Thread: Iraq/Dinar News until 5PM CST May 10,2007

by David Dieudonne 49 minutes ago


WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States Wednesday reaffirmed support for embattled World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who wants more time to respond to allegations of favoritism as Europeans push for a quick finish to the scandal tying up the global development lender.
"We still support him fully," Tony Snow, the spokesman for President George W. Bush, said aboard the presidential airplane Air Force One.
Snow was responding to questions about statements he made the prior day interpreted as a move by the White House to distance itself from the former US deputy defense secretary.
Snow on Tuesday dodged a reporter's questions asking him if the president was still insisting that Wolfowitz keep his World Bank job.
"The conversations right now are not between the administration and the World Bank, they're between Mr. Wolfowitz and the World Bank and I think it's proper to let the process work itself out rather than trying to insinuate ourselves into it," the spokesman had said.
But on Wednesday, Snow insisted: "This is not hanging Paul Wolfowitz out to dry."
Wolfowitz, 63, is battling strong calls from inside and outside the bank for his resignation after the revelation last month that he personally engineered a massive pay hike and guaranteed promotion for his companion, Shaha Riza, a World Bank employee.
Bank rules prohibit managers from supervising employees with whom they have such a relationship.
The Bush administration, which nominated Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, to lead the multilateral institution in June 2005, is pressing for the bank's directors to give him more time to respond to the allegations of favoritism.
In a report given to Wolfowitz Sunday, a bank investigatory panel concluded that he had clearly violated bank rules, a European source said.
The committee gave him 48 hours to respond, but his lawyer, Robert Bennett (news, bio, voting record), called the treatment "terribly unfair" and asked Tuesday for at least five days to answer the allegations.
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also defended Wolfowitz, insisting he is "a dedicated public servant and deserves a fair process rather than a rush to judgment," said Brookly McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Paulson.
"That includes sufficient time to review the ad hoc committee's report and respond, as well as sufficient time for the ad hoc committee to consider his response to the report," she said.
Implicitly, Wolfowitz and his supporters are seeking to schedule a board meeting to examine the documents, including Wolfowitz's response, no earlier than next week, instead of an expected meeting this week.
But several European countries represented on the board of directors do not want to wait.
"We would want the board of directors to meet swiftly to decide based on this report and on statements from Mr. Wolfowitz," said French foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei.
"Our concern is to ensure the proper functioning of the World Bank in the framework of its mission to promote development and the struggle against poverty," Mattei said, in a reference to the paralysis that has gripped the Washington-base institution since the scandal erupted a month ago.

Tuesday, Dutch Finance Minister Wouter Bos, heading into a meeting of European Union finance ministers, said that the investigatory panel's report was putting more pressure on Wolfowitz to resign.
And Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said the scandal was undermining the six-decade-old bank. "It's impossible to go everywhere in the world to speak about good governance and not to have good governance in the World Bank," Reynders said.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Warren Buffett is confident that Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile , Research)(BRKb.N: Quote, Profile , Research) can conclude several large takeovers soon, Buffett told Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft in an interview on Wednesday.
"We are primarily interested in larger takeovers. I'd happily buy something in the area of $5-$20 billion, but unfortunately targets with potential are rare. I'm confident that we are going to be able to conclude several larger transactions soon," he told the newspaper.
Buffett said insurance and investment group Berkshire, which he heads, was not as active in the currency markets as it once was.
"Today, we're only actively buying one currency. You'll find out in one year which one it was," he said.

Buffett sharing $620,100 lunch with investor | Chicago Tribune

An old article BUT timely:

iraq's progress: The best new ideas for rebuilding a nation.

An Alan Greenspan for Iraq… And six other ideas for fixing Iraq's economy.

By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 1:06 PM ET

Fixing Iraq's economy may turn out to be the smoothest part of Iraq's recovery. Compared to replacing a totalitarian dictatorship with a constitutional democracy, transforming Iraq's command economy into a vigorous free market could be—to borrow the word of the month—a cakewalk. Iraq has a well-educated and entrepreneurial population and a sea of oil. What's more, the past few years have witnessed a flourishing of economic innovation, a profusion of ideas about how to spur entrepreneurship, manage an economy, and preserve oil wealth.
Here are seven promising ones that could speed Iraq's recovery:

