The $20 million dealership — which will be called Schomp BMW — is located at C-470 and Lucent Boulevard in Highlands Ranch. A grand opening gala is planned for Oct. 22.

Schomp owns Ralph Schomp Automotive on South Broadway in Littleton, which sells BMWs, Hondas and Minis cash till payday advance.

BMW sales will be moved to the new facility in November. It will be among the top 15 largest BMW dealerships in the U.S., the company said.

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The two companies have been among the hardest hit stocks during this devastating market decline. But shares of several other big bank stocks rallied during a wild, tumultuous day for the broader market.

Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) plummeted as much as 46% at one point Friday on news that the rating agency Moody’s was weighing a potential downgrade of the long-term debt ratings of the company and its subsidiaries. The company’s stock bounced back a bit at the end of the day but still finished 22% lower.

Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley was forced to deny rumors that its proposed $9 billion stock sale to the Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ was in danger of falling apart.

Still, despite several reassurances from Morgan Stanley and Mitsubishi that the deal would close as scheduled next week, investors remained jittery about Morgan’s fate.

"The fundamental issue with financial stocks is that fear in the market can become self-fulfilling," said Benjamin Wallace, an analyst at the Westborough, Mass.-based wealth management firm Grimes and Company Inc.

Shares of Goldman Sachs also fell Friday after Moody’s issued a similar warning about the Goldman’s debt. Goldman (GS, Fortune 500) stock fell 12% on the news.

Calls to both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs requesting comment about the Moody’s reports were not immediately returned.

But other big banks which some analysts have deemed as relatively safer than the investment banks, such as Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), bucked the trend, gaining over 6% and 13% respectively.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), which claimed victory in its battle with Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) to buy struggling bank Wachovia (WB, Fortune 500) on Thursday, closed up nearly 4%.

The KBW Banking Index and S&P Banking Index, two key barometers of the sector that also include many regional banks, both finished more than 7% higher Friday.

Shares of regional banks SunTrust (STI, Fortune 500), KeyCorp (KEY, Fortune 500) and US Bancorp (USB, Fortune 500) all ended about 5% higher on the day.

Investors were juggling a host of other concerns about banks Friday, including an auction of credit default swaps for bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

A number of big U.S. and European banks, such as Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, found themselves on the hook after the auction valued the insurance against a Lehman collapse at just 8.625 cents on the dollar, according to credit derivatives processor Creditex.

But one analyst downplayed the impact that the results of the auction were having on bank stocks.

"In the context of more than [$200 billion] of payments that will be made, it’s not that significant and on the bright side, this auction gives us clarity to pricing and closure to this situation and now the players can quantify fully their exposure to this particular event," Peter Boockvar, market analyst for Miller Tabak, wrote in a note to clients.

In the end, a lack of confidence remained the key driver in Friday’s selloff of many banks.

World governments have unleashed numerous initiatives in recent days in the hopes of restoring some much-needed calm to markets worldwide including a coordinated cut interest rates by a number of central banks. Still, those efforts have proved ineffective as the selloff continues and credit markets remain frozen.

Starting today, finance ministers from the Group of Seven, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, are scheduled to meet to discuss other coordinated efforts to help stop the global market slide.

Still, Paulson and other top domestic officials are weighing other courses of action to help prop up the U.S. banking system.

One widely speculated move would involve injecting much-needed capital into banks through the purchase of shares in bank stocks. This option was made available to the Treasury under the recently passed $700 billion rescue plan.

President Bush’s chief economic adviser, Edward Lazear, told CNN Thursday that this was being considered. Many experts believe that doing so would encourage banks to lend to one another more freely.

Libor, a key rate banks use when lending to each other, has soared to record levels in recent weeks. Even as banks showed some willingness to lend on a short-term basis on Friday, longer-term Libor rates jumped to their higher level so far this year.

There is also talk that U.S. officials may take a page from the playbook of other world governments such as the U.K., which backed billions of dollars in bank debt earlier this week.

At the same time, top U.S. officials are also considering removing the deposit insurance cap on all domestic bank deposits, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. European countries including Greece, Ireland and Germany have already done so in recent days.

The thinking behind such bold measures is that they could provide a psychological boost to an industry which has been shaken to its core.

But John Douglas, a former general counsel at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., has warned that removing deposit caps altogether could have unintended consequences.

Lifting the deposit caps might make it tougher for regulators to identify banks in trouble since a run on deposits is typically a warning signal. And commercial depositors would be less likely to take their money out of banks if all the deposits are insured, Douglas said.

In addition, Douglas, who currently serves as a partner in charge of the bank and financial institutions group at the law firm Paul Hastings, warned that lifting the cap could require financial institutions to pay higher premiums to support the insurance fund that covers deposits of failed banks.

