japan 114th among 185 economies. New Zealand was at the top, and the U.S. was No. 13. Singapore was fourth, while Ghana was 112th.

Japan's initial public offerings, at 36 in 2011, make for a fraction of the numbers in the U.S. at 134, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Adding to the obstacles, the prevailing message for the past decade in Japan was that startups were not to be trusted.

The ones that used to get attention tended to be video-game companies such as Gree Inc., which got slammed over the alleged anti-social addictiveness of its games, and the wayward, such as Net services company Livedoor, whose founder was arrested in a securities fraud scandal.

It is only recently that some vigor has returned to ventures. Part of the explanation may be the renewed focus on manufacturing.

Japan's four decades of industrial success after World War II were followed by more than two decades of stagnation, mainly because of the absence of innovation, said Masazumi Ishii, managing director of AZCA Inc., a California consulting firm specializing in international corporate development.

For innovations to happen, poorly performing large companies need to be allowed to fail, and innovative smaller companies must be nurtured and funded, he said.

The technological prowess is there. Japan still produces its share of Nobel Prize winners, ranking eighth in the world, and Japan's top universities file as many patents as do top U.S. universities, according to Ishii.

"Japan has the capability to innovate. But the problem is that this capability does not translate to commercial value."

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Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at www.twitter.com/yurikageyama

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Portland jetport's passenger traffic up slightly

PORTLAND, Maine — Passenger numbers at the Portland International Jetport have slowly started to climb after four consecutive years of declines.

There was a 1.4 percent increase in passengers passing through the jetport in the first six months of this year when compared to the same time-period last year.

Portland's passenger traffic is ahead of the national figure, which increased by about 0.3 percent in the first half of 2013 compared with the year-ago period.

Jetport director Paul Bradbury tells The Portland Press Herald that although modest, the gains are good news. He says the region does not have a lot of population growth, so the goal is to capture a larger share of the market.

The jetport is owned and operated by the city but is funded without taxpayer revenue.

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Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com

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Pritzker family buying TMS in $1B deal

PITTSBURGH — TMS International Corp. said Monday that it's selling itself to members of the Pritzker family in a cash deal it valued at about $1 billion including refinanced third-party debt.

Pittsburgh-based TMS provides outsourced industrial services to steel mills. It operates 81 customer sites in 12 countries, along with 36 brokerage offices from which it buys and sells raw materials.

The Pritzker family, one of America's wealthiest, operates a global industrial conglomerate and founded the Hyatt chain of hotels.

TMS stockholders will get $17.50 in cash for each share of their TMS Class A and Class B common stock. The price represents a 12 percent premium over the company's Friday closing stock price.

TMS, which went public in 2011, said the deal boosts returns for its shareholders and positions it to expand globally as a privately held company.

The deal, which remains subject to anti-trust approval and other closing conditions, has been approved by TMS' board and is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

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China says economy stabilizing after long slowdown

BEIJING — China's government tried Monday to reassure companies and its public about the economy's health, saying growth is stabilizing after a lengthy decline and should hit the official target of 7.5 percent for the year.

The announcement by the chief spokesman for the Cabinet's statistics agency was part of official efforts to defuse unease about the country's deepest slump since the 2008 global crisis.

"There are growing signs of stabilization and also of further growth," said the spokesman, Sheng Laiyun, at a news briefing. "We are confident we can hit our full-year growth target."

Sheng gave no updated data but cited previously released figures that showed industrial production and other parts of the economy improved in July.

Economic growth fell to 7.5 percent in the three months ending in June after declining steadily for 10 straight quarters. Sheng said it was the longest such slowdown since China's market-style reforms began three decades ago.

The International Monetary Fund and private sector analysts have cut this year's growth forecasts for China, though to a still healthy level of close to 8 percent. Some analysts say growth could dip below 7 percent in coming quarters.

The slowdown was largely due to government efforts to reduce reliance on trade and investment that drove the past decade's boom and nurture more self-sustaining growth based on domestic consumption.

