Friday, September 16, 2011

Ritzy European Villas Plummet in Price

Looks like the question that I asked myself whilst drink my espresso in the harbor of St Tropez 3 years ago, why is my  espresso worth 8 dollars here when the same one is only 2 dollars in Naples Florida? Has been answered it is NOT! enjoy the video below


http://online.wsj.com/video/ritzy-european-villas-plummet-in-price/34846F21-1A29-47A9-8D1D-2DC88BB9D0DB.html

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Thousands Come Clean as IRS Gets $2.7 Billion

Ah, I am reminded of the wealth manager telling a prospective client that it was okay to park his cash offshore and bring it home to avoid tax's. At the time my wife and I questioned if this was wise as our observations elsewhere in the world especially in Aussie was that the IRS would start to look at this type of activity very closely. Sure enough they did.

Aivars Lode





IRS Gets $2.7 Billion From Offshore Accounts

IRS Gets $2.7 Billion From Offshore Accounts
Ariel Jerozolimski/Bloomberg
The voluntary program allowed U.S. taxpayers with offshore accounts to come forward and pay back taxes and penalties to likely avoid prosecution.
The voluntary program allowed U.S. taxpayers with offshore accounts to come forward and pay back taxes and penalties to likely avoid prosecution. Photographer: Ariel Jerozolimski/Bloomberg
The Internal Revenue Service announced that 12,000 taxpayers declared offshore bank accounts in the second round of a voluntary disclosure program that the agency says has yielded $2.7 billion overall.
IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said today that the agency’s emphasis on international tax enforcement prompted more people than anticipated to accept penalties and reveal their accounts.
“The results we’re seeing today were unthinkable just a few short years ago,” he said on a conference call with reporters. “The world has clearly changed.”
The results mark the continuation of the IRS’s beefed-up enforcement efforts, which include the voluntary programs as well as prosecutions with the Department of Justice.
“You’d have to be living in a hole not to know that the U.S. government is really focused on offshore tax evasion, getting better at it,” Shulman said.
He declined to comment about U.S. efforts to obtain account information from Swiss banks, other than to confirm that the U.S. and Swiss governments are discussing the issue.
‘Never About Switzerland
“This effort was never about Switzerland,” Shulman said. “I think a lot of Swiss banks aren’t taking these kinds of accounts anymore and they’re really trying hard to move forward.”
In 2009, the U.S. and UBS AG (UBSN) reached a deferred-prosecution agreement under which the bank paid $780 million. Since then, the U.S. has been prosecuting clients of UBS, HSBC Holdings Plc and other banks around the world.
The voluntary program allowed U.S. taxpayers with offshore accounts to come forward and pay back taxes and penalties to likely avoid prosecution.
The program’s initial round in 2009 yielded $2.2 billion in taxes, interest and penalties from 15,000 taxpayers, Shulman announced today.
An additional 3,000 taxpayers came forward after that program ended, and 12,000 more declared accounts this year under the 2011 program, which had a deadline of Sept. 9 and less generous terms for taxpayers than the previous version. Shulman said the 2011 program has yielded $500 million so far, and he expects that to increase because the total so far doesn’t include many penalties.
“That’s more than I expected in the second round,” said Mark Matthews, a Washington-based tax attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP. Overall, “a lot of practitioners think this was one of the most successful tax compliance actions in history,” said Matthews, a former IRS deputy commissioner.
What Now?
Matthews said he’d like the IRS to issue guidance now that the disclosure initiative has ended.
“What do we do now?” Matthews asked. Those who have come forward, he said, are “still only a fraction of the people who have these accounts.”
Some people didn’t come forward because they were comparing the risk of getting caught with the penalties they would owe under the program.
Richard Sapinski, a lawyer at Sills, Cummis & Gross P.C. in Newark, New Jersey, said he doubts the IRS will offer another partial amnesty because that would undermine tax compliance.
“I think they probably would be very hesitant to have a third program,” Sapinski said. “It would be like catching a bus. You miss one and you wait for the next one.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Rubin in Washington at rrubin12@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net

