Thursday -- Wall Street Journal, Others

The Wall Street Journal

This is how it will play out: insurance premiums are about to sky-rocket for CBR. This has to be a nightmare for Warren Buffett -- a crude oil train exploding in downtown Omaha.

This is incredibly cool. A few minutes ago I posted a bit on Barnes and Noble, including the Nook. Now, I see, The Wall Street Journal, has a full article focused on the Nook. 

In an interview, Mr. Huseby said figuring out the Nook was one of his top priorities and he said that the retailer no longer sees itself competing with Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. in the tablet marketplace.

But he acknowledged that Barnes & Noble needs to sell its own tablets if it is to retain a decent market share of digital content.

"Your best chance of success for selling digital content is on your own dedicated devices which have your brand or a co-brand on them," Mr. Huseby said. "That's why we're dedicated to providing those devices in both black and white and color."

A key issue, he said, is how much cost associated with making tablets Barnes & Noble wants to shoulder on a permanent basis.

Personally I think it's all over for the Nook. Game, set, match.

The CEO says his top priority is trying to "figure out the Nook." It's fairly simply to figure out. It can't compete with multi-functional tablets. Period.

The CEO says he is looking at how to shoulder the cost: when content sales decrease 30% year-over-year, the writing is on the wall. Barnes and Noble needs to decide what business it is in.

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This is not good. JC Penneys did not provide analysts with holiday sales results. I know when newspapers report "rats leaving a sinking ship," the number of rats leaving is not provided.

It looks like The Wall Street Journal has a continuing series on coal. I haven't read, but just noticing the headlines. Today: scrubbing technology revives Midwest coal. The opening line mentions the "Illinois Basin." In my mind, Illinois is geographically and politically in the East. Whatever. I have no dog in the coal fight.  And this is interesting: coal keeps the Gulf busy.

Now some people in the industry anticipate that the U.S. will become an increasingly significant global supplier of steam coal, which is used to generate electricity. With the domestic market for U.S. steam coal crimped by new environmental rules and competition from natural gas, producers are finding new markets abroad.

Much U.S. steam coal is mined in the Midwest, driving investment in coal-export facilities at Gulf of Mexico ports to meet overseas demand. United Bulk Terminals bought its Davant, La., terminal in 2011 and is investing about $80 million to upgrade it.

The company, a division of Germany's Oiltanking Group, says the work will nearly double the terminal's export capacity to 22 million tons a year. Easy access to the Mississippi River will help make coal from Illinois the "export coal of choice" in a world market growing hungrier for steam coal, says a United Bulk spokesperson.

The Los Angeles Times

This is why the market is struggling: the deficit is falling too fast. I can't make this stuff up.  

The capital may be enduring a brief spell of record-low temperatures this week, but the federal deficit continues to melt away. According to the latest figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the red ink for the first quarter of fiscal 2014, which began Oct. 1, dropped by almost 40% compared with the same period a year earlier.

The deficit has gone down so much that the federal government actually ran a surplus for December — a one-time occurrence that resulted from some special circumstances but still an indicator of the rapidly improving state of the government’s finances.

Indeed, many prominent economists, including outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, have suggested that the deficit is now coming down too fast. At a news conference last month, Bernanke said fiscal policy had been too tight recently — central bank jargon for suggesting that with the economy still operating below capacity, a somewhat higher deficit over the next year would help, not hurt.

The politicians have just been given the green light to spend more money as we go into the 2014 election cycle. And whenever the government spends, the "market" goes up. It's going to be a fantastic 2014.

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