MOSCOW — Like many chief executives of American companies, Rex W. Tillerson of Exxon Mobil didn’t attend the major business forum in Russia last month, at the urging of White House officials. But the company’s exploration chief, Neil W. Duffin, did. In a ceremony at the event, Mr. Duffin signed an agreement with Igor I. Sechin, the head of the state-owned Rosneft, to expand its joint ventures to drill offshore in the Arctic Ocean, to explore for shale oil in Siberia and to cooperate on a liquefied natural gas plant in Vladivostok. The deal came just weeks after the United…
Author: Lloyd Graff
SALTILLO, Mexico — Jason Sauey calls them lemmings — all the American companies that rushed to China to make things like toys and toilet brushes, only to be searching now for alternatives in Mexico and the United States. His own family-owned plastics company, Flambeau, nearly made the same mistake around 2004, he said, when competitors contracting with China undercut prices and seized market share. Flambeau resisted, turning instead to its factory here in central Mexico. And now the company — which makes Duncan yo-yos, hunting decoys, plastic cases and an array of industrial items — is reaping the rewards, Mr.…
Michael Lewis has written several great books about various marketplaces. Two standouts are Moneyball and The Big Short. These books extol the virtue of determining the true value of an item in an opaque market. How do you find the real value of a minor league baseball player or a securitized sub-prime mortgage bond fund, then exploit that knowledge to find a hole in the market? Lewis’s most recent book, Flash Boys, takes the opposite tack. Here, the math oriented, technically superior high-frequency traders (HFT) who are exploiting the hole are the bad guys, even though they seem to have a…
Robert Levy, of auctioneer Hilco Industrial, and I had a leisurely dinner after the blockbuster auction he and Myron Bowling conducted at M & D Machine near the Baltimore Airport on May 29th. Robert slowly nursed three vodkas on the rocks as we discussed some of the highlights of his past 33 years on the stand, first with the firm his dad started 61 years ago, Norman Levy Associates, then Dovebid, and finally as President, then Managing Partner and Principal of Hilco Industrial for the last 10 years. I’ve known Robert for most of those 33 years in the rough…
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday will announce one of the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change, a proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details. The regulation takes aim at the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants. If it withstands an expected onslaught of legal and legislative attacks,…
This coming Sunday I’m competing in an amateur salsa dancing contest. Unfortunately the suede bottoms on my special dance shoes had become damaged a few weeks ago so I had to scramble to find some new dance shoes. At the dance shoe store in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago, I couldn’t find any shoes that I loved, so one of the women working there suggested I go to a cobbler nearby called Masters Shoes Repair, where they refer many customers. Before going, I read the reviews of the cobbler on Yelp. The place had received several reviews of five stars…
It’s Memorial Day 2014 as I write this piece, and for most people it’s a day of barbecues and softball games. For me, it’s still about Vietnam and memories. And I didn’t even go. Vietnam was my war. My horror. And I didn’t even go. But my friends and classmates went. Some died there or in the skies over Laos. I check for their names when I visit the stunning Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I do not apologize for not going to war. I signed up for the Illinois National Guard. I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew…
If President Obama approves the hot-button Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada has plenty of work to do to build the Montana-to-Nebraska connection. This is how its engineers plan to do it. After more than four years of controversy, the Obama administration is expected to make a final decision this summer about whether the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline can be built in the United States. If the administration green-lights the project, which was proposed in 2008, it will go from hotly debated idea to a monumental engineering undertaking. The pipeline would run 875 miles from the Canadian border to Steele City, Neb., where it…
I am hardly a horse racing buff, but the story of California Chrome, winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness, is just so Mickey Rooney, it’s irresistible. The California horse is trained by Art Sherman, who at 77 is the oldest trainer to ever win a Derby. A former jockey of little success, the 5’2” fellow’s only other appearance at Churchill Downs was in 1955 as an exercise boy for Derby winner, Swaps. He actually slept on the straw with Swaps on the horse’s four-day road trip from California to Louisville for the race. California Chrome is owned by…
On Wednesday, a week after a train loaded with crude oil from North Dakotaexploded in downtown Lynchburg, Va., dumping 30,000 gallons of oil into the James River, the Department of Transportation announced two moves to try to keep this from happening so frequently. It’s doubtful that either will make much of a difference in preventing what’s become a major safety hazard in the U.S. Under a new “emergency order,” the DOT said it’s now going to require any railroad that ships a large amount of crude to tell state emergency responders what it’s up to. That includes telling them how much…