L.L. Bean Offers

Online shopping can be addictive and convenient, but some may shy away from purchasing items with a couple clicks of the mouse due to the cost of shipping. For L.L. Bean enthusiasts, starting March 25, that will no longer be a problem.

As of Friday March 25, apparel and outdoor gear maker L.L. Bean will permanently extinguish shipping fees for all online orders in response to customer demand. As stated in Business Week, L.L. Bean’s Chief Marketing Officer Steve Fuller said the Maine-based company is adopting the policy because that’s what customers want.

To promote its free shipping deal, the company is wrapping 10 MBTA (Massachusets Bay Transportation Authority) buses in advertisements that will make them look like mail-order packages. Anyone who rides the 10 buses from Monday to Saturday of next week will ride free, according toBoston.com. The MBTA, or the T as it is called in Boston, has twice before offered free subway rides as company promotions, once for ING and another time for Microsoft, but those were only for three-hour periods. L.L. Bean is the first company to focus on the city’s buses, according to Boston.com. The Maine-based company is paying the MBTA $216,000 for the promotion, which is roughly double what the 10 buses would collect from fares in a typical week.

“Boston is a very big market for us,” said Laurie Brooks, L.L. Bean spokeswoman in Boston.com. “We’re going to be running a national TV ad, with 15 second and 30 second spots, but we’re not doing anything fun like this.’’ The T’s busiest bus routes carry about 16,000 riders on an average weekday, with 10 or so vehicles operating on each route. According to reports, a busy bus might generate $1,200 a day in fares.

During the promotion, the inside of the buses will also be covered in advertisements that will resemble the inside of an L.L. Bean package.

Goldman Deals: On Tape

A Goldman Sachs director disclosed to Raj Rajaratnam in 2008 that the investment bank was weighing an acquisition of either Wachovia or American International Group, according to a wiretapped telephone conversation that was played in court on Tuesday.

Mr. Rajaratnam, co-founder of the hedge fund Galleon Group, is on trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan on insider trading charges. On Tuesday, a defense lawyer began his cross-examination of a main government witness who has pleaded guilty to passing illegal stock tips to Mr. Rajaratnam.

But the most striking testimony came when prosecutors played a recording of a July 25, 2008, call between Mr. Rajaratnam and Rajat K. Gupta, then a Goldman director.

Mr. Rajaratnam, working from his Greenwich, Conn., home that day, told Mr. Gupta that he was meeting with Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman, later in the week. He asked Mr. Gupta about a rumor that Goldman might look to buy a commercial bank.

“This was a big discussion at a board meeting,” Mr. Gupta said. He explained that the Goldman board was divided over whether buying a commercial bank made sense because it was a low-return business. Goldman was bearish on commercial banks, he said, but the board was “opportunistic” and if Wachovia “was a good deal they’d go and buy Wachovia.”

Mr. Gupta also said that the board was weighing the acquisition of an insurance business, including A.I.G. “Yes, A.I.G. was in the discussion mix,” he said. Ultimately, Mr. Gupta concluded, “I would be extremely surprised” if there was “anything imminent.”

The detailed discussion of Goldman’s board meeting is the first time the government has disclosed specific comments made by Mr. Gupta to Mr. Rajaratnam about the bank’s internal dealings while a director. The exchange also reveals the thinking of Goldman’s board at a time when the bank was struggling as the financial crisis grew.

A Goldman spokesman declined to comment.

The Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil action this month against Mr. Gupta, who once ran the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, accusing him of passing illegal tips to Mr. Rajaratnam about Goldman and Procter & Gamble, where he also served as a director. The case recounted phone calls between the two men, but provided no detail of their content.

Mr. Gupta has not been charged criminally. Gary Naftalis, a lawyer for Mr. Gupta, has said that the S.E.C.’s accusations are baseless.

The government concluded its direct examination Tuesday morning of Anil Kumar, a former senior executive at McKinsey, who has pleaded guilty to giving Mr. Rajaratnam confidential information about his clients.

Mr. Kumar testified that Mr. Gupta had numerous business dealings with Mr. Rajaratnam, including a partnership in a fund managed by Mr. Rajaratnam called Voyager that was unrelated to Galleon and that collapsed during the financial crisis.

During the cross-examination, John Dowd, Mr. Rajaratnam’s lawyer, attacked Mr. Kumar’s credibility, depicting him as a cooperating witness in the government’s back pocket and a cheat who did not pay his taxes.

“When you got caught, you pinned it all on Raj, didn’t you?” Mr. Dowd said.

Mr. Kumar, who spoke in a soft, scholarly tone during the direct examination, became combative. He raised his voice several octaves and repeatedly sparred with Mr. Dowd, shooting back clipped, rapid-fire retorts and mocking his questions with derisive laughter.

Mr. Dowd focused on the plan Mr. Kumar had set up in 2003 to receive secret payments from Mr. Rajaratnam and then invest them in Galleon. To avoid detection by McKinsey, Mr. Kumar established a shell company and opened a Swiss bank account in the company’s name. Those payments were then redirected to an offshore Galleon account controlled by Mr. Kumar but opened in the name of his housekeeper.

Mr. Kumar told the jury that he did all this at the direction of Mr. Rajaratnam, who paid him more than $2 million.

On Monday, Mr. Dowd called Mr. Kumar’s maneuvers “a monstrous lie.”

Mr. Kumar said, “I am not sure what you mean by ‘monstrous,’ I obeyed the instructions of Raj Rajaratnam, the managing partner of Galleon.”

Bank of America

Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender, counted 288,000 employees in its annual report for 2010 to securities regulators, an increase of 4,000, or 1.4 percent. Wells Fargo, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, increased headcount by 4,900, or 1.8 percent, to 272,200, according to its annual report. Bank of America’s workforce increased 17 percent in 2009, the year when Merrill Lynch & Co. was added, while San Francisco based Wells Fargo dropped almost 5 percent that year.

According to data, Banks reported a 77 % increase in earnings in 2010. Improved asset quality and a decrease in loan-loss provisions contributed to the earnings growth, according to a report last week from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, put aside $28.4 billion for bad loans in 2010, down 41 percent.

Eric Moskowitz said, “There was good talent out there at the right price,” head of market intelligence in the global financial markets practice of Los Angeles based executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. “A lot of banks cut pretty deep in 2008 and 2009, and they needed to staff-up.”

AmEx Headcount

JPMorgan, the second largest bank, may file its annual form 10K later today. Data accompanying the New York-based company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in January showed 239,831 employees, an increase of almost 8 percent from a year earlier.

The biggest credit card issuer American Express by purchases, increased its workforce by 2,700, or 4.6 percent, to 61,000 in 2010, according to a filing today by the New York based firm. In 2009, the staff shrank 12 percent. Citigroup Inc. the third largest bank by assets, cut jobs by 5,300, or 2 percent, to 260,000 in 2010. New York based Citigroup has been shrinking as it recovers from the financial crisis.

Banks are adding employees to help ensure they’re in compliance with new laws such as the Dodd Frank overhaul of the financial industry that passed last July, Moskowitz said. The act creates a consumer bureau at the Federal Reserve, a council of regulators to monitor firms for systemic risk to the economy and a mechanism for liquidating large financial firms whose collapse could threaten economic stability.

“It’s a very nuanced regulatory environment, not just for the U.S. Moskowitz said, but globally so you need people on the ground in different regions because the regulations are so in flux and varied.”

According to the filing, the BOA ranked second in home loans and first in mortgage servicing, hired and trained about 12,000 people to modify loans over the past two years to help homeowners struggling to keep up with payments. About 58,200 were employed in the home loans and insurance unit.