1. Microcredit. Pioneered in Bangladesh during the '80s, microcredit has become a global cause célèbre in the past five years. Microcredit operations—usually subsidized by governments or NGOs—extend tiny loans, sometimes less than $25, to the poor to help them start small businesses, improve their farms, and fund education. (These are loans that regular banks won't make, because the administrative costs are too high.) Microcredit is the most dramatic way to encourage entrepreneurship among the poorest. In the best cases, it has harvested repayment rates of 98 percent and recorded genuine improvements in living standards. (Some microcredit enterprises are even profitable.) Microcredit operations have particularly benefited women, who receive lots of loans.
Microcredit is a natural for Iraq, a country with a boisterous commercial tradition and a shortage of capital. It could aid ambitious farmers and would-be entrepreneurs who don't have the seed money to start a business.

2. Hernando de Soto. The Peruvian author of The Mystery of Capital is perhaps the world's trendiest economist, a genius of property rights. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich love him. He may be the only person ever praised by the editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. De Soto's key insight, formulated in the mid-'80s and refined since, is that the failure to acknowledge the property rights of the developing world's poor shuts them out of the economy and cripples capitalism.
Successful nations make it easy to establish property rights. Those property rights, in turn, fuel the mortgage and credit market that is the foundation of small business and economic growth. Poor people, de Soto says, have plenty of capital in the form of houses and unregistered businesses, but they can't "unlock" that capital because the legal system won't acknowledge their property rights. For example, many of the world's poor own houses on land that they can't get formal title to: As a result, they can't borrow against their houses, so they lack the capital to start businesses. De Soto has worked to simplify property rights, making it much easier for people to secure title to things they effectively own and to register businesses legally. In Peru, de Soto and his think tank have pushed to cut paperwork and costs for registering land and businesses. As a result, they claim, 6.3 million poor Peruvians now have title to their land, increasing their income by $3.2 billion. The time it takes to register a business has dropped from 300 days to one; 380,000 businesses have been legalized, and 560,000 legal new jobs have been created.
According to Scott Brown, a policy development adviser at the International Monetary Fund, de Soto's ideas are likely to be useful in the squatter-dominated shantytowns of Baghdad and in the countryside, which has had a strange system of land rights in which small farmers worked fields owned by sheiks.

3. Oil Trusts. Recent research by Jeffrey Sachs, among others, has overturned the classical notion that natural resources aid economic development. In fact, resource-rich developing countries tend to have lousy economies: They don't diversify into manufacturing, and much of their resource wealth is stolen by a corrupt elite or squandered on useless projects (see Nigeria, Congo, Iraq …). Resource-poor countries are forced into the value-added manufacturing, service work, and agriculture that make them prosper.
Iraq is a classic example of a wasteful resource-rich country, earning billions in oil profits annually with practically nothing to show for it. How to put that oil wealth to good use? The most radical new idea is to place the oil revenues, or a significant chunk of them, in trust for the Iraqi people. There are two competing notions about what to do with that trust. One idea, floated first by Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, is an Alaska-style trust fund that pays annual dividend checks to every Iraqi citizen. This would share the wealth fairly and would harness the entrepreneurial talents of each Iraqi.
The other idea, cited by lots of development economists, is the more recent precedent of Chad. With help from the World Bank, Chad is placing its oil revenues in a national trust that allocates 80 percent to health, education, and rural development, and 10 percent to an account for future generations. An Iraqi trust, insulated from greedy politicians and the daily demands of government, could fund the best long-term investments the nation can make in itself. Either kind of trust would probably benefit Iraq more than an arrangement that gives leaders control of the oil revenues or auctions off the fields to a small elite.

4. "Publish What You Pay." Another oil idea, this one pushed by George Soros. Karin Lissakers, who advises Soros on Publish What You Pay, says the premise is that oil (and mineral) rich countries suffer huge corruption and waste because no one ever accounts for their wealth. The countries sign secret contracts with foreign oil and mining concerns. The companies don't disclose what they are paying the government; the government does not disclose its mineral revenues. As a result, it's easy for corrupt individuals to steal: Billions of dollars end up in Swiss bank accounts because no one knows how much revenue the government ought to collect. This veil of secrecy not only robs a nation of cash, it trashes government accountability. If citizens can't know what money the government should have, how can they hold the government to account?
The British government is now pushing a voluntary transparency initiative for "extractive industries" that would make public the terms of such oil and mineral contracts. Lissakers and Soros are also lobbying for securities regulations here and in Europe that would force companies like ExxonMobil to report the terms of their contracts. The oil companies, Lissakers says, are surprisingly sympathetic. They are beginning to recognize that corruption is destabilizing for them, bringing terrible publicity, and endangering operations in places like Nigeria.
In Iraq, Publish What You Pay would restore some trust in the corrupt oil business and would help redirect revenue from corrupt officials to the coffers where it belongs. Such transparency would also be essential for the success of any oil trust, since Iraqis couldn't trust a trust if they didn't know how much was supposed to go into it.

