Irvine developer Western National Realty Advisors bought a 206-unit apartment complex in Long Beach for $46 million.

Western National bought the property at 1613 Ximeno Ave. from Archstone, a Colorado apartment developer and operator. The new owners named the complex built in the 1980s the Landing at Long Beach.

Western National plans to update the 145,000-square-foot garden-style complex, said Jerry LaPointe, vice president of Western National Realty Advisors, an affiliate of apartment investor Western National Group.

The acquisition is the sixth in Western National’s Fund II, La Pointe said. “We are actively pursuing additional acquisitions.”

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SACRAMENTO -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. has lost a bid to stop state electric grid operators from installing equipment at two Huntington Beach power plants to help prevent brownouts next summer.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled late Friday that JPMorgan, which has a contract to resell power from two other units of the plant, does not have the contractual power to veto installation of needed voltage condensers.

The devices are needed at the shoreline plant to protect the Southern California electrical grid from power spikes and shortages when air conditioners are working overtime.

The California electricity grid operator wants to make sure that the state has enough power to compensate for the loss of 2,000 megawatts from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, whose reactors are shut down for safety reasons.

"We're obviously very pleased with the order," said Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the Folsom-based California Independent Systems Operator, which runs most of...

India has long had a love affair with gold. But one businessman there is so infatuated with the precious metal, he dropped about $230,000 on solid gold shirt.

More than two dozen goldsmiths toiled for 15 days for lender Datta Phuge, who custom ordered the seven-pound top to wear for New Year's festivities, according to the Pune Mirror. The shirt is crafted from 14,000 22-karat gold rings linked together and comes with six Swarovski crystal buttons and a belt also made of gold.

Phuge said he considers the shirt “an investment which will keep appreciating.”

“People buy cars and go on holidays abroad,” he told the Mirror. “For me, gold is the ultimate passion. That is the reason I have spent a whopping amount of money on the shirt.”

That kind of thinking isn’t unique in India, where gold represents wealth and financial security in much the way that owning a home does in the United States. HSBC recently predicted that gold prices would jump this...

A massive cargo-carrying airship has taken shape inside one of the 17-story wooden blimp hangars at the former military base in Tustin.

According to aircraft maker Worldwide Aeros Corp., construction is complete on a 36,000-pound blimp-like aircraft designed for the military to carry tons of cargo to remote areas around the world.

The Montebello company hopes to have a first flight in the coming months and to demonstrate cargo-carrying capability shortly thereafter.

PHOTOS: Next-generation airships

"This is truly the beginning of a vertical global transportation solution for perhaps the next 100 years,” Chief Executive Igor Pasternak said in a statement.

Worldwide Aeros, a company of about 100 employees, built the prototype under a contract of about $35 million from the Pentagon and NASA.

The Aeroscraft is a zeppelin with a 230-foot rigid skeleton made of aluminum and carbon fiber. It's a new type of hybrid aircraft that combines airplane and airship technologies and doesn't need...

Remember when the investment world was abuzz with rumors that Bank of America Corp. might go under, despite a $45-billion bailout from the feds?

Investors finally shrugged off any such remaining fears last year, bidding up shares in the Charlotte, N.C., bank by 109% -- the biggest gain for 2012 of any stock in the Dow Jones industrial average.

The shares, which traded above $50 in 2007 and plunged below $4 in 2009, rose to $11.61 at the close of 2012. The stock closed Friday at $12.11.

Chief executive Brian Moynihan's biggest chore has been dealing with claims from government agencies,  private mortgage investors and mortgage insurers for damages related to Countrywide Financial of Calabasas, the high-risk home lender BofA acquired in 2008.

After tens of billions of dollars in Countrywide losses, the claims are still chewing away at BofA, whose third-quarter earnings tumbled 95%, to just $340 million, after the bank set aside another $1.6 billion for litigation costs. BofA reports...

Early signs point to a holiday season that was not nearly as merry as retailers had hoped.

Sales were down 3.4% compared to the year before, while the number of store visits plunged 16.4%, according to a report from coupon site RetailMeNot.

Aside from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, spending came late into the season, the report found. Four of the five busiest shopping days fell within 10 days of Christmas, with Dec. 22 (commonly known as Super Saturday) surpassing even Black Friday.

Post-Christmas shoppers between Dec. 26 and the new year handed retailers a 12.7% jump in sales despite traffic into stores actually falling 8.5% as retailers got better at converting browsers into buyers.

“There were important shifts in calendar days this season, which impacted sales and traffic to stores," said Shelley Kohan, RetailMeNot vice president of retail consulting.

She noted that Christmas last year fell on a Sunday, which suppressed sales on Saturday but boosted shopping on the day after...

The Food and Drug Administration laid out two proposed rules Friday designed to boost food safety and curb illnesses that kill thousands of Americans a year.

The first would require food producers to have formal plans in place to avoid and deal with contaminated consumables sold in the U.S., whether originating domestically or abroad.

All companies would have to keep records of their efforts, which would be open to government audits.

The latter rule would demand “science- and risk-based standards” at fruit and vegetable farms and packing facilities.

The suggested regulations were a long time coming – one of them 12 months behind the date mandated by Congress, according to food safety advocates. The agency said the lag was due to “extensive outreach” to consumers and industry members necessary for effective rules.

The policies stem from the Food Safety Modernization Act, which President Obama signed into law two years ago and is widely recognized as the...

For the first time since the recession began, the unemployment rate for adult women surpassed that for adult men, indicating that while the U.S. might have been a "mancession," it also appears to be experiencing a "mancovery."

The unemployment rate for women 20 years and older rose to 7.3% in December, from 7% the month before. Unemployment for men of the same age remained at 7.2% in December.

The persistently high unemployment rate for women is likely a result of the large cuts in state and local governments that have come over the last year as lawmakers slashed jobs to close budget gaps. The economy lost 13,000 government jobs from November to December, and has lost 68,000 since December 2011.

Women occupy about two-thirds of public sector jobs, according to Joan Entmacher, vice president for Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center. Women make up a large part of local government payrolls because they are a large proportion of the teachers in the country. The...

After a week of ups and downs in the stock market, investors were mixed in their reaction to the news that the U.S. economy added 155,000 jobs in December, a number that was widely expected.

The S&P 500 rose 1.98 points, or 0.14%, as of 10:56 a.m. EST, while the Dow remained essentially flat. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell 7.91, or 0.26%.

The news from the jobs report helped continue turbulence in the markets after minutes released by the Federal Reserve on Thursday raised investor concern, indicating that some members of the Federal Open Market Committee wanted to end quantitative easing sometime this year.

Quantitative easing is when central banks buy financial assets from commercial banks, injecting money into the economy. The Fed had expanded quantitative easing to help stabilize the economy, but some members of the FOMC suggested there was not a broad consensus in how long to continue these programs.

“This could mean that maybe the end of the open-ended...