Barclays cuts 3,700 jobs; Airline industry at its safest since Jet age dawn; Dealing with Apple's cash mountain

1 Barclays cuts 3,700 jobs (Jill Treanor in The Guardian) The new boss of Barclays has attempted to break from the bank's scandal-ridden recent past by announcing plans to pull out of controversial businesses that speculate on food prices, specialize in “industrial scale” tax avoidance schemes and use the bank's money to bet on markets.

Antony Jenkins, promoted to the top job last year when Bob Diamond was forced out in the wake of the Libor-rigging scandal, had vowed to shut down businesses that were unethical, regardless of the profits they generate for the bank. However, he stepped back from the most radical reform by insisting the investment bank – which generates 60% of the bank's total profits – would remain a "very large part and an important part of the group". He said changing the bank's culture and rebuilding its reputation would take five to 10 years.

Some 3,700 jobs are to be axed as the bank retrenches from troubled businesses in continental Europe to focus on the UK, US and Asia after a six-month review of 75 individual business lines. Some 1,600 investment banking jobs have gone in the last six weeks alone. In a room emblazoned with the bank's new values – respect, integrity, service, excellence and stewardship – Jenkins insisted: "This is not window dressing or PR. They define the work we will do and the work we won't do."

2 Airline industry at its safest since Jet age dawn (Jad Mouawad & Christopher Drew in The New York Times) Flying on a commercial jetliner has never been safer. It was four years on Tuesday since the last fatal crash in the US, a record unmatched since propeller planes gave way to the jet age more than half a century ago. Globally, last year was the safest since 1945, with 23 deadly accidents and 475 fatalities, according to the Aviation Safety Network, an accident researcher. That was less than half the 1,147 deaths, in 42 crashes, in 2000.

In the last five years, the death risk for passengers in the US has been one in 45 million flights, according to Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at M.I.T. In other words, flying has become so reliable that a traveler could fly every day for an average of 123,000 years before being in a fatal crash, he said. There are many reasons for this remarkable development. Planes and engines have become more reliable. Advanced navigation and warning technology has sharply reduced once-common accidents like midair collisions or crashes into mountains in poor visibility. 

Regulators, pilots and airlines now share much more extensive information about flying hazards, with the goal of preventing accidents rather than just reacting to them. And when crashes do occur, passengers are now more likely to survive. The grounding of the Boeing 787 fleet last month illustrates this new era of caution. The last fatal accident involving a commercial flight in the US was Colgan Air Flight 3407, which crashed near Buffalo, killing 50 people, on Feb. 12, 2009. The pilot’s maneuver was the opposite of what he should have done when ice formed on the wings. 

But while flying is safer, it is still not risk-free. Air traffic is set to grow in the next decade, and airports are more congested. Near-misses on runways and taxiways have risen. And with two million passengers in the US boarding more than 30,000 flights every day, maintaining that safety record will be a challenge. 

3 Dealing with Apple’s cash mountain (Steven M Davidoff in The New York Times) The fight over Apple’s $140 billion cash pile is proving the adage that money can make people do strange things. And it is not just Apple that is doing things it would not have done before. The hedge fund manager David Einhorn, famous for shorting stocks like Lehman Brothers, has gone long on Apple, betting heavily that Apple’s stock is undervalued — and blaming that eye-popping mountain of money.

While most of us would think that having tens of billions would be wonderful, it’s actually a problem for Apple. The money just sits there, not earning much in an environment of extremely low interest rates. And the problem is only getting worse. Apple is accumulating money at an enormous rate — more than $23 billion in the last quarter alone. It was a more manageable issue when Apple was a rapidly growing stock, but since September Apple’s share price has fallen to roughly $470, from over $700.

The problem is that even if Apple wanted to return all its cash to shareholders, it can't. Much of the cash is held abroad in foreign subsidiaries. If the company repatriates it to return to shareholders, it would have to pay taxes on it. Instead, the company is letting the cash sit there in the apparent expectation that there will be federal tax relief.