“I’m willing to bet the dollar will weaken against other currencies over the longer term, so I feel no need to hedge those currencies.”
Warren Buffett has fuelled suspicions that he is set to turn his sights on British companies by declaring he is now particularly focused on buying European businesses.
While family-owned companies in mainland Europe are at the top of his list, the investor indicated that his business may also focus on groups whose main operations were in pounds or euros.
This weekend, at the annual general meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, Mr Buffett said he was keen to diversify away from companies whose business was largely in dollars, since he expects the US currency to lose more value in the coming years.
He said: “We are happy to invest in businesses that earn their money in the euro, or in companies that derive their earnings in Germany, or from the sterling in the UK, because I don’t have a feeling that those currencies are going to depreciate in a big way against the dollar”.
At the start of its EU presidency in July, France is set to intensify negotiations on EU defence co-operation with the UK, the bloc’s other main military power.
President George W. Bush on Wednesday signalled a softening of long-standing US resistance to stronger European Union defence capabilities, suggesting for the first time this could help rather than weaken Nato.
The signal came in a speech ahead of Wednesday’s Nato summit in Bucharest, in which Mr Bush said European governments should spend more on defence – but suggested it did not matter whether it was to support Nato or EU operations.
Washington has long seen the EU’s plans to develop independent military capabilities as subtracting from capabilities that should properly lie with Nato.
But in recent months US diplomats have indicated that this suspicion of the European Security and Defence Policy was coming to an end. Victoria Nuland, US ambassador to Nato, has said that the ESDP was now being viewed as complementing rather than supplanting Nato.
The automated systems that allow it to track down an object (the ISS) moving at 27,000km/h, and attach itself with an accuracy of 2cm, are beyond what other space-faring nations have at the moment - including the Russians and the US.
Europe’s sophisticated new space truck, the ATV, has docked with the International Space Station (ISS).
The unmanned vessel carries just under five tonnes of food, water, air, fuel and equipment for the orbiting platform’s three astronauts.
The Automated Transfer Vehicle used its own computerised systems to make the attachment at 1445 GMT.
The European Space Agency’s (Esa) station programme manager, Alan Thirkettle, said it was a great engineering achievement.
He told BBC News: “This is a first in the world - this is a fully automatic spacecraft that docked with the space station, totally under its own control, and that’s never been done before by anybody at all; so from a purely technical point of view, it’s really quite incredible.”
This continues to suggest to us that the ECB is unlikely to feel under pressure to intervene and, with the U.S. unlikely to act, the euro should be able to scale the [$1.60] region
Germany’s Ifo Institute said its March business climate index rose to 104.8 after a reading of 104.1 in February, according to news reports. Markets were expecting a reading near 103.4, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires.
Earlier, France’s Insee statistical agency said its French business sentiment index improved slightly, rising to 109 from 107 in February. Markets were expecting a decline to 106.
Despite the US slump, German exports to other countries saw robust growth. Among Germany’s 15 most important export partners, exports to Poland last year registered the highest increase, soaring by 24.3 percent to 36.1 billion euros.
Flagging economic growth in the US and the strong euro have dented German exports to the US, Germany’s biggest export partner outside Europe, the Federal Statistics Office reported this week.
German exports to the United States last year dipped by 5.9 percent to 73.4 billion euros ($115 billion), the country’s federal statistics office revealed this week.
Still, Germany saw overall exports jump in 2007 to 969 billion euros, a surge of 8.5 percent. The BGA expects the rise to continue and increase by another five percent this year to surpass the one trillion euro mark for the first time.
The Eurozone does not include the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania.
The U.S. economy lost the title of “world’s biggest” to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.
Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the United States when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro.
“The curious outcome of breaching this latest milestone is that the size of the euro zone’s annual output has now exceeded that of the U.S.,” the economics department of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, said in a note to clients.
Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP — $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone — the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.
No one can deny that this is a major asset for peace in the world. The approximately 15 civilian and military operations that Europe has already conducted since 2003 in the Balkans, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and as far away as Indonesia, largely attest to this. In each of them, the EU was guided by a single ideal: to save lives, to avert war, and to work for reconstruction and reconciliation when the international community had been unable to prevent conflict.
For months, for years, we have been deeply distressed, yet powerless, with respect to the tragedy in Darfur. Two weeks ago, despite the troubles in Chad, Europe gave itself the means to protect the victims and to rebuild their villages in eastern Chad. At the behest of France, and thanks to the efforts of our European partners, the European Union - implementing a unanimous UN Security Council resolution - launched its Eufor operation.
There will finally be help and comfort for women - who up to now were raped or killed as soon as they left their camps - and for hungry children.
This is no small achievement. I’ve just returned from Goz Beida in eastern Chad, and I will never forget the enthusiastic welcome the European soldiers received from displaced persons and refugees.
The launch of an autonomous EU operation in Africa, led by an Irish general with a Polish deputy and bringing together troops from some 15 countries, illustrates how far we have come in building a European defense. It is now desired and supported by nations that until very recently remained skeptical.
The euro last week pushed through $1.54 to reach fresh record highs against the dollar.
German exports saw the fastest growth in 16 months at the start of this year, underlying the resilience of Europe’s largest economy despite the soaring euro.
Exports rose by 3.8 per cent in January compared with December, the German statistics office reported – the biggest monthly increase since September 2006. The data suggested world demand for German products remains solid, even as the US economy flirts with recession.
At the same time, France and Italy reported stronger than expected industrial production figures for January, strengthening the European Central Bank’s argument that economic fundamentals remain “sound” across the 15-country eurozone.
