Burmese Wildlife Pay High Price For Illegal Trade If the market of Mong La is anything to go by, the remaining wild elephants, tigers and bears in Burma’s forests are being hunted down slowly and sold to China.... Read Full Article Assisting The Good Life A golf resort in Oregon benefits from a variety of hidden subsidies, the kind of indirect favors that influence the flow of money from public to private interests.... Read Full Article Disney Youth Don?t Bop; They?re Singing In Hindi The media conglomerate is trying to expand the global reach of ?High School Musical? to squeeze even more money from the franchise.... Read Full Article Music Review: In A Thickly Textured Maelstrom, Nothing’s Left To Chance Dillinger Escape Plan’s music is arranged down to the millisecond and always has been. But watching its shows is like cranking the handle on a jack-in-the-box.... Read Full Article Exploring Different Sides Of One Of Handel’s Styles The Dutch conductor Ton Koopman spent last week presiding over a choral workshop quite different from those the great choral conductor Robert Shaw used to lead.... Read Full Article |
Currency NewsGreenback shows those green shootsCautious, tentative optimism that the United States may be past the worst of the financial crisis seems to have found an echo in global currency markets.Read Full Article Food crisis forces Malaysia into barter: palm oil for riceAsian commodity and currency markets could be plunged into chaos after the Malaysian government threatened to abandon standard trading channels in favour of bartering palm oil for rice.Read Full Article Warren Buffet takes centre stage at the Berkshire Hathaway AGMWarren Buffett gave an hilarious performance at his annual shareholders’ meeting this weekend, musing that envy was the most useless of the seven deadly sins because it hurts you, rather than its subject, who may even feel better as a result. Gluttony, on the other hand, had an upside, Mr Buffett told an audience of 31,000 as he munched chocolates and guzzled cola throughout a five-hour question-and-answer session in his home town of Omaha, Nebraska, on Saturday. His take on the Christian vices was classic Buffett, combining a strict moral code with his desire to enjoy the pleasures of life and wrapping a serious message in a joke. With an estimated $62 billion ($£31.4 billion) fortune, Mr Buffett, 77, recently supplanted Bill Gates, a member of his Berkshire Hathaway board who attended the meeting, as the world’s richest man. The annual weekend of events has come to be known as the Woodstock of capitalism and is thought to be the largest financial gathering in the world, with hotel rooms booked years in advance. Mr Buffett’s annual shareholder meeting is without parallel. It attracts a range of people from successful hedge fund managers to small children, from Britain, Australia and India, to hear his opinions on derivatives and currency fluctuations. The combination of age, wealth and success has left Mr Buffett comfortable in his skin and with little to prove. How many heads of huge corporations would recommend shareholders to sell their stock in his company, as he seemed to do at the weekend? “If you have a small amount of money, for many there might be something better to do than buy Berkshire Hathaway. If you have plenty of time, there are more attractive things to buy in smaller investments - it is not feasible for us to do it now like we did in the past,” Mr Buffett said. Over the past 40 years Mr Buffett has turned a failing textiles company into a $200 billion conglomerate stretching from insurance to sweets, prompting a more than 7,000-fold rise in its share price. The sheer size of Berkshire Hathaway means that he has to make huge investments if they are to have any impact on his fund$’s bottom line. Mr Buffett bemoaned that it is much harder to make a good return on multibillion-dollar investments because there are fewer of them and the companies involved are much better known. Berkshire Hathaway owns or has stakes in about 80 companies, including Coca-Cola, See’s Candy, Tesco, Johnson & Johnson and the Washington Post. He is set to add a 19 per cent stake in Wrigley’s after agreeing to help Mars to finance a takeover of the chewing gum maker last week. “There is no question that returns for Berkshire will be lower than in the past. We operate in a universe of stocks of companies worth at least $10 billion and more often $50 billion,$” Mr Buffett said. “You can take Warren’s promise [on Berkshire’s returns] to the bank,” quipped Charlie Munger, the group’s 84-year-old vice-chairman and less famous half of the corporate world’s greatest comedy duo. Although he has not been involved in the day-to-day running of Berkshire Hathaway for years, Mr Munger has played a considerable part in the group’s success, providing an invaluable sounding board for Mr Buffett over the past 30 years. In a relationship