Still, the downturn has been deeper than forecast, due to unexpectedly weak global demand for Chinese goods. That raised concern about higher unemployment, which could fuel political tensions, but the government says the economy is still generating new jobs.

Sheng also downplayed concern about debts owed by local governments that borrowed heavily over the past decade, in part to pay for building projects under Beijing's stimulus in response to the 2008 crisis. Some analysts worry the economy could suffer if local governments default, hurting the state-owned banking industry.

An audit last year found local governments ran up debts of 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) over the preceding decade, equal to about one-quarter of China's annual economic output.

Sheng said some local governments have paid down their debts while others are rolling out plans to manage them.

"We are monitoring the situation carefully and right now the issue is under control," he said.

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3-D Pancam's big potential

Video cameras can do a lot today, but picture one that has such varied uses as entertainment, surveillance, facial recognition — even interior design — and you've pretty much got the Pancam — or Eric Prechtl's vision of it, anyway.

With enough seed investment, the founder and president of Axis Engineering Technologies says, he's six months away from producing a polished, three-dimensional, panoramic camera that can send video to a 3-D television. And with the right analytics partners, AET could develop later models with each of those other capabilities.

At MassChallenge, the startup accelerator and competition that's named his company a finalist, "We're analyzing different markets and trying to figure out what is the best one to go after first," he said.

As unlikely as it might seem, the 43-year-old Prechtl's quest to build a smarter camera actually grew out of his efforts more than a decade ago to build a smarter helicopter.

While he was working on his doctorate in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed an actuator to reduce the amount of vibration in a helicopter, helping it to fly more smoothly and quietly.

"A similar thought process led us to figure out a way to make cameras smarter, including to make them see in 3-D instead of 2-D," Prechtl said.

He describes his working prototype as a "gnarly laboratory device," 24 inches in diameter, with six spokes, each with two cameras at the end.

Each camera, in turn, is capable of capturing 20 frames per second, "creating a panorama very fast."

Because human eyes are spaced only about 2.5 inches apart, the next-generation Pancam will be only 4 inches in diameter.

To adapt it for interior design and renovations, the next step would be to add software to map a still image of a room, Prechtl said.

The same camera could be used for surveillance to track suspicious movements, raising an alert should someone try to access a restricted area, he said.

And because the camera can see in three dimensions, it could be used by police, the FBI and the military for facial recognition because it could distinguish a person's features better than a traditional two-dimensional camera.

All of this technology doesn't come cheaply. Prechtl estimates the finished product, if it's sold commercially, would likely cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

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Buick LaCrosse gets stuck in park

My car is a 2008 Buick 
LaCrosse with the automatic shift on the steering column. It has begun sticking when in "park" and won't release even though I press the brake pedal hard. I had to push the car forward and back before the shift-lever would release. This has happened about five times, the last time while at a GM dealership. They told me that when the car is parked on any type of incline the pressure on the parking "pawl" may cause the problem. They suggest that while the engine is still running in "drive," set the parking brake, then step on the brake pedal, shift into park and then shut off the engine. This seems a rather strange and unorthodox way to solve my problem. And why did it take four-plus years to develop?

Actually, the procedure outlined by the dealer — and the owner's manual — is correct. In setting the parking brake first to immobilize the vehicle, there will be no pressure or leverage on the parking pawl, which physically locks the transmission. This eliminates what's known as torque lock — where the weight of the vehicle is "leaning" on the parking pawl, making disengagement difficult.

The other remote possibility is an issue with the automatic transmission shift-lock mechanism, which requires depressing the brake pedal with the ignition switch turned on to electronically release the shift mechanism.

I don't have a solid answer for why this problem has developed recently other than wear on the pawl or final drive internal gear that the pawl locks when in park. I'd ask the dealer to use the "range selector lever cable adjustment" procedure to check that the shift cable is correctly adjusted.

