In a filing to regulators today, Tacoma-based Columbia Banking System announced it will likely show a loss during the third quarter because of recent national home-loan upheavels.

Columbia said it owns 400,000 preferred Series Z shares of Freddie Mac and 400,000 preferred Series S shares of Fannie Mae. The cost of the stock was $20 million at the end of the second quarter, and has since dropped to a point where, if the shares had been sold on Sept. 9, the value would have been approximately $2.2 million.

The company did not say it plans to sell the stock. The cost of any impairment will not be known until Columbia announces its third-quarter earnings in October.

“The story will come out at the end of the quarter,” Columbia spokesman JoAnne Coy told me this afternoon. “We don’t have any plans to dispose of (the shares) at this time. We’ll know more as we get to the end of the quarter. We don’t know exactly where everything will end up.”

Analysts Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said today, in announcing the impairment to clients, “Importantly, (Columbia) should remain well-capitalized and the (ownership of the shares) is not new news.”

Columbia shares rose 72 cents in Friday trading to close at $14.60.

Alaska Airlines today announced cutbacks to both its flight schedule and its workforce beginning Nov. 9 to combat higher fuel costs and lowered travel demand.

The airline, headquartered in the City of SeaTac and the dominant carrier at Sea-Tac Airport, will eliminate 8 percent of its available seat-miles and 15 percent of its departures. Those reductions will trigger a workforce reduction of up to 1,000 people.

Alaska is the latest among U.S. network carriers to announce significant cutbacks to trim away unprofitable flying.

"The one-two punch of record oil prices and a softening economy on top of increased competition, has burdened Alaska Air Group with with a $50 million loss on an adjusted basis for the first half of the year," said Alaska chairman Bill Ayer. "We are changing our schedule to make sure we're flying the right routes with the right frequency and right aircraft," he said. "Regretably , a reduced schedule means we need fewer employees."

Those flight reductions will take several forms:

* Fewer flights at low-demand times such as holidays and weekends.

* Reducing flights in high frequency markets such as Seattle-California where Alaska already has multiple flights daily. Even with typical reductions of one flight per day in the Seattle-San Francisco and Seattle-Los Angeles markets, Alaska will still have more daily flights than at the same last year. Alaska bolstered its flight schedule earlier this year to compete with new rivals Virgin America and JetBlue.

* Downsizing aircraft it uses on Portland-Bay Area flights from Alaska 737s to Horizon Air CRJ-700 jets or Q400 turboprops. Horizon is Alaska's sister regional airline.

* Ending seasonal flying between San Francisco and three Mexican destinations, Cancun, Mazatlan and Ixtapa in Mexico. Alaska will continue serving those cities through Los Angeles.

* Halting flying between Portland and Orlando and Vancouver and San Francisco. That change was effective Aug. 24. Alaska will continue to serve Orlando twice daily from Seattle.

The company said it hopes to eliminate many of the jobs through attrition and by closing many open positions. It also plans to offer early-out packages and severance packages.

The union representing Alaska's 1,500 pilots warned that the airline could cut pilot ranks too far.

"We are concerned that, particularly as oil prices continue to plummet, Alaska Airlines will reduce its pilot ranks so severely that our management will create a situation in which our carrier will be unable to take advantage of its strong cash position and respond to opportunities to grow as other airlines cut routes and capacity," said Bill Shivers, chairman of the Alaska Airlines Master Executive Council of the Air Line Pilots Association.

The airline said it had hoped other economy and income-raising measures would have helped balance out higher fuel expenses, but those have proven insufficient.

The airline has raised fares on some routes multiple times this year. It has imposed a $25 fee on second checked bags and retired the last of its fuel-guzzling MD-80s jets.

The airline has realigned its frequent flier program to require more miles for free flights, and its has implemented new check-in procedures at Sea-Tac to reduce personnel requirements and speed up the check-in times.

Bamford & Bamford, home to upper-end frost-free pottery, plants and custom water features, will soon move from its showroom at 3003 So. Huson St. in Tacoma to 3505 South Tacoma Way. This weekend and through Sept. 21 the store will conduct a sale, with many items marked down 30 percent.

The move will take the store to a location beside Water Concepts, the newly installed kitchen and bath store at the site of the former Busch’s Drive-In.

Bamford will be doing business at the South Tacoma Way location from a trailer during construction, which should be complete by spring, said Tina Washington, a Bamford worker I spoke with this afternoon.

For more information, visit www.bambampots.com.

Looking to become an entrepreneur? Head for Pullman.

Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review have ranked the undergraduate Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Washington State University College of Business 18th among 2,300 programs surveyed in the 6th annual survey of graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurial programs.

The Top 10 programs listed by the magazine are: University of Houston, Babson College, Drexel University, University of Dayton, University of Arizona, Temple University, DePaul University, University of Oklahoma, University of Southern California and Chapman University.

The "cancelled" signs are already going up on the schedule boards at Sea-Tac Airport this morning as Continental Airlines shuts down its Houston hub in anticipation of Hurricane Ike's landfall.

Shortly after 6:30 a.m. today Continental had canceled two non-stop flights to Houston, those leaving Sea-Tac at 7:10 a.m. and 8:20 a.m.

And the airline warned on its Web site that operations at its largest hub are likely to be shut down for the remainder of today and all of Saturday.

If you're traveling to Houston or beyond on a connecting flight through George Bush Intercontinental Airport, check with Continental for a reaccomodation. The airline is waiving change fees for rescheduling.

See the airline's Web site, www.continental.com for specifics. Other airlines with flights connecting to the the Texas and Louisiana coasts are also cancelling flights. Most have adopted similar fee waiver policies.