5. An Alan Greenspan for Iraq. Hyperinflation used to be a common global malady: Everytime you turned around in the 1970s, some country's currency was falling apart. (Remember those places where it took a thick stack of bills to buy a loaf of bread?) Central banks would print money like crazy; economic chaos ensued. But as Steve Radelet, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, points out, hyperinflation is disappearing because of the rising competence of central bankers—a Greenspan in every pot.
Better central banking has kneecapped inflation in developing countries and helped stabilize monetary policies. In the past decade, the IMF and other international donor groups have insisted that central bankers run a tight ship if they want to keep getting loans. More important, central bankers in even the most backward places now understand their jobs. This is partly the result of a concerted effort. The IMF and various top universities now offer crash courses for central banking officials. In three weeks to six months, they learn the basic technical skills and economic principles they need to construct a sound monetary policy. The result, says Radelet, is that "the level of competence of central bankers is much, much higher than it used to be."
In Iraq, able central bankers will help establish a single viable currency, rein in the inflation that prevailed in the final months of the Saddam administration, and keep monetary policy disciplined enough to satisfy international aid groups.

6. Democracy by Development. IMF jockeys, World Bankers, USAIDers, and the like will be champing to shove wonderful projects down the throat of the new Iraqi government: schools here, roads there, restore these marshlands, fix that port, that bridge, that power station. Unfortunately, the record of big, top-down foreign development projects is mixed, leaning toward lousy: Corrupt officials steal too much of the cash, the locals don't really want the project and so don't maintain it, too many villages are demolished, etc.
But at the World Bank—still the 800-pound gorilla of development—the past decade has witnessed a tilt toward grass-roots development that might bode well for postwar reconstruction. The most promising idea here for Iraq may be a 5-year-old World Bank experiment in Indonesia called the Kecamatan Development Project, which is pouring nearly $1 billion into thousands of villages. The innovation in KDP is that each village decides—after a community debate and competitive bidding process—what project it wants: Some choose to build roads, others irrigation projects, others schools. Local participation in the decision vastly increases the success (and popularity) of the projects. (Traditionally such grass-roots development has been stifled by governments because it doesn't produce grand results, like dams, and because it undermines central control by granting each village autonomy.)
The second and perhaps more important new idea of the KDP is that it uses development to promote democracy. It is, as a World Bank staffer puts it, a "democracy project disguised as a development project." The bidding process for KDP teaches villagers democratic habits: debate, lobbying, peaceful dissent. These are new, deeply necessary skills in a nation making the transition to democracy from authoritarianism. (The bank is now studying whether these KDP skills are energizing other kinds of democratic activism in the villages.) The bank is pitching a version of the KDP for Afghanistan, and it's expected that it will propose something similar to develop and democratize Iraq.

7. Net Business. The Internet won't revolutionize the Iraqi economy. Its tech infrastructure is ancient. Silicon Desert won't be springing up outside Basra. Amazon.iq isn't going to challenge the bazaar. But the Net can give a small kick to would-be entrepreneurs. Eurasia Society President Bill Maynes describes a project that Iraq should imitate. Western NGOs have scattered Internet business centers around the former Soviet Union. These kiosks can advise on how to set up a business, keep your books, pay your taxes (or, in Russia, not pay your taxes). This information was only sparsely available in the pre-Web age. Its accessibility probably increases the rate of business creation. Iraq is wired enough that a similar program could encourage entrepreneurship there.
So far, this series has ignored what may be the greatest obstacle to Iraq's recovery: its vicious ethnic and religious divides. The next installment of Iraq's Progress will examine some of the most promising ideas for minimizing these hatreds, everything from truth commissions to controversial laws against hate speech

Seven ways to fix Iraq's economy. - By David Plotz - Slate Magazine

Next installment (if interested): Can't the Iraqis All Just Get Along? Well … no. So here are seven ways to reduce ethnic and religious tension before they start killing each other.

