NEWS AT A GLANCE
UBS reports record losses
UBS AG, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, reported a quarterly loss of $11.3 billion, the largest loss ever for a bank, after writing down $13.7 billion in investments tied to the U.S. subprime mortgage sector. (Bloomberg) For the full year, UBS posted its first annual loss, of $4 billion, since its creation through the 1997 merger of Swiss Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland. (AP in International Herald Tribune) UBS also revealed $26.6 billion in exposure to so-called Alt-A mortgages in the U.S., adding to roughly $27 billion in subprime exposure. (Reuters) “UBS expects 2008 to be another difficult year,” the bank said in a statement. (MarketWatch)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
News Corp. enters Yahoo! fray
Yahoo! is in talks to trade about 20 percent of itself to News Corp. for social networking site MySpace, in a gambit to scuttle or bid up Microsoft’s hostile takeover offer, according to published reports. (The Wall Street Journal) The Microsoft offer is currently at $42.1 billion, and the News Corp. deal would likely push Yahoo!’s taking price up toward $50 billion. (AP in Yahoo! Finance) But most analysts were skeptical of a Yahoo!-News Corp. deal working out. “It’s still at the fanciful rumor stage,” says analyst Jeffrey Lindsay at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “We couldn’t make the numbers add up.” (BusinessWeek.com)
Comcast gets a boost from cable TV trade-ups
Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, reported a 54 percent rise in quarterly profits, to $602 million, and said it would pay a dividend for the first time in almost a decade. Comcast also said it will buy back $6.9 billion in stock over two years. (Bloomberg) The results, which beat analysts’ forecasts, were driven by higher spending on cable TV. The average Comcast customer spent $61.72 a month on cable TV last year, compared with $58.19 in 2006. Basic cable subscriptions fell, but more expensive cable packages rose, as did broadband Internet and digital phone service subscribers. (AP in Yahoo! Finance)
Dark days for chocolate makers
It’s a bittersweet Valentine’s Day for chocolate makers, as raw cocoa futures hit a 23-year high in New York yesterday. The run-up in cocoa prices is attributed to a strike in Ivory Coast and a shortage of rainfall in West Africa, where 70 percent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown. Chocolate lovers are driving up demand, too, buying a new breed of “ultra-dark” chocolate that contains 99 percent cocoa; the typical chocolate bar contains 25 percent. More prosaically, however, cocoa prices are benefitting from a bullish stance among investors on a range of commodities. “We’ve seen quite a bit of speculative buying,” said A.G. Edwards analyst Dan Vaught. (MarketWatch)
Why ghost guns are so easy to make — and so dangerous
The Week contest: Swift stimulus
'It's hard to resist a sweet deal on a good car'