honed over decades, Mr Buffett played his usual role of the sociable wife to Mr Munger’s grumpy, acerbic husband, jockeying him along and smoothing his bluntness for the guests. After giving an investor from New Jersey a lengthy response to a question about the futurepossible direction of the stock markets, Mr Buffett, oozing folksy Mid-Western charm, gave the floor to his po-faced, dead-pan deputy. “I have nothing to add,” Mr Munger said. “He’s been practising for weeks,” Mr Buffett joked. A little later, after his answer about future energy sources, Mr Munger concluded that “most people don’t think like that, but I do”. “Charlie does not find comfort in numbers,” Mr Buffett explained, to the same gales of laughter than greeted many of their exchanges. There is an obvious chemistry between the two. At one point, Mr Buffett mused: “Charlie and I don’t even need to talk to each other. We think in the same way and have the same spheres of knowledge.” As if to underline the point, a shareholder from Mexico City asked Mr Buffett where he stood on religion. “I am an agnostic,” Mr Warren said. “I simply don’t know,” Mr Munger added, with precision timing. On the surface there is something surreal about 31,000 people flying across the world to see these elderly men talking about finance. But, more than anybody else, they represent a human face of business that people can relate and aspire to. Their investment philosophy sounds so simple - invest in solid, market-leading brands that people will always want and don’t get involved in things you don’t understand, such as derivatives. They are very funny and they have remained ordinary. Mr Buffett has lived in the same house, valued at about £350,000, since 1958 and has pledged to give away 85 per cent of his wealth over time, most of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable foundation, the rest going to four family charities. He and Mr Munger take annual salaries of only $100,000 $– although their holdings make them billionaires. On the subject of pay, Mr Munger said on Saturday: “The leaders of great enterprises have a moral duty not to take the compensation they do. I don’t know how they can do it.” And Berkshire Hathaway is a company of its word, Mr Buffett said. Once it has agreed to finance a deal, it will do so “even if [Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke runs off to South America with Paris Hilton”. Towards the end of the meeting, a 12-year-old girl asked him why, when his hero was Benjamin Graham, the investment guru who taught him at Columbia, he insisted on not paying a dividend. “You were influenced by your hero in so many ways, so why not in this?” she asked.“I had to do something my way,” said Mr Buffett, who has not paid a dividend since the 1960s, preferring to reinvest all profits in his company. Ins and outs of life at Berkshire — Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A shares trade at just under $135,000 each, making them the most expensive in the world $ $— The group introduced Class B shares, with fewer voting rights, in 1996, valued at 1/30th of the Class A, to make it more affordable to invest — Mr Buffett has about 32 per cent of Berkshire’s voting power, while Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman, has 1.4 per cent — Berkshire’s investments include stakes in Tesco, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson — In April, Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates to become the world’s richest man, with an estimated $62billion fortune, according to Forbes magazine$Read Full Article Memo From Frankfurt: As Euro Nears 10, Cracks Emerge in Fiscal UnionBy most yardsticks, Europe’s common currency has been a success. Yet fissures are forming in the European monetary union that threaten to widen in coming months.Read Full Article What’s credit got to do with the price of rice?Now that the Bank of England has got off its high horse and decided to support British banks in much the same way that the European Central Bank has been supporting Spanish and German banks since last August, governments around the world are finally committed to publicly funded financial workouts. This is the “Plan B” that I have described here – the inevitable next stage in the credit crunch, once it became apparent that a market-based solution was doomed to fail. Now that Plan B has swung fully into action, global credit conditions should gradually return to normal in the months ahead. The bad news is that “normal” does not mean anything like the conditions that have prevailed in the world financial system and the global economy during the past few years.