The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 28

The Beacon Journal March 31, 199S Census isn't online yet The Census Bureau says security reasons are behind its decision that people cannot use the Internet to respond to the national head count in 2000. Bureau official Judith V. Waldrop said the Internet will probably be used to take the 2010 count. The Census Bureau pioneered the development of computers, using a punch card system and the first successful computer to help tabulate the 1890 count Close Close Close 568.89 736.45 1818.70 11 11 11 iplli Close Close Close 8782.12 1093.55 5.97 11 11 0.01 PageC6 Eye on the economy Three reports tomorrow will take the economy's pulse: The National Association of Purchasing Management releases its March index. The Commerce Department reports construction spending for February.

And the Conference Board reports February leading economic indicators. TTTNTT JJ "Firestone heir sies Baumk One Russell Firestone III alleges trust mismanageA Seeks independent trustee, $26.5 million damages Home sales and prices bring hope But many factors can cut into that 5.8 gain Home values are definitely looking up. Rising prices are the rule almost everywhere. Home sales jumped a big 10.3 percent in January. Owners are daring to dream that homes might be a good investment again.

Standard Poor's DR1 an economic forecasting firm in Lexington, expects an average increase of 5.8 percent this year on existing homes. That doesn't match the profits you've captured in called The One Group Income Bond Fund, a mutual fund in which a Bank One affiliate served as the portfolio manager. Firestone said that investment was done secretly, resulting in a loss of $478,859 during 1994, while the Bank One defendants, who sponsored and managed it generated large fees for themselves and the banks. Such an investment constituted See Fund, Page CIO wrongdoing. Firestone contends that because of mismanagement the trust fund, which started out at $8.5 million in the early 1990s, has tailed to grow at a rate it should have if the money had been invested well For example, he said that during the years 1993 and 1994 the trustee for Bank One committed more than 26 percent of the trust's net assets to a bond fund ed him and breached their duty in managing his trust fund through various, sometimes secretive, transactions.

Firestone, who now lives in Washington, D.C, and runs a monthly newspaper called Georgetown Country from there, is asking a jury to remove Bank One and its affiliates as trustee of the fund and name an independent trustee in their place. Bank One officials deny any BY WILLIAM CANTERBURY Beacon Journal stuff trnler Firestone heir Russell Firestone IH is taking various Bank One divisions in Ohio to federal court in Akron seeking at least $26.5 million in damages for alleged mismanagement of his trust fund. In a jury trial that opened yesterday, the 26-year-old great-grandson of Harvey Firestone, founder of the former Akron-based tire and rubber company that still carries the family name, claims that Bank One of Akron, and five other divisions of Bank One, including Banc One defraud Operators in Disorder mutual funds don't also give you a place to sleep. The current, booming demand JANE BRYANT QUINN Channel 67 is bought, but it will still sell Format won't change much as area station joins Tennessee company that owns shop-at-home services 'i BY R.D. HELDENFELS Beacon Journal lelensioii writer WOAC (Channel 67) has a new owner but only a slight change in focus: from infomercials to shop-at-home programs.

Shop At Home a Tennessee company specializing in home shopping services via TV, the Internet and other means, has acquired Channel 67 along with stations in Raleigh, N.C., and San Francisco. The company, which already owned stations in Houston and Boston, bought the stations and other assets of the New York-based Global Broadcasting Systems in bankruptcy court for $75.9 million. Shop At Home sees Channel 67 as a means of reaching the Cleveland television market the 13th largest in the country. Although licensed to Canton, Channel 67 operates from Warrensville Heights, where it shares a facility with an Akron licensee, WVPX (Channel 23). Paxson Communications owns Channel 23 and has managed Channel 67.

Shop At Home now reaches about 65 million homes, said its president Kent E. Lillie; insomniacs have seen its wares in the wee hours on WBNX (Channel 55). Lillie called Shop At Home the fastest-growing of the four major for homes is no inflationary blip. It's grounded in job growth, income growth and a forgiving credit market At 7.5 percent interest, mortgages look incredibly cheap. Thanks to low down payments (under 10 percent), buyers don't need a lot of cash.

A raft of special programs is even putting people with lower incomes in homes of their own. Young people, too, are rediscovering the joys of mortgage payments. Of the households headed by people under 25, 18 percent owned homes last year. That's the highest rate since 1983, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Like playing the lottery Nationally, homeownership stands at a record 66 percent, up from a low of 63.7 percent in 1988.

Minority buyers account for a huge 42 percent of the growth. Homebuying also jumped among the never-married, widowed and divorced. In a random group of cities I checked, the fastest-rising prices were for smaller homes, as measured by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. On the high end, prices jumped the most in places that have seen housing booms before, says economist Karl Case of Wellesley, Mass. Owners in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco are sitting on piles of home equity, which they're using to trade up.

