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Farewell (for now) to Finance News

Have you been wondering where Finance News has been these last few weeks? Finance News' maintainer, Celia (me), has accepted a new, non-finance related position at Columbia College Chicago and will no longer be updating this site. While Finance News may be revived by someone in the future, it is now defunct.

Thanks for reading...I leave you with one last interesting link to an interview from this week's HBS Working Knowledge newsletter about a Czech joint venture. Read the whole article HERE.

Facelift for Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance has upgraded some of their features and now offers video, enhanced message boards, interactive charts and blogs, among other things. Read about the update from CNet or Red Herring or Reuters

Check out Yahoo! Finance HERE

Ford to cut dividends. Moody's lowers Ford's bond rating.

From BBC news today: Ford is to cut its shareholder dividend in half, a further blow for investors who have watched the carmaker's losses mount in recent months. Read the whole article HERE.

From Reuters today: Moody's Investors Service on Friday cut its ratings on Ford Motor Co. and its finance arm deeper into junk status, saying the automaker will face considerable stress as high fuel prices hurt demand for sports utility vehicles. Read more HERE

Read more about Ford's woes from Bloomberg

Read more on Ford's bond rating cut from Bloomberg or Forbes

Soccernomics

In a report called Soccernomics (published pre-World Cup in March 2006), the ABN Amro Economics Department concluded that the world economy would benefit the most from an Italian World Cup win...we shall see. Read Soccernomics HERE.

Commercial Real Estate's Perfect Storm: What Lies Ahead?

More on Commercial Real Estate from this week's Knowledge @ Wharton newsletter: The commercial real estate market has been on a tear in the last few years. Banks, insurance companies and institutional investors have funneled money into the market because its returns, in an environment of low interest rates, exceeded those of other asset classes. As interest rates begin to climb, how will that situation change? Experts discussed those issues at a recent conference on Innovation and Risk Management in Real Estate Markets organized by the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and Mercer Oliver Wyman. Read the whole article HERE

Reinventing the Dowdy Savings Bond

From this week's HBS Working Knowledge newsletter: In the family of investment products, a U.S. savings bond might be cast as boring old Uncle Ned, snoozing away in the corner after dinner. There's nothing wrong with that—but HBS professor Peter Tufano envisions a more meaningful role for savings bonds in the financial lives of low- and moderate-income families. Low-risk and low-profile, savings bonds have been around for decades, offering the dual benefit of funding the national debt while acting as a savings vehicle for millions of Americans. In "Reinventing Savings Bonds," an article in Tax Notes (October 31, 2005) with Daniel Schneider, Tufano proposes a slight renovation of the program that will make it easier for asset-poor families to use savings bonds to build a nest egg for the future.
Read the HBS Working Knowledge article HERE.

To read the Reinventing Savings Bonds article from Tax Notes, log into LexisNexis and search on Reinventing Savings Bonds.

Commercial Real Estate Maintains Its Strength Despite a Cooling Housing Market

From today's WSJ: WITH AMERICA'S HOUSING market clearly cooling, will commercial real estate start to swoon? Hardly. The national office market, which cratered after the tech bust in 2000, has recovered and is the strongest it has been in five years. The shopping-mall market has stayed strong because consumer spending held up better than expected. And hotels had their most profitable year ever in 2005, partly because of strong business travel. In fact, the commercial markets benefited from the former froth in the residential-property market because the boom in residential construction limited the amount of land that could be used for other purposes. In some markets, the conversion of apartments, hotels and, to a lesser extent, office buildings, into condominiums reduced the risk of oversupply -- one of the biggest hazards in commercial real estate and one that contributed to the sector's crash in the late 1980s. Read the whole article HERE

Pure Play in Soccer: Hedge Fund Invests In Portuguese Stars

From today's WSJ: LISBON -- Nuno Goncalves is pulling hard for Portugal in the World Cup, but with more reason than most of his countrymen. The Lisbon- based hedge-fund manager has an investment in Ricardo Costa, a 25- year-old defender on Portugal's team. The 33-year-old Mr. Goncalves, who runs three funds with about $14 million of investments for Football Players Funds Management Ltd., buys and sells interests in the rights to soccer players from Europe, Brazil and elsewhere. When one of his 15 players excels, and a wealthy franchise makes a bid for him, Mr. Goncalves's firm shares in the profits from the deal. Read the whole article HERE.

And read a related article from the WSJ on scoring last-minute World Cup tickets HERE.

Diversification gets derailed

From a special report in today's Chicago Tribune: With stock, bond and commodity prices moving in lock step, the idea of offsetting losers with winners by holding multiple types of investments worldwide is no longer the best answer.

Read the whole article HERE.