Peter C. Beller,
Warren Buffett's flip-flop could bring new investors to Berkshire and more volume to its shares.

When the world's greatest investor announced he was buying a railroad to add to his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, few of Warren Buffett's long-time disciples were surprised at the thinking behind the deal. Americans need to move more freight and no one's ever going to build another big railroad, Buffett told the media. What did shock Ber...

Steve Schaefer,
Consumers won't lead the recovery, but Swiss Re economist Kurt Karl thinks they should be able to sustain it.

Bad news for the American unemployed: companies aren't going to start hiring anytime soon. By this point, reports like Thursday's news that AOL will cut more than 2,000 jobs as it is spun out from Time Warner ( TWX - news - people ), are hardly eye-opening to observers who fully anticipate a weak labor market for the foreseeable...

Stop giving the Fed chairman such a hard time, he prevented more bankruptcies than we'll ever know.

Matthew Craft,
Complaints about the Federal Reserve come from every corner. Cable pundits worry about inflation and the falling dollar.
Asian countries gripe that near-zero interest rates risk creating speculative bubbles. Members of Congress make sport out of bashing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. But the Fed's efforts have had one little noticed knock-on...

Peter C. Beller,
A late rally has stocks ending the week down but not out.



A late-day rally saved stock investors from finishing the week with another rout but a third straight day of falling share prices reflected the market's uncertain mood about the U.S. economy. A stronger dollar again hit commodities and the companies that produce them while tech shares suffered from weak forecasts.

The major indexes dipped sharply in morning trading with t...

Christopher Helman,
Warren Buffett sees its future. Here's why other investors should too.

HOUSTON -- Poor coal. Seemingly every day comes another attack. On Thursday came word that leaders in the U.S. Senate were considering a Plan B for the carbon cap-and-trade bill, aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. It would scrap the economy-wide carbon trading regime in favor of a more modest plan targeting only electric power plants. Adoption of Plan B would le...

Robert Langreth and Rebecca Ruiz

Why can't we control costs? Because experts who write perfectly reasonable guidelines get branded death panels.

In the midst of the debate over health care reform, we have been handed the perfect example of why America will never get health care costs under control: The furious reaction to new guidelines that recommend most women should get mammograms later in life and less frequently.

On Monday, the U.S. Preventive...

By REUTERS
Published: November 20, 2009

Ohio’s attorney general sued Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings on Friday, asserting that they provided misleading credit ratings that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for state funds.

The official, Richard Cordray, filed the lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio on behalf of five Ohio funds that assert they lost more than $457 million because of “false and misleading ratings�...

By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: November 16, 2009

Suntech Power, China’s largest solar panel manufacturer, plans to open its first American plant near Phoenix, the company announced on Monday. It would be the first time a Chinese solar company has built a manufacturing plant in the United States, experts said.

The plant will begin production in the third quarter of 2010 and will build panels from solar cells shipped from China. Those cells, in turn, contain substantial amounts of a substan...