That could prove to be an expensive proposition for capital-hungry banks.

"[The money] has to come from somewhere," Douglas said. 

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That increases the HTA’s fiscal 2009 budget for marketing to $55.5 million. The $2 million will be reallocated from other, as yet unspecified, HTA funds.

HTA’s 2009 budget initially totaled $88 million but that was later adjusted to $79 million, reflecting the drop in hotel guest tax revenues that support the agency’s operations.

For the June-August period, transient accommodations tax revenue was in line with the downward forecast, said Lloyd Unebasami, the HTA’s chief administrative officer, who on Thursday was named interim president and CEO while a search begins to replace Rex Johnson, who resigned Wednesday (quick faxless payday loan).

Sharon Weiner, the HTA’s vice chairwoman, said the board would determine where to spend the extra $2 million after receiving staff recommendations.

Previous efforts have focused on public relations and advertising campaigns on the West Coast, Hawaii’s largest visitor market.

On Oct. 5, the HTA and its chief marketer, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, launched the first phase of a $12.5 million North American campaign that will run through next March.

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The second annual award, sponsored by Chicago-based APA’s Great Places in America program, recognizes the role planning plays in creating communities.

Arlington’s implementation of smart growth measures in the area have resulted in above-average Metro use, mixed-use development along the two streets, increased density and a reduced carbon footprint, according to APA.

Twenty percent of Arlington residents do not own a car and 50 percent walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.

Bike lanes on the two boulevards connect to nearby Metro stations, and sidewalks continue to be widened to fit more foot traffic.

“The efforts of the community and local officials during the 1960s to get Metro routed through the commercial and business areas of Arlington shows the lasting value such planning and foresighted decisions create for a community,” said Paul Farmer, APA’s executive director, in a statement (pay day loan).

Since 1970, the number of jobs and office space — measured in square footage — in the area has quadrupled.

And more growth will spurt up soon, thanks to a two-decade plan developed by Arlington Economic Development in 2006 that envisions 1.1 million square feet of new office space.

Last year, APA called Eastern Market in D.C. one of the 10 best neighborhoods in the U.S.

On Wednesday APA also named Union Station in D.C. a great space. APA cited Union Station’s social atmosphere, transportation options, historic position in the L’Enfant plan for D.C., and its revitalization after periods of decline, as reasons for the pick.

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“They are financial institutions that could sell assets,” James Lockhart, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said during a C-SPAN television interview. “Whether they will or not certainly the decision has not been made.”

Lockhart estimated that between 2 percent and 4 percent of Fannie and Freddie’s assets are bad mortgages.

On Friday, President George W. Bush signed into law a $700 billion bailout package for the U.S. financial industry aimed at allowing Treasury to buy soured assets from institutions that have stopped lending to each other as well as individuals and businesses (cash loan).

The two government-sponsored enterprises, which were seized by the government in early September, own or guarantee almost half of the country’s $12 trillion in outstanding home mortgage debt.

The first asset sale under the Treasury program is not expected to take place for at least four weeks, sources familiar with the financial rescue plan said on Friday.

“It’s very important for them that Treasury will be able to buy those, free up capital at those banks to make new mortgages that hopefully Fannie and Freddie can buy,” Lockhart said.

The U.S. financial crisis has dealt a massive blow to the lending industry on Wall Street and in Europe. Companies have collapsed under the weight of nonperforming mortgages and related securities. 

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Labor Department figures showed yesterday that payrolls fell by 159,000 in September, the biggest reduction in five years. While the unemployment rate held at 6.1 percent, that’s up from 5 percent as recently as April. Some economists, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jan Hatzius, said it may rise to 8 percent as the credit crunch hammers consumers and companies.

“We’re in this self-reinforcing negative cycle,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at the West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Economy.com. “It’s going to be a very significant recession.”

That’s bad news for Republican presidential candidate John McCain as the campaign enters its final month. The jobless rate has only risen twice in the year leading up to elections since World War II and in each case the party in power lost.

“Voters praise or blame the incumbent party in the White House for the economy,” said Ray Fair, a professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Rising unemployment is a negative for McCain.”

A computer model Fair has developed to forecast the election based on the economy shows the 72-year-old Arizona senator losing to his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, 47, on Nov. 4.

Mounting job losses also put pressure on policy makers to do more to aid the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is slated to speak to economists in Washington on Oct. 7 and some central bank watchers said he might use the opportunity to signal that a reduction in interest rates is in the offing.

Rate Cuts

“The Fed is expected to cut interest rates soon and ultimately take the federal funds rate down to 1 percent,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. The target federal funds rate — the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans — is now 2 percent.

At the Treasury, Secretary Henry Paulson moved quickly to put a $700 billion bank rescue plan approved by Congress into effect. He’s recruiting asset managers, bankers and lawyers to help the Treasury get the plan off the ground.