Double-Sun Planet Discovered, à la 'Star Wars'

So what you say? Well, these discoveries seem to come as a surprise, so how come we can be so definitive about mans effect on global warming?
Aivars Lode 

Double-Sun Planet Discovered, à la 'Star Wars'

Astronomers announced Thursday the discovery of a rare planet that orbits two stars, like Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films, adding to a growing inventory of alien worlds in the curiosity shop of the cosmos.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars.
Detected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's $600 million Kepler space telescope, it is the first confirmed solar system of its kind, turning a Hollywood fantasy into an astronomical fact. Called Kepler-16b, the Saturn-size planet circles its twin stars in the constellation Cygnus about every 229 days, the researchers reported in Science.
"The reality goes beyond the imagination of the most creative theorist in astronomy or science fiction writer," said astrophysicist Fred Rasio at Northwestern University, who wasn't involved in the work. "Just about anything you could think of as a planetary system is actually out there."
The discovery capped a week of new findings about worlds beyond our own solar system. All told, four research teams in Europe and the U.S. reported finding 74 previously unknown exoplanets, as worlds orbiting other stars are called, including 16 that appear to be only slightly larger than Earth and with gravity favorable to life as we know it.
One of them, with about 3.5 times Earth's mass, may be orbiting near its parent star's so-called habitable zone, in which water may be liquid and conditions possibly ripe for life, said astronomers at the European Southern Observatory, who announced the find earlier this week.
It was among a trove of 50 exoplanets they detected around nearby stars using a spectrograph called the High Accuracy Radial-velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), based at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
So far, for reasons ranging from toxicity to temperature extremes, none of the 683 confirmed exoplanets seem capable of harboring life. No one can say with certainty whether any habitable planets exist outside our solar system.
Even so, the cascade of finds offers growing evidence that alien worlds may outnumber the stars themselves.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Saturn-size planet circles its twin stars in the constellation Cygnus about every 229 days. (Artist's rendering.)
The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, estimated that about 40% of all stars like the Sun have at least one planet of Saturn's size or smaller. So far, the Kepler mission scientists have found more than 170 star systems in which two, three, four, five or even six planets all orbit one star.
"The universe is teeming with planetary systems of multiple planets, many of which are nearly the size of Earth," said plant-hunting pioneer Geoffrey Marcy at the University of California in Berkeley.
Among the other unearthly wonders discovered in recent months are an exoplanet blacker than coal and a world stripped to a diamond-like core. A third newly found exoplanet is blasted by its parent star with X-ray bursts so fierce that the radiation is eroding the planet's surface at a rate of five million tons a second.
Stranger still, a star survey of the Milky Way by astronomers in Japan and New Zealand earlier this year discovered a new class of Jupiter-size planets that float free of any star at all, swimming about on their own in the dark. They estimated that there may be twice as many of these orphan planets as stars.
Earlier this week, British astronomers in the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project announced they had found 23 giant, hot exoplanets, each about the size of Jupiter and, no doubt, with crushing gravity. These exotic worlds circle their stars so closely that they complete an entire obit about every five to eight days, the researchers said.
The WASP group monitors 10 million stars for signs of exoplanets by taking images of the night sky every 10 minutes with an array of cameras in South Africa and in the Canary islands. Their research, which hasn't yet been published, was discussed at the Extreme Solar Systems conference this week in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
"We are finding planetary systems which are very different from our own," said astrophysicist Coel Heiler at the U.K.'s Keele University, whose group runs the WASP search in the Southern Hemisphere.
Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Israel as the Dutch Republic in the Thirty Years War

A very interesting perspective on the Middle East and relatable to the wars involving Spain and the Dutch, thanks Rob for the article.

Aivars Lode


Asia Times Middle East
     Sep 13, 2011

Israel as the Dutch Republic
in the Thirty Years War

By Spengler

A small country, its land reclaimed from a hostile nature, fights for survival against overwhelming odds for 80 years. Surrounded by enemies dedicated to its destruction, it fields the world's most innovative army and beats them. Despite three generations of war, the arts, sciences and commerce flourish. Its population grows quickly while the conflict empties the failed states that surround it. And it becomes a beacon of hope for the cause of freedom.

