Author: Vivian Lewis

  The world’s largest gold coin sold for $4.02 mn in Vienna at the venerable Dorotheum auction house. This was significantly below the pre-sale estimate of $4.90 mn for the auto-wheel-sized Maple Leaf monster coin showing...

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or free trading in exchange-traded funds. Commission-free ETF trading, the hot new way to invest, is now offered by Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard which have lured in billions of dollars...

Today’s blog is late and I wanted to tell you why. I got three time-consuming communications in the mail yesterday. They mark the way machine systems do not work any longer. There is no automatic pilot. First I got a bill...

From Macquarie Group’s Michael Kurtz in Hong Kong the hot news about the Renminbi, which was first reported to the world late Friday night in a scoop from Reuters: The People’s Bank of China announced that it would...

  The euro is finding its mojo again. Estonia yesterday joined the common currency. In the days of Communism, the Baltic country was always closest to freedom and capitalism, mainly because its weird language is close to...

Only paid subscribers will be able to understand my headline. They will also get a stuffed issue with lots of commentary and one sale. Yesterday there was no blog. I attended two conferences, one by Old Mutual on outlook for...

  BP drilling engineer Brian Morel complained about cost-cutting shortcuts that put the operation of the in an e-mail on April 14. He said the errors created a potential “nightmare well” 6 days before an explosion destroyed the...

  Here are some comments from across the Irish Sea about BP’s woes, from Paddy Power, which collects bets made with Irish bookies:Troubled oil giant BP have today been cut from 10-1 to 4-1 to file for bankruptcy before the...