Seven ways to make Iraqis get along. - By David Plotz - Slate Magazine

Cheers!
DayDream

Originally Posted by mustang sally

From a recent press briefing...

{cut..}

QUESTION: But as far as funding and tying it to that is the question.

AMBASSADOR CROCKER: Well, certainly from the political-economic side, just as is the case with the military, our people need the tools to get the job done. And the tools in this case are money. We really need to get the money out here so we can start making a difference on the streets.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ken Fireman, Bloomberg.

QUESTION: Thank you, sir. You said you were impressed by the responses that you heard from Prime Minister Maliki and his colleagues. Did they offer any specific commitments, particularly time commitments, in moving forward on some of the specific measures that you and other American officials have talked about; namely, hydrocarbon law, de-Baathification, provincial elections and constitutional reform?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe that Prime Minister Maliki plans an address to the parliament this week on many of these issues – [cough] excuse me – and, of course, it’s a political process that depends upon action by their legislative body. And but as I say, I do believe that there is a greater sense of urgency now than I’d seen previously.

QUESTION: But no specific time commitments?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It’s difficult to do with our own Congress, let alone somebody else’s.

Thanks, everybody.

END 7:25 P.M. (Local)

YES!!!

i received this video from a friend. it is about our men and women in iraq. her husband is stationed there in this unit. God bless our troops

YouTube - First Bat Wingaging

US to sustain Iraq surge with 10 brigades
Correspondents in Washington
10may07

THE Pentagon announced yesterday that it would pour 35,000 US troops in 10 combat brigades into Iraq from August, enough to sustain the "surge" in forces through to the end of the year.


US commanders in Iraq are convinced that the boost in troop levels, announced in January by President George W. Bush, would need to last into at least April next year.

The US military said it would assess in September how well its counter-insurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, was working, The Washington Post reported.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, the day-to-day commander for US military operations in Iraq, told the paper.

"What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not.

"Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the deployment would make it possible to sustain up to 20 combat brigades in Iraq through to the end of the year.

Mr Whitman said the 10 combat brigades, all from the active duty army, had been given orders to deploy between August and December of this year.

General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has said he would make a recommendation in September on whether the US strategy was working, or a new approach was needed.

News of the deployment came as US Vice-President Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday to tell top Iraqi leaders to redouble efforts to promote national reconciliation and warn them US patience was running short.

Mr Cheney was to hammer home Washington's powerful objections to Iraqi politicians' planned two-month northern summer recess, US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said.

"The reality is, with the major effort we're making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making, themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in summer is impossible to understand."

Originally Posted by jsfletcher

ZURICH (Reuters) - Warren Buffett is confident that Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile , Research)(BRKb.N: Quote, Profile , Research) can conclude several large takeovers soon, Buffett told Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft in an interview on Wednesday.
"We are primarily interested in larger takeovers. I'd happily buy something in the area of $5-$20 billion, but unfortunately targets with potential are rare. I'm confident that we are going to be able to conclude several larger transactions soon," he told the newspaper.
Buffett said insurance and investment group Berkshire, which he heads, was not as active in the currency markets as it once was.
"Today, we're only actively buying one currency. You'll find out in one year which one it was," he said.

Buffett sharing $620,100 lunch with investor | Chicago Tribune

the link provided did not connect with the quote posted

Chevron Seen Settling Case on Iraq Oil
By CLAUDIO GATTI and JAD MOUAWAD

09 May 2007 (New York Times)

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

The $64 billion program was set up in 1996 by the Security Council to help ease the effects of United Nations sanctions on Iraqi civilians after the first gulf war. Until the American invasion in 2003, the program allowed Saddam’s government to export oil to pay for food, medicine and humanitarian goods.

Using an elaborate system of secret surcharges and extra fees, however, the Iraqi regime received at least $1.8 billion in kickbacks from companies in the program, according to an investigation completed in 2005 by Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

By imposing surcharges on the sale of crude oil, the Iraqi regime skimmed about $228 million from its oil exports.

A report released in 2004 by an investigator at the Central Intelligence Agency listed five American companies that bought oil through the program: the Coastal Corporation, a subsidiary of El Paso; Chevron; Texaco; BayOil, and Mobil, now part of Exxon Mobil. The companies have denied any wrongdoing and said they were cooperating with the investigations.

As part of the deal under negotiation, Chevron, which now owns Texaco, is not expected to admit to violating the