•      •      •

I have a 1988 Ford F150 with a 4.9-liter engine and a manual transmission. I have an intermittent problem with the engine cutting out at high rpm. Sometimes it cuts out at a lower rpm or sometimes not at all. The ignition system is the TFI-IV system, which requires no timing adjustment. Any ideas?

The most common cause for intermittent ignition problems with this generation Ford is the module itself. I've removed problematic modules for inspection and found visible air bubbles on the surface of the PC board sealed with a thick layer of silicone. You may be able to find a parts store that can test the module to determine if you need a new one.

•      •      •

I have a 2006 Toyota 
Sienna V6 with 59,200 miles. A notice from the dealer indicated that a valve adjustment should be done on the vehicle. Is this something that needs to be done at this low mileage? The maintenance manual does not have any mention of this requirement.

According to my ALLDATA automotive database, Toyota recommends inspecting that valve adjustment at 60,000-mile intervals. Inspecting valve adjustment requires removing the valve covers, rotating the crankshaft into specific positions and using a feeler gauge to measure valve clearance. On the other hand, adjusting the valves is listed as a 5.9-hour job, meaning a cost of $600 or more.

I can't recommend not having the inspection done at 60,000 miles, but if it were my vehicle and I wasn't hearing any clicking, tapping or unusual valve train noises, well, let's just say I'd keep driving the vehicle.

•      •      •

I have a 2006 Toyota Highlander, 6-cylinder, that I purchased new. I have an issue that seems to be getting worse since I've had the car. Sometimes when the car is shifting into third gear and going between 35 to 40 miles per hour, the car jerks. If you accelerate quickly it doesn't do it. The Toyota dealer and a transmission shop have looked at it but could not find the problem.

Remember my comments about torque-converter slippage described as shudder, chatter or flutter? Could this be the "jerks"? If this only occurs shifting into third, service literature points toward the "direct and overdrive clutch."

Readers may write Paul Brand at Star Tribune, 425 Portland Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn., 55488 or via email at paulbrand@startribune.com.

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Patent sought for infant-saving AIR

A pioneering MIT researcher is tackling the huge problem of infant deaths with a simple device he put together on the night he learned that nearly 2 million children die on the day they are born.

"I had a few sensors literally lying in the trash in my lab, so we built it and it works," said Kevin 
Cedrone, whose Augmented Infant Resuscitator might just become the next international lifesaver. "When you want to save a life, you really don't want to have to wait until a baby dies to find out you're doing it wrong."

The so-called AIR — 
designed to attach to existing infant ventilation equipment — relies on tiny sensors to measure the rate and pressure of air entering a newborn's lungs.

This way, doctors and nurses can immediately tell if they need to speed up or slow down the air flow, or just readjust the ventilation mask covering the baby's nose and mouth.

After putting together the makeshift model, Cedrone met with a team of doctors and engineers to tweak it. The team includes Santorino Data, a pediatrician who specializes in neonatal resuscitation; Craig Mielcarz, an electrical engineer who has produced low-cost, battery-operated medical devices; and Dr. Kristian Olson of Massachusetts General Hospital's Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies.

They're seeking a patent for their product, and hope to sell it someday for as little as $3 each.

Meanwhile, AIR has won top prizes in a variety of competitions, including MIT's IDEAS Global Challenge, Dow's Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge program, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Saving Lives at Birth partnership.

"It has great potential to change something that has a huge impact on the quality of life of infants all around the world," said Kate Mytty, who used to run the MIT IDEAS challenge. "People are trained on infant resuscitators all over the world, but they're still not working well. This makes it possible to understand why these resuscitators aren't working."

Money from those awards will pay to create more models and conduct a clinical trial in Uganda, 
Cedrone said.

As for Cedrone, who earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering last year, there's no telling what's next.

"I don't know what the future holds," he said. "Less than a year ago, everything I was doing was aimed at energy. This just kind of came across my radar."

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California vies for new space industry

SAN FRANCISCO — As several new private ventures to take people on trips to space come closer to becoming reality, California lawmakers are racing other states to woo the new space companies with cushy incentives.