<br/> <br/> Three lasting changes in the world economy are likely to result from the credit crunch. First, the US economy, which should start to recover this summer in response to fiscal and monetary stimulus, will no longer be powered by housing and consumption, but mainly by exports and manufacturing. Secondly, the British and European economies, which are 12 to 18 months behind the US in a broadly similar monetary cycle, will only now begin to experience an economic slowdown and housing slump as serious as the one that has almost ended in the US. So, while the credit crunch may be in its final stages globally, its economic impact will probably be far more noticeable from now on in Britain and Europe than in the United States.<br/> <br/> Thirdly, the emerging economies of Asia and other developing regions will no longer enjoy export-led growth as consumption in America and Europe becomes structurally weaker. If the developing countries are to continue growing rapidly – and I believe that they will – they must rely on domestic consumption, infrastructure investment and their own home-grown property booms.<br/> <br/> These three fundamental shifts in the world economy are by now widely recognised. There is, however, another apparent consequence of the credit crunch that is less understood and is causing consternation and anxiety, especially in China and other developing countries. This is the upsurge in oil, food and commodity prices, many of which have almost doubled since the credit crunch began last August, even though the causal linkage between soaring commodity prices and a collapsing supply of credit remains obscure. If anything, the credit-induced slowdown in global economic growth and consumption since last August should have weakened demand for commodities and therefore pushed down prices. Yet the reality is that commodity prices have recently leapt higher every time the global banking system was hit by some new shock.<br/> <br/> As a result, China and other emerging countries, which last year were preparing to boost domestic consumption to compensate for weaker exports to the US, are now more worried about inflation and are raising interest rates to try to slow their domestic growth. This is potentially a very dangerous development for the world economy, which increasingly relies on domestic demand from Asia, the Middle East and Russia. This unexpected policy tightening by emerging nations also explains why stock markets fell far harder in Asia than in America and Europe in the first quarter of this year.<br/> <br/> Why, then, has a global collapse in credit created a boom in commodity demand? The short answer is that nobody knows. A common explanation in the media is that soaring commodity prices reflect a global panic about inflation, as the Federal Reserve Board supports the US banking system by printing money and slashing interest rates.<br/> <br/> This explanation does not pass muster for at least three reasons. First, because US inflationary pressures are already subsiding as a result of the credit crunch and the associated fall in house prices and employment. Secondly, because the ECB and the Bank of England show no sign of imitating the Fed’s expansionary monetary policies, yet commodity prices are soaring in sterling and euros as well as dollars. Thirdly, because the commodities rising fastest – such as rice, wheat and pork – cannot be used as long-term stores of value and so must reflect the balance of supply and demand for instant use, rather than fears about loose monetary policy and its possible effects on inflation many years ahead.<br/> <br/> What, then, has suddenly boosted demand for agricultural commodities and how might this be related to the credit crunch? A possible explanation is that the rise in prices itself has triggered a self-sustaining upward spiral of demand, in which investors, wholesalers and final consumers want to buy more of a commodity each time its price rises and this leads to more hoarding and still higher prices. Such self-sustaining price trends are normally rapidly reversed because value-oriented investors and commodity producers start to trade against the trend, selling more each time the price rises. In present conditions, however, it is harder than usual for speculators to trade against the rising price trend, because bank lending has dried up. Several American grain wholesalers, for example, have been pushed towards bankruptcy because they have sold futures against grain supplies they bought in advance from US farmers and have then been unable to finance these temporary “short positions” until the next harvest comes along.<br/> <br/> By draining liquidity in this way from all financial markets, the credit crunch has exacerbated trend-following behaviour among investors, promoted stockpiling throughout the global supply chain and encouraged hoarding by consumers. This financially driven process, rather than a sudden increase in Chinese and Indian appetites, has probably been the main cause of this year’s shortfall in global food supplies.