John Berry reports that the Federal Reserve has warned employees of its twelve regional banks that some jobs may be cut in coming months due to the decline in check volume cleared by the Fed.

In a typical letter sent this month to Fed employees, Robert D. McTeer Jr., president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "The Federal Reserve's national check business has experienced significant losses in volume and revenue over a period of many months. This volume loss is attributable to a number of factors including consolidations in the financial services industry and greater use of electronic payments."

Michelle Higgins reports on the growth in prepaid cards.

The new cards are the latest indication that competition among card issuers has never been more brutal. Americans who carry plastic already have an average of nearly eight cards in their wallet. To win new customers, card companies have been competing fiercely with new offers of 0% cash advances and other deals. But with the credit-card market so saturated, they are under pressure to find new sources of growth. "They're segmenting the market into finer and finer niches in order to capture more market share and define more payment uses," says card consultant Rob Markey, of Bain & Co. in New York. What's more, prepaid cards -- which describes all the new cards except for American Express's -- are a "very low loss-rate product," he says. That's because customers must cough up the money in advance. That is an important consideration these days with credit-card companies writing off record amounts of bad debts.

Ashutosh Sinha reports from New Delhi on the shortage of middle and senior managers to help run India's growth as the "back office of the world."

According to consulting firm McKinsey, revenue of Indian companies in the two industries could reach $21 billion to 24 billion by 2008 -- a 1,500 percent spike from $1.4 billion in revenue this year. These segments are forecast to employ over 2 million people. But to achieve that kind of growth, Indian companies need experienced managers who can sell the country's advantages to global companies. The shortage of employees with management experience doesn't bode well.

Feels sorta like another gold rush, doesn't it? It's not just about services either. See this report about India's growing supercomputing hardware business.

The Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be targeting some of the countries, which have already bought its earlier PARAM 10000 version with a computing power of 100 gigaflops. C-DAC has already sold about 7 PARAM 10000 supercomputers with 100-gigaflop memory to eight countries so far, including Russia, Canada, Singapore and Germany. It has so far sold over 53 supercomputers, since it started developing it in the Eighties following a technology denial regime against the country by the developed world. C-DAC will be targeting both domestic and international customers for marketing the Padma supercomputer, which can be scaled up to 16-teraflops.