But will your house be a good investment? Despite the positive national trend, you can't predict In greater Detroit, prices for midmarket homes jumped 7.2 percent last year, on Case-Shiner's index. In the Hartford, area, they gained just 2.3 percent. Any single sale is just as much a lottery as is trading stocks. It's true that even small gains look good compared with the amount of money you invest Take a $200,000 house with a 10 percent down payment rising in value by 2.3 percent The gain on your original equity comes to a fat 23 percent A little luck helps But the cost of buying and selling could easily exceed $20,000, after closing costs and sales commissions. You'll need supergains, or many years of smaller gains, to climb out of that hole.

Meanwhile, your down payment might have been racking up profits in stocks or bonds. Homeowners also have to pony up money for maintenance and repairs. You probably never measure this, but it cuts into your net return. Tax deductions for property taxes and mortgage interest help a bit that is, if you can use them. On modest homes, they might not exceed the standard deduction that you'd get in any case.

In short, this "investment" is not a slam-dunk. For decent returns on any home, you need either stupendous luck or a holding period long enough to amoitize your many costs. In average markets, it takes at least four years just to break evea Yet more than a third of home buyers sell sooner than that according to data developed by the National Association of Realtors in Washington, D.C. Jane Bryant Quinn's column appears every Tuesday. home shopping services.

The others are QVC; Home Shopping Network, which includes WQHS (Channel 61) in Cleveland; and ValueVision International, a for mer owner of Channel 23. One difference between Shoj At Home and its competitors is that the company markets prod ucts to men more than the others, Lillie said. The deal was completed Friday, and Shop At Home's telecasts began on Channel 67 over the weekend. It will also provide some children's shows and public affairs programs to meet Federal Communications Commission requirements, Lillie said. Local sports, which had been appearing on Channel 67 occasionally, are not currently part of Shop At Home's plans, said Lillie, although he said many details, including staffing and whether the station will move to new offices, are still to be worked out Channel 23 may pick up some of the sports programming, said Sam Curcuru, who recently succeeded Glenn Schiller as general manager of Paxson's local opera-tioa The Channel 67 deal has been in the works for a year.

The former owner, Whitehead See Shop, Page CIO Associated Press A Japanese businessman stops to take a look at share prices In downtown Tokyo yesterday. banks and businesses to abandon some of their old reliance on alliances with each other and with government bureaucrats. Already, Goldman Sachs and Co. has raised $6.5 billion from individual Japanese investors and Citibank has accumulated 850,000 individual accounts here, a gain of See Bang, Page CIO III Japan gets ready for the 'Big Bang' Nation's financial overhaul aims at rebinlding banking system. Some predict massive capital flight Hi -ft Diona Artis of Akron takes directory assistance calls at Ameritech's About 130 operators work at the office open 24 hours a day.

Rivalry takes Phone companies sometimes leave customers hanging in battle for directory assistance profits By Richard Thompson Beacon Journal business toiler There's a numbers game that's perfectly legal to play but that isn't always easy to win. It's called directory assistance. You place your bet 30 cents to have Ameritech look up a number for you, 95 cents for and hope for the payoff: actually getting the phone num KEN LOVE. Beacon Journal office In downtown Canton. a toll ing volume of phone numbers has increased their workload.

Technology has made their life more efficient, but telephone competition hasn't made it easier. Directory assistance operators are only as reliable as the listings their employers provide them. The problem is that some telephone companies are making it harder for other telephone companies to get their hands on See Phone, Page C7 Accountability in Portland, Ore. Today, in the latest such effort, the National Committee for Quality Assurance is set to unveil a plan to, for the first time, incorporate measurements of quality when it decides which HMOs to See HMOs, Page C7 BY MICHAEL ZIELENZIGER Kniglil Ridder Netrsixiiwrs TOKYO: The Japanese people, the world's most prodigious savers, are about to put their $10 trillion portfolio fully one-third of the globe's savings under new management and Wall Street and millions of investors may be among the biggest beneficiaries. After tomorrow, when Japan's enormous pool of savings, pension funds, and other capital will be freed from foreign exchange controls and other restrictions, enormous sums of Japanese money seem likely to flood out of this stagnant economy to seek higher returns in the United States and elsewhere.

"Publicly, we are saying the transition process after the Big Bang begins will be a gradual one," said one senior Japanese official, who insisted on anonymity. "But actually I think you will see massive capital flight" That's likely to keep U.S. interest rates down and equity prices up, and it's certain to give U.S. and other foreign firms greater opportunities to make money in Japaa More important in the long run, the Japanese reforms may signal that the world's second-largest economy is finally beginning to play by the same free market rules as its global competitors. If so, that will force Japanese ber you wanted on the first try.

Lately, though, it seems your odds of winning this game are worse than ever. Once upon a time, getting reliable directory assistance was a sure bet What happened? For starters, directory assistance operators like most of the rest of us have been down-. sized over the years. An increas erning what managed care companies can do, this effort focuses on creating "report cards" to help separate mediocre or poor doctors and hospitals from superior ones. "We have very little information on the quality of health care in this country," said David Lansky, president of the Foundation for HMO 'report cards' are in the works National Committee for Quality Assurance will rate plans, compare services BY LAURA MECKLER Associated Press Washington: As Congress debates consumer protection in the age of HMOs, a separate effort is under way to help Americans find quality health care by comparing doctors, hospitals and treatments.

Rather than creating rules gov-.