I refer not to Israel, but to the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, whose struggle for freedom against Spain set the precedent for the American Revolution. The final three decades of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) coincided with the terrible Thirty Years War.

In 1600, a million-and-a-half Dutchmen faced an Austrian-Spanish


 
alliance with more than 10 times their population; by 1648, the people of the Netherlands numbered two million, while the Spanish and Austrians had perhaps a quarter of their people. Holland had become the richest land in the world, with 16,000 merchant vessels supplying a global trading empire, graced by artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer and scientists like Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.

We might speak of the "isolation" of the Dutch at the outset of the Thirty Years War, although England backed them from the outset; that is why Philip II of Spain launched the Great Armada in 1588. Holland faced more formidable enemies than modern Israel; in place of the feckless Third World armies of Egypt and Syria, the Dutch fought Spain, the superpower of the 16th century, with the world's best professional infantry bought with New World loot. The superior Dutch navy disrupted Spanish lines of communication, and a new kind of mobile infantry defeated the static Spanish square with continuous musket fire.

Holland confronted a formidable adversary, determined to extirpate its Protestant religion; Israel faces a group of failed or gradually-failing states whose capacity to make war is eroding. Seven months after the start of the Arab uprisings, Israel's position is a paradox.

The prospects for a formal peace are the worst since 1977, while Israel's military position has improved. The Syrian army is too busy butchering protesters to attack the Jewish state, and the uncertain position of the Bashar al-Assad regime weakens its Lebanese client Hezbollah. Egyptian popular sentiment has turned nastily against Israel, but the last thing the Egyptian army needs at the moment is a war with Israel that it inevitably would lose.

Egypt is a failed state. It has no way out. Chinese pigs will eat before the Egyptian poor, as wealthy Asians outbid impoverished Arabs for grain. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, and its foreign exchange reserves last week dipped below what its central bank called the "danger" level of $25 billion covering six months of imports, down from $36 billion before Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
The reported reserve numbers probably include Saudi and Algerian emergency loans. With no tourism and much of the economy in shambles, the country is sliding towards destitution; it barely can feed itself at the moment. What will Egypt do when its reverses are gone? Almost half of Egyptian adults can't read, and the 800,000 young people who graduate yearly from the diploma mills are qualified only to stamp each other's identity cards. It is not surprising that football rowdies attacked Israel's embassy in Cairo last week.

The rupture in Israeli-Turkish relations, in turn, reflects Turkish weakness as well as the fanaticism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey faces a short-term squeeze and a long-term crisis. Erdogan won re-election last June more as an economic manager than as neo-Ottoman imperial leader, but his economic success rested on a 40% rate of bank credit growth, and a consequent current account deficit equal to 11% of gross domestic product, the same level as Greece or Portugal.

As I reported last month (Instant obsolescence of the Turkish model, Asia Times Online, August 10, 2011), Turkey's stock market has fallen by nearly half in dollar terms since late 2010, and its currency has lost 20% of its value. Erdogan's economic Cave of Wonders has dissolved into the Anatolian sand, and Turkey faces a long period of belt-tightening.

Turkey's economic problems are a discomfort; its ethnic problems, by contrast, present an existential threat in the long run. In a quarter of a century, Kurdish will be the cradle-tongue of nearly half of all Turkish children, as Kurds have four to five children per family while Turkish-speakers have just 1.5. At some point, Turkey in its present form will cease to exist. Kurdish nationalism is stronger than ever; as Omar Aspinar [1] of the Brookings Institution wrote on September 11 in Zaman Online:
Kurdish political aspirations have reached unprecedented levels in the last 10 years ... Kurdish ethnic, cultural and political demands are fueled by a young and increasingly resentful generation of Kurds who are vocal and frustrated not only in Eastern Anatolia but also in Turkey's large Western cities including Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin and Adana. Turkey's nightmare scenario is Turkish-Kurdish ethnic violence in such western urban centers.
The Kurds know that the demographic future belongs to them, and that Erdogan's frantic calls on Turkish women to have more babies will do nothing to change matters. "The Kurdish issue," warns Aspinar," remains Turkey's Achilles' heel."