They are debating a bill now in Sacramento that would insulate manufacturers of spaceships and parts suppliers from liability should travelers get injured or killed on a voyage, except in cases such as gross negligence or intentional wrongdoing. Last year, the state enacted a law that shields space tourism companies such as Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic from similar lawsuits.

"We're still in the fledgling part of space flight and space travel, and we need people to be able to take a risk," said California Republican Sen. Steve Knight, who introduced both state bills.

Several other states — including Texas, Florida, Virginia and New Mexico — have passed similar laws, hoping to lure newcomers to the more than $200 billion commercial space flight industry.

California's latest bill faces opposition from several lawmakers who say the state should not relax its standards since tourists should expect the ships they use to ascend to the heavens are safe. But space tourism companies say the protection is necessary if the state wants to attract and retain the industry's business.

"Someday, something is going to crash and burn," said Kathleen Allen, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California who researches and advises new space companies. "The question is: Are we going to be able to say that's a price we pay to stretch and explore and go beyond our current limits?"

Edwin Sahakian dreamed of flying in space since he watched Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon almost 45 years ago. Sahakian, 50, a trucking company owner from Glendale, Calif., is one of more than 600 people who have collectively paid about $75 million to embark on a trip in space with Virgin Galactic.

Leaving the planet is worth the risk, he said. Without incentives like limiting the ability of customers and family members to sue, he said the opportunity would never be open to him.

"I'm not under the impression that it's as safe as flying on an airliner or anything remotely like that," he said. "But I do feel like it's the safest way to go to space right now."

In April, Virgin Galactic's space ship completed its first powered flight, as its rocket engine burned for 16 seconds, propelling the ship to an altitude of 55,000 feet as it broke the sound barrier. The company expects to conduct flight testing this year and send people into space soon thereafter.

Other companies are also working to launch people beyond the earth's atmosphere. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX is already ferrying cargo to the International Space Station. Last year, SpaceX signed an agreement with Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace, which is designing inflatable space stations for research and maybe even tourists. SpaceX and other companies will provide the transportation — like airlines — and Bigelow the place to stay.

Regulatory and economic incentives play a big role in where companies choose to do business, said Andrew Nelson, the chief operating officer of XCOR, which is pursuing space tourism and hoping to conduct flight tests for its Lynx spaceship this year.

Last year, the company — which operates at Mojave Air and Spaceport in Southern California — announced it would place a research and development center and corporate headquarters in Midland, Texas, which offered economic incentives and an attractive regulatory environment, including shielding XCOR's suppliers from lawsuits.

Nelson said the company passed over Virginia, Florida, Oklahoma and California. XCOR expects the facility will create jobs and boost the local economy by millions of dollars. He said since California doesn't shield the company's supply chain and could not offer economic incentives, XCOR ruled the state out despite its talented workforce. The company will still have a smaller operation at Mojave and would consider doing more in the state if Knight's bill is enacted.

In April, New Mexico enacted a law shielding parts suppliers and manufacturers of space transport companies from liability as an incentive for Virgin Galactic and others to launch spaceships from Spaceport America, which the state had already spent more than $200 million financing.

At a California senate committee hearing in May, several senators expressed concern over shielding manufacturers and suppliers from lawsuits, saying customers should assume the equipment functions correctly and should have redress if it doesn't.

The bill's opponents say protection against liability is unnecessary because it would be outweighed by California's historical ties to the aerospace industry and its well-educated workforce. Knight said he is trying to work out a compromise with the bill's opponents by January.

Both supporters and opponents of Knight's bill agreed developments in the space industry — possibilities include mining asteroids or placing a human colony on Mars — present exciting, uncharted possibilities.

"Everybody would like to see a big goal that got the whole country behind like we did when we went to the moon. That was an exciting time, those people who remember it would like to see that again," Allen said.

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Even without Bernanke, Jackson Hole's a hot ticket

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Ben Bernanke is a no-show. No matter. Despite the absence of the Federal Reserve chairman, this year's annual economic conference in Jackson Hole has once again proved a destination of choice for central bankers.