<br/> <br/> Similar influences may explain other surprising linkages that have suddenly emerged between financial markets. Since the credit crunch’s start, commodity prices have developed an uncanny correlation with the euro/dollar exchange rate (see chart) and this currency trend, in turn, has been powerfully correlated to two other momentum-driven trends – the collapse in US Treasury bond yields and the widening of credit spreads.<br/> <br/> If all these trends are driven ultimately by lack of liquidity in global financial markets, they are all likely to turn at about the same time, or in a fairly tight sequence - and this process may now be starting. The trend in credit spreads began to reverse in mid-March after the Bear Stearns rescue – and last week, more or less on cue, the predominant direction of the US bond market seemed to switch from lower to higher bond yields. If this rise in US bond yields proves sustainable, the overwhelming currency momentum against the dollar and in favour of the euro may also start to reverse. If that reversal occurs, the trend in commodities should soon follow and the panic about inflation in China and other emerging economies should start to subside. At that point, we will finally be able to say that the worst of the global credit crunch is over.Read Full Article External News for: currencyWORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For Risk - Wall Street JournalSDNN: San Diego News NetworkWORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For RiskWall Street JournalIndications from around the globe of a more restrictive official stance toward capital flows and currency volatility also contributed to risk-averse ...Pound Slides on Risk Unwinding Before DataNew York TimesWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain As Investors Shun RiskWall Street JournalWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain On Relapse in Risk SentimentWall Street JournalWall Street Journal -Wall Street Journalall 310 news articles »WORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For Risk - Wall Street JournalSDNN: San Diego News NetworkWORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For RiskWall Street JournalIndications from around the globe of a more restrictive official stance toward capital flows and currency volatility also contributed to risk-averse ...Pound Slides on Risk Unwinding Before DataNew York TimesWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain As Investors Shun RiskWall Street JournalWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain On Relapse in Risk SentimentWall Street JournalWall Street Journal -Wall Street Journalall 310 news articles »Canadian Dollar Tracking its Commodity Compatriots to its Detriment - Daily FXGlobe and MailCanadian Dollar Tracking its Commodity Compatriots to its DetrimentDaily FXDespite lacking some of the most vital statistics of a carry currency; the loonie has long enjoyed an ill-deserved association to the high-yielding ...Canada Afternoon: C$ Ends Lower Amid Subdued Risk SentimentWall Street JournalCanada Dollar Falls a Fourth Day as Investors Shun Oil, StocksBloombergCANADA FX DEBT-C$ falls as commodities, equities weakenReutersGlobe and Mail -Bloomberg -Bloombergall 182 news articles »WORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For Risk - Wall Street JournalSDNN: San Diego News NetworkWORLD FOREX: Euro Slumps Amid Waning Tolerance For RiskWall Street JournalIndications from around the globe of a more restrictive official stance toward capital flows and currency volatility also contributed to risk-averse ...Pound Slides on Risk Unwinding Before DataNew York TimesWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain As Investors Shun RiskWall Street JournalWORLD FOREX: Dollar, Yen Gain On Relapse in Risk SentimentWall Street JournalWall Street Journal -Wall Street Journalall 310 news articles »Canadian Dollar Tracking its Commodity Compatriots to its Detriment - Daily FXGlobe and MailCanadian Dollar Tracking its Commodity Compatriots to its DetrimentDaily FXDespite lacking some of the most vital statistics of a carry currency; the loonie has long enjoyed an ill-deserved association to the high-yielding ...Canada Afternoon: C$ Ends Lower Amid Subdued Risk SentimentWall Street JournalCanada Dollar Falls a Fourth Day as Investors Shun Oil, StocksBloombergCANADA FX DEBT-C$ falls as commodities, equities weakenReutersGlobe and Mail -Bloomberg -Bloombergall 182 news articles »Escalation of US-China trade row biggest global threat-M.Stanley - ReutersAFPEscalation of US-China trade row biggest global threat-M.StanleyReutersSINGAPORE, Nov 20 (Reuters) - A serious escalation in trade or currency disputes between the United States and China could be the biggest risk to global ...Geithner: China Wants To Deal With Currency ConcernsWall Street JournalUS lawmakers threaten China sanctions over currencyAFPGeithner 'Quite Confident' China Will Move to Ease Yuan's PegBloombergABC Online -Alibaba News Channel -AsiaNews.itall 98 news articles » |
i8news.com |