Rather than isolate Israel diplomatically, Turkey and Egypt have buttressed its diplomatic position. By declaring the United Nations' Palmer Commission report on the May 2010 Gaza flotilla incident "null and void", Turkish President Abdullah Gul put his country in the position of the rogue state. Egypt's failure to prevent an attack on Israel's embassy was a gross violation of international standards. Diplomacy, though, makes little difference, because Israel requires only the support of the United States.

The most likely outcome is a prolonged low-intensity war in which Israel suffers more rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza, and occasional terrorist infiltration from Sinai and the West Bank, but no organized military threat from its immediate neighbors. Iran's nuclear program presents an existential threat to Israel, and remains the great unknown in the equation.

As Jonathan Speyer [2] wrote in a September 11 report for the Gloria Center, Iran's attempt to lead an anti-Israel resistance bloc "has fallen victim to the Arab Spring", particularly after Tehran aided the despised Syrian regime. But Speyer warns that this "should because for neither satisfaction nor complacency".

A country that knows it must fight daily for its existence may thrive under interrupted stress. That is unimaginable for the Israeli peace camp, which dwindled into political insignificance after the Intifada of 2000, as well as for America's liberal Jews. But most Israelis seem to have adapted well to a long-term war regime.

The Dutch certainly did. When the Thirty Years War began in 1618 over Bohemia's attempts to cast off Austrian rule, Holland knew that Spain would take the opportunity to settle accounts with its breakaway Protestant province. Expecting a Spanish invasion, the English Separatists living in Holland decided instead to become Pilgrims to the New World. ''The Spaniard,'' their leader William Bradford wrote in 1618, ''might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine and pestilence as sore here as there.''

A year after the Mayflower sailed to Plymouth Rock in 1620, Spain sent an army into Holland, and in 1625 the Spanish took the great Dutch fortress of Breda, just 90 kilometers from Amsterdam; Velasquez's canvas depicting the city's surrender hangs in Madrid's Prado Museum. The Dutch defenders kept the Spanish army away from their coastal cities only by opening the dikes and flooding the countryside. Had the Pilgrims stayed and the Spanish won, the Pilgrims likely would have been burned as heretics.

Spain embargoed Dutch trade and succeeded in damaging its economy, although Dutch attacks on the Spanish fleets bringing treasure from the New World provided some breathing room. One by one, Holland saw its German and Danish Protestant allies beaten by Austro-Spanish alliance, and by 1625 was fighting alone. By the late 1620s, though, Holland was winning a war of attrition against overextended Spain, and could match the Spanish in the field.

The military balance remained precarious; in 1629 the Spanish army within 40 kilometers of Amsterdam. The turning point came in 1632, when the Dutch took the Flemish city of Maastricht, breaking Spain's hold on the Catholic Low Countries. When Spain and France went to war in 1635, the victorious Netherlands dominated European trade and its "Golden Age" reached fruition.

Holland boasted the world's strongest navy and a dominant position in world shipping trade, and its home provinces became impregnable.

The Dutch were smart and tough, but they beat the Spanish empire in large part by being better than their adversaries. The Dutch republic offered Europe's first example of religious toleration. Iberian Jews and French Huguenot found refuge in Holland against religious toleration, and the skilled immigrants made invaluable contributions to the Dutch economic miracle - something like the Russian immigrants to Israel today.

When Dutch armies invaded the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) they offered religious freedom to the Catholics they absorbed. Countries that attract talented people have an enormous advantage over countries that drive them out.

Without stretching the analogy too far, the religious conflict that surrounded 17th century Holland have something in common with today's Middle East. Americans know almost nothing of the Thirty Years War; not a single Hollywood film nor one popular novel recounts its major events. It is a tale of unrelenting misery, of battles and marches and countermarches that left nearly half of Central Europe dead.