In international banking circles, the Jackson Hole gathering, held each August in a rustic lodge in Grand Teton National Park, is akin to Academy Awards night. If you're invited, the message is clear: You're someone who matters.

This is the first year in more than two decades that a Fed chief hasn't given the keynote speech to open the two-day conference, which ended Saturday. News last spring that Bernanke would skip this year's conference was taken as a signal that he'll leave the Fed when his term ends in January.

With speculation intensifying over his successor, a spotlight has fallen on Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, one of two leading contenders. Yellen is here. Her chief rival, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, is not.

Yellen is among 10 members of the 19-member Federal Open Market Committee in attendance. The FOMC comprises the Fed board members and regional bank presidents who set the central bank's interest-rate policies.

Central bankers from every major economy, from Germany and Britain to Japan and China, are here. So are those of smaller nations from Albania to Malta.

Among the 130 guests are many scholars of economic policy. They're joined by top economists from financial firms — at least those who managed to score an invite.

Attendees spend hours in a windowless conference room hearing and discussing presentations of academic research. They do get afternoons off — to hike, go rafting or take bus tours. But even against the backdrop of majestic mountain grandeur, many of the Ph.D. scholars have been known to go right on debating economics through the day.

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One issue not on the agenda but a hot topic at the edges of the conference: The campaigns waged by supporters of Yellen and Summers to secure the nomination of their candidate. From the use of Twitter and opinion columns to behind-the-scenes lobbying and letters signed by Senate Democrats, the battle to influence the president's mind has been raging.

Fed officials here have been careful not to take sides in the contest, at least not publicly. They do agree on this: They've not seen anything quite like this summer's public jousting.

Dennis Lockhart, head of the Atlanta regional Fed bank, called it unprecedented. But he said the jockeying over the chairman's job is having no effect on the Fed's policymaking.

"The chairman's leadership is as strong as it has ever been," Lockhart said in an interview on CNBC.

He was addressing concerns that the prolonged contest to succeed Bernanke might weaken his influence as chairman by solidifying the perception that he's a lame duck.

James Bullard, head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, noted that a change in the Fed chairmanship has been fairly unusual since World War II. Bernanke has served for nearly eight years. Two of his predecessors — William McChesney Martin (1951-1970) and Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) — served for a combined nearly four decades.

As for whom he would prefer as chairman, Yellen or Summers, Bullard, also interviewed on CNBC, struck a diplomatic note.

They're both "great economists," he said.

___

Yellen did have a modest role to play at this year's conference, serving as the moderator for Saturday's session. It was a job she performed with fair minded diligence.

"My job today is to be a ruthless time keeper," she told the crowd in her opening comments. And she kept to her word, turning over numbered cards signaling to the presenters how much time they had left to present papers on such esoteric topics as global liquidity and cross-border capital flows.

She then had the job of picking the lucky participants in the audience who got to ask questions. At one point, she called on Donald Kohn, her predecessor as vice chairman at the Federal Reserve and one of three names President Barack Obama has provided as the leading candidates for the Fed chairman's job. Yellen and Summers are the other two.

Yellen didn't offer any substantive comments during her moderating stint, but there was one brief moment she had to have enjoyed.

Acknowledging her introduction, Princeton economics professor Jean-Pierre Landau said, "Thank you very much, Madam Chairman."

Ah. Music to her ears.

___

At the opening dinner Thursday night, Esther George, who as head of the Kansas City regional Fed bank is the conference host, had some fun with the topic of Bernanke's absence.

"Sometimes," George said in her welcoming remarks, "those who regularly attend are not able to make it. We make it a practice never to talk about those who turn us down."

"Despite my personal disappointment," she went on, she'd be happy to welcome back Ken Rogoff for future conferences.

Her mention of Rogoff, a well-known Harvard economist, rather than Bernanke, drew laughter from the audience.

Call it economists' humor.

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