While that may eventually help limit the damage, economists said the economy is likely to get worse before it gets better.

“It’s just gotten to the point where a lot of companies will be forced to cut costs more aggressively and they’ll look for those in jobs,” said Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co. in Minneapolis.

Losses Spread

Job losses in September were widespread as the weakness that began in the housing market expanded to other parts of the economy. Aside from a 9,000 gain in government payrolls, all major categories dropped except education and health care.

Edelmira Clark, 53, of Chicago, said she was concerned about losing her job as a hotel housekeeper (instant pay day loan). Her company has already cut her work hours to two days a week.

“I’m trying to find a part-time job in the morning to balance, because I can’t do only two days of work,” said Clark, who immigrated to Chicago from Belize in 1997. “But a lot of people, my friends, have lost their jobs for good.”

The September employment report showed that the work week shrank to match the lowest level since records began in 1964.

Even lawyers are hurting. Peter Cronan, a former professional football player who is now vice president of a litigation support firm in Boston, said the company is stepping up its layoffs as the economy weakens.

“We’ve just put the accelerator on” firings, said the 53- year-old Cronan. “It’s survival.”

Vicious Spiral

The risk now is that the 13-month-old credit crisis and the recessionary economy begin to feed off each other in a vicious spiral that makes both worse.

Companies from newspaper publisher Gannett Co. to slot machine maker Bally Technologies Inc. are finding it harder to raise cash as frightened investors and bankers pull back. That’s undermining the economy and deepening the recession, giving lenders yet another reason to hoard cash.

“The credit flow appears to be a trickle,” said former Fed governor Lyle Gramley, now senior economic adviser at the Stanford Group Co. in Washington. “If that persists, we’d be seeing job losses of 300,000 to 400,000 a month and consumer spending collapsing.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of U.S. economic cycles, has yet to call a recession. The group, which bases its assessment on indicators including employment, sales, incomes and industrial production, usually takes six to 18 months to make a determination.

`Waiting Mode’

As gross domestic product figures have still “not recorded the bad news, we are in waiting mode,” said Robert Hall, the Stanford University economist who heads the committee.

Still, many economists have little doubt that a recession has begun. The only questions are how long it will last and how deep it will be.

Zandi and Gramley said the economy already looks likely to suffer a bigger decline than in the last two recessions in 2001 and 1990-91 and may rival the 1980-82 slump, during which GDP shrank by 2.7 percent.

The increase in the jobless rate may be even worse. If unemployment rises as high as the 8 percent forecast by Hatzius, Goldman’s chief U.S. economist, that would mean that it had jumped by more than it did in the early 1980’s.

“The economy is being hit on all fronts,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York. “We may be entering a deep recession.”

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France confirmed that President Nicolas Sarkozy would host a summit on the global financial crisis with leaders of Germany, Britain and Italy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker in Paris on Saturday.

The announcement put an end to uncertainty about a meeting Paris has pushed for, due to disagreements among the main European Union governments on the right response to the deepening credit crunch.

An unnamed senior Greek finance ministry official said the country would guarantee all deposits at its banks. Such a move would ignore criticism of a similar move by fellow euro zone member Ireland, which has attracted criticism from Britain and Spain as well as misgivings among Brussels’ competition authorities.

Governments in Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have ridden to the rescue of banks in the past week, using state funds to take full or partial control to restore confidence in ailing lenders such as Fortis (FOR.BR: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) (FOR.AS: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Bradford & Bingley (BB.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

European officials welcomed the U.S. Senate’s approval of a $700 billion plan to take so-called toxic assets off banks’ balance sheets, but they insisted Europe did not need a similar program or was not ready for it institutionally.

“We do not have a federal budget, so the idea that we could do the same as what is done on the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t fit with the political structure of Europe,” the ECB’s Trichet told a news conference.

The bank left its interest rates unchanged on Thursday although it discussed a cut amid slowing growth and easing inflation risks.

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John McCarty, who owns a half-dozen restaurants around the Twin Cities, reached a deal this week to lease space for the restaurant with the partnership that owns the building, at 89 S. 10th St. Terms of the lease were undisclosed. McCarty said he plans to have the new restaurant open by Nov. 1 or sooner.

McCarty owns Grandview Grill, Louisiana Cafe and Paisano’s in St. Paul, Uptown Diner in Minneapolis and Woodbury Cafe.

McCarty didn’t say what the new restaurant would be called.

He said the new restaurant will share the same menu as some of the other stores and like the others, it won’t serve alcohol. The space won’t be heavily refurbished, but it will get a new sign, he said. The restaurant is already fully staffed, he said.

Hell’s Kitchen had been looking for a new home since March, partly because its existing space was to be affected by the redevelopment of the site at 10th St. S. and Nicollet Mall.