It degenerated into a duel between two powers who both acted out of the mystical conviction that they were God's chosen people: the France of Cardinal Richelieu and the Spain of the Count-Duke Olivares. It foreshadowed the neo-paganism that nearly conquered Europe in what British statesman Winston Churchill called "the second Thirty Years War" of 1914-1945.

The conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam may cause something like a Thirty Years War in the Middle East, as Arabs, Turks and Persians fight for the mantle of Divine Election. The difference is that Europe descended into the maelstrom from a peak of economic and cultural success; the Muslim nations of the Middle East are goaded by a profound sense of humiliation and failure.

What transpires may be even more horrific than the events of 1618-1648. The methods the American military employed to win a respite in Iraq might set such a conflict in motion, as I argued last year in "General Petraeus' Thirty Years War" [3]. Once again, the nation that embodies religious faith embedded in democratic values will prevail despite the chaos around it.

Notes
1. Time to focus on the Kurdish question Today's Zaman, September 11, 2011. 2. Israel, Iran and the New Middle East Gloria Center, September 11, 2001.
3. General Petraeus' Thirty Years War Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, the author of How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too), just published by Regnery. His collection of essays from First Things magazine and Asia Times Online, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You (Van Praag) appeared this month as well.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Australia is also on the front lines of globalization’s biggest challenges

The titleabove comes from the body of this article and supports what I have discussed many times. What has happened in Australia in the past is just happening now in the USA and we can learn and anticipate from that .


Aivars Lode

 

Obama’s Economy Sees Mirror Image Down Under: William Pesek

Bad Hands of Cards
Illustration by Victor Kerlow

William Pesek is based in Tokyo and writes on economics, markets and politics throughout the Asia-Pacific region. His journalism awards include the 2010 Society of American Business Editors and Writers prize for commentary.
More about William Pesek
It’s as predictable as political leadership gets: When things go awry at home, escape overseas for a while, grip and grin with a foreign head of state and change the subject.
Barack Obama may have this tried-and-true strategy in mind as he plans to visit Australia, which is about as far as a U.S. president can get from the rancor in Washington. Yet as he meets with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in November, it will be hard not to wonder about the weak leadership imperiling not only their economies, but also the world at large.
The similarities between Gillard and Obama are striking. Both are trailblazers -- Australia’s first female leader, the U.S.’s first black one -- who pledged to change the tone in their capitals. Both are likable politicians who inspire visceral and often inexplicable dislike and face daunting levels of opposition from cynical foes out to derail their every effort. Both confront a news media that has swung from fawning to churlish.
Obama is struggling to get any legislation passed while the economy stalls and U.S. standing wanes. Gillard’s inability to get her policies passed risks squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to harness the benefits of a mining boom and prepare for when the resources run out.
So maddened are their opponents that they forget what they once stood for. Gillard can’t garner support for a refugee bill that lawmakers probably would have supported before June 2010, when she came to power. Opposition leader Tony Abbott now opposes an emissions-trading system his party championed a few years ago.

Bad Hands

In the U.S., Republicans are down on Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes, something they would have supported in an instant in the past. In both cases, the opposition would rather hand leaders political defeats than stay true to their own convictions.
What’s more, both Obama and Gillard were, to varying degrees, dealt bad hands of cards.
Australia’s economy steered around the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, its national budget isn’t far from balance and exporters have a reliable customer in China. One might argue that Gillard’s predicament is partly of her own making as an ouster of predecessor Kevin Rudd in a political coup fueled public discontent.

On Autopilot

Yet Gillard inherited a long to-do list because Rudd (2007 to 2010) and John Howard (1996 to 2007) had largely left the economy on autopilot. Most of the heavy lifting was done by past prime ministers like Bob Hawke (1983 to 1991) and Paul Keating (1991 to 1996). Howard and Rudd opted to coast and ride China’s boom. Gillard doesn’t have that luxury as the world economy slides anew.
Obama faces a far more intractable set of obstacles. A variety of crises came to a head as he entered the White House in 2009. Yet Republicans have taken an over-our-dead-body position against Obama’s every effort.
The only answer for Gillard and Obama is to get radical -- be bold, think big and fight for your ideals. Neither leader seems set to do that, or able to sell their messages. Much the same can be said of the rest of the world, not to mention Asia.
Japan’s growing list of premiers since 2000 is a who’s who of weak leaders. From India to Malaysia to South Korea, Asians are struggling amid tepid stewardship. Those with vision and backbone, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia and Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, are up against institutionalized corruption fighting their every move.

