2011

David Sokol, widely considered the heir apparent to Warren Buffett,  has abruptly resigned from Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries after it was revealed that he profited from the purchase of a publicly-traded company made by Berkshire.…

As I was thinking about the competitive landscape for e-Commerce and Amazon's foray into the streaming music scene, it occurred to me that Amazon has a huge data mining opportunity here and that this will almost certainly raise privacy…

Short-Run Actions Have Consequences In the spring of 2003 there was worldwide concern that the U.S. economy was falling into a “Japanese-like” malaise; the recovery was stalling, deflation was likely to occur and unemployment was…

Thanks to Iza Kaminska for pointing me to the video below of row after row of incomplete homes in Spanish host towns, las ciudades fantasmas. Spain has the same problem of overbuilding that the U.S. had during its bubble days. Now that…

BBH CurrencyView US dollar is mixed; ADP report likely supportive of USD against JPY and CHF Swiss KoF leading Indicator reaches four and a half year highs Euro softer on the day but remains resilient in the face of…

By Marc Chandler Many market observers seem to be exaggerating the role of some Federal Reserve officials, in particular James Bullard, who has mentioned exiting from QE2 before completing the $60 bln of purchases. Plosser, a voting…

The house price data has been dismal in the last several months. With the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices released today, we have now passed below the post-bubble trough and are hitting new low prices across the country. For data…

By Win Thin Brazil loan growth continues to pick up and it belies the notion that macroprudential measures are having any discernible effect on the economy. Total loans rose 1.4% m/m in February vs. 0.5% m/m in January, bringing the y/y…

By Win Thin S&P cut Portugal one notch from BBB to BBB-, and comes just five days after it cut the rating from A- to BBB. Did things really materially change over the past five days? It’s time for a reminder of what the agencies are…

Amazon just dropped a bomb on the technology world in the form of a cross-platform cloud music player. This is at once a game-changing move in the Internet storage and backup world dominated by players like EMC, in the Internet Music world…