That development hasn’t come together, but Hells Kitchen announced last month that it decided to move anyway - less than a block away into the former Rossi’s restaurant at Marquette and 10th.

The popular restaurant will have its last day in its current home on Sunday and plans to re-open Oct. 13, according to Hell’s Kitchen part-owner Cynthia Gerdes. Its new home is in the basement of the mixed use complex at 80 South 9th St.

“We’re beside ourselves decorating the new space,” she said. “This was just meant to be – its underground.”

The new location will have different areas, one that is more cheeky and louder and will show movies on weeknights and have live music on weekends, another that is formal and quiet. It will also have a bar and even a place for takeout food that’s going to be called Hell on Wheels, she said.

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Twenty minutes into the regular trading session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had gained 190.51 points, or 1.84 percent, to 10,555.96. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 24.42 points, or 2.21 percent, to 1,130.81. The Nasdaq Composite Index added 34.64 points, or 1.75 percent, to 2,018.37.

European stock markets were trading mixed on Tuesday. As of 9:36 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, The FTSE 100 Index rose 20.66 points, or 0.43 percent, to 4,839.43 on the London Stock Exchange, while the Dax Index declined 58.38 points, or 1.0 percent, to 5,748.70 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

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The measure of sales in the euro area fell to 46.2 from 47.7 in August. A reading below 50 indicates contraction. The index is based on a survey of more than 1,000 executives compiled for Bloomberg News by Markit Economics.

Banks have become more reluctant to lend as the U.S. financial turmoil spreads, undermining global economic growth and pushing confidence among executives and consumers in the euro region to the lowest since the slump in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. At the same time, inflation remains close to a 16-year high, lowering consumers’ purchasing power.

“Consumer spending will remain very subdued,” said Gilles Moec, an economist at Bank of America Corp. in London. “There’s a risk of another negative quarter” after the region’s economy contracted in the three months through June.

Retail sales dropped in Germany and Italy, two of the three largest economies in the 15-nation euro region. French shops sold more for a third month. European retailers are firing workers at the fastest pace in almost three years, the report showed.

Fiat SpA, Italy’s largest manufacturer, suffered a 23 percent decline in Italian car sales in August. Gruppo Coin SpA, Italy’s largest department-store chain, said second-quarter profit fell 75 percent after consumer confidence sagged to near a 15-year low.

Slower Growth

The Italian government last week cut its 2008 economic growth forecast to 0.1 percent, the slowest pace in five years, and less than a June estimate of 0.5 percent. Unemployment in Italy probably rose for a fifth quarter in the three months through June, a report will show today, according to the medium forecast of 15 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

“We expect consumer spending to contract again in the third quarter, reflecting the impact of a weaker labor market and of the July oil-price peak,” said Paolo Pizzoli, an economist at ING Wholesale Banking in Milan.

Today’s report showed that retailers’ gross margins continued to fall as shops needed to offer greater discounts to attract customers, Markit Economics said. Inflation in the euro zone reached 3.8 percent in August, almost twice the European Central Bank’s 2 percent target.

Shedding Workers

The declining profit margins and weak economic conditions are forcing European retailers to cut staff. German department store owner Arcandor AG announced plans to eliminate at least a fifth of jobs at the headquarters of its Karstadt unit, Germany’s largest department-store chain, and lowered its profit forecast for 2009.

Retail sales in Europe’s largest economy fell for the fourth month. More than a third of German retailers didn’t meet sales targets for September and some companies saw consumer demand falling faster than expected, the report showed.

The German economy contracted 0.5 percent in the second quarter and may not recover in the third as investments falter and consumer spending slumps. The threat of job losses may further undermine consumer sentiment and spending.

French retailers seem to be coping with the global slowdown as sales expanded in September and consumer confidence in Europe’s second-largest economy unexpectedly rose for the first time in more than a year as the retreat in fuel prices left people with more to spend. Crude oil prices have fallen almost 30 percent since the peak of $147.27 a barrel on July 11.

Gucci Sales

PPR SA’s, the owner of luxury clothes maker Gucci Group, last week confirmed sales and profit will increase this year. Chief Executive Officer Francois-Henri Pinault said a slowdown of “one or two years” is in store following four years of luxury-goods expansion.

The gains may be short lived as the spreading credit crunch threatens to further choke economic growth.

“The strength of the global financial crisis will have consequences on economic growth and employment in France,” President Nicolas Sarkozy told ministers on Sept. 26 at the weekly Cabinet meeting in Paris.

For the Bloomberg retail indicator, Markit Economics recruited a panel of companies in Germany, France and Italy, which together make up around 80 percent of total euro-area retail sales by value. The panel includes large chain retailers as well as smaller stores.

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