China to Rescue

Europe too is a mess. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel personifies the long list of leaders needing opposition support just to stay in power. As Greece burns and euro-area credit ratings get slashed, leaders are looking to a developing nation for help. Italy is the latest to reach out to China about buying its bonds. Who needs the International Monetary Fund when China is ready to step up with its surplus cash?
And if you think we’re going to get leadership from the Group of 20, you’re dreaming. It’s great that this broader, more representative group replaced the Group of Seven. The time when the G-7 could have its way with markets passed long before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed in 2008.
The trouble is, which G-20 leader is coming to the table with new and innovative ideas? In a more perfect world, Australia would be doing just that. For all its challenges, it boasts the kinds of statistics officials in Brussels, Tokyo and Washington would kill for. While the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan hold interest rates at zero, Australia’s central bank has set overnight rates at 4.75 percent. That gives it plenty of monetary ammunition should world growth crash.

Front Line

Australia is also on the front lines of globalization’s biggest challenges: the effects of climate change, an aging population, immigration, a widening gap between rich and poor, creaky infrastructure and an education system that needs an overhaul to maintain competitiveness. On these and other issues, ones shared by Obama, Australia’s voice should be sought early and often.
Yes, Gillard and Obama will have much to discuss come November. That is, if she’s even in office. Canberra is abuzz with talk that the Labor Party will soon dump Gillard and go with Rudd once again. Stranger things have happened, as Gillard’s peer in Washington can tell you all about, too.
(William Pesek is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this article: William Pesek in Tokyo at wpesek@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

GE to buy back Buffett's financial crisis stake

What does this mean? That if we had not all panicked everything would have been alright! Or as Buffett said when everyone is greedy be scared when everyone is scared be greedy!

Aivars Lode

  • Thu, Aug 25 2011

General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt speaks at a news conference after a ''Jobs for America Summit'' at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt speaks at a news conference after a ''Jobs for America Summit'' at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, July 11, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
Tue Sep 13, 2011 5:12pm EDT
(Reuters) - General Electric Co (GE.N) said on Tuesday it would buy back Berkshire Hathaway Inc's (BRKa.N) preferred stake in the largest U.S. conglomerate, handing back a lifeline it grabbed during the 2008 financial crisis.
The company said in a regulatory filing it would pay $3.3 billion, plus unpaid dividends, to cash in famed U.S. investor Warren Buffett's stake, which paid a 10 percent dividend. The redemption date has been set for October 17.
With the long-awaited move, GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt will aim to close one of the most difficult chapters in the company's history, when trouble at its GE Capital finance arm threatened to take down the entire company.
Buffett bought his preferred stake in GE in October 2008, just a week after taking a $5 billion preferred stake in Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N). The investments were intended to signal his confidence in two storied U.S. companies during a financial crisis he likened to an "economic Pearl Harbor."
That vote of confidence came at a price: GE will have paid Berkshire nearly $1 billion in dividends over the life of the investment.
In his annual investor letter earlier this year, Buffett lamented the likelihood that GE would redeem the shares, saying it would be an "unwelcome" event that would hurt Berkshire's earnings power.
GE shares fell 3 percent to $14.95 in after-hours trading. Berkshire shares were unchanged. (Reporting by Scott Malone in Boston and Ben Berkowitz in New York; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The other climate theory.

I wrote about this about three years ago, Sun Flares may be more impact full than humans.

Aivars Lode

  http://online.wsj.com/video/the-other-climate-theory/DDA61D17-339F-4F0F-95E3-325026562A7F.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_mpvidcar_1