Business Highlights

risk losing say in their fate after Wednesday

Pilots at Northwest and Delta airlines have until Wednesday to make pay cut deals before they risk losing some of their control over the matter.

A bankruptcy judge is set to rule on Northwest’s request for permission to impose its own pay cuts and work rules on pilots and flight attendants. And Delta’s request to reject its pilot contract will go to arbitrators if a second long-term concessions deal isn’t reached. Both unions are threatening strikes if the airlines impose pay cuts unilaterally. Both airlines have said strikes could kill them.

As talks continued Tuesday in New York, Northwest pilots appeared closest to the edge of a strike. Two pay cuts have already sliced 39 percent from their wages. More than 92 percent of pilots voted to authorize a strike, the union said Tuesday.

Economic reports are encouraging to some, discouraging to others

WASHINGTON — The economy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

What looks encouraging to some Americans can be discouraging to others. It all depends on where you sit on the economy — seller versus buyer, Main Street versus Wall Street.

"What economists see as half full, investors see as half empty,” said Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research. A trio of economic reports, released Tuesday, seemed to underscore that point. The reports showed mediocre economic activity at the end of last year, a slowing housing market in January and skittish consumers in February.

Economists said the reports didn’t change their view that the economy is probably growing by a brisk 4.5 percent rate in the January-to-March quarter and will log another year of solid — though slower — growth for all of 2006.

"The economy is doing pretty well now in terms of momentum,” said Brian Bethune, economist at Global Insight.

But the latest batch of economic news unnerved Wall Street investors, sending stocks tumbling. The Dow Jones industrials lost 104.14 points to close at 10,993.41.

Briefly ...

Consumer confidence falls: Americans in February became less optimistic about the overall economy, especially the short-term prospects for the job market, sending a widely followed barometer of consumer sentiment below analysts’ estimates.

The Conference Board, a New York-based private research group, said Tuesday its consumer confidence index fell to 101.7, from a revised 106.8 in January, the highest level since May 2002.

The drop in February stalled a rebound in the index that began in November following the Gulf Coast hurricanes. Analysts had expected a reading of 104.0 in February.

Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said "consumers are growing increasingly concerned about the short-term health of the economy and, in turn, about job prospects.”<