Last month, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders approved splitting the company’s class B shares 50-for-1 as part of the firm’s $26.3 billion acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The class B shares have
Update: The accompanying video was taped prior to the open
Thursday; major averages were recently down about 2% following a
weaker-than-expected jobless claims report and renewed strength in the
dollar amid ongoing worries over sover
Having just returned from Davos, Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor at The Economist, says there was a lot of bank bashing at the confab and a lot of “big ideas” centered around the question: How do we improve capitalism? &q
From The Business Insider, Feb. 4, 2010:More bad news for California bondholders. Pimco expects yields on
California debt to return to their highs from the state’s fiscal crisis
last summer, which would slam bond prices.
Credit default swaps have paint
There’s an art to financing a deal and Kraft and Berkshire Hathaway ’s brushstrokes are showing. Kraft launched a $9.5 billion debt sale to help finance its acquisition of Cadbury, and Berkshire announced a bond sale of up to $8 billion to help pay for its acquisition of Burlington Northern Sante Fe.
Berkshire’s bond sale announcement comes on the same day S&P stripped the company of its top AAA rating, citing capital adequacy and liquidity concerns related to the Burlington acquisition. An investment strategist tells Bloomberg the ratings firms are “are hedging their bets in the event of another economic downturn.”
More from Reuters and the Web:
As tech spending stages a comeback, watch for industry giants like Hewlett-Packard and IBM to start scouring the security software market for acquisitions that will boost their share of corporate IT budgets, Anupreeta Das reports. Security software is a critical component of the “stack” of applications used by companies to store and manage networks and data, making software makers from McAfee to upstart Sourcefire attractive targets.
“There is a clear trend toward convergence of technologies in the data center, and security is front and center,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets. He and other analysts said security spending by companies held up well during the recession even as overall IT budgets shrank — a mark of resilience that only adds to the lure of security companies. “Security really has the attention of CIOs (chief information officers),” Ives said in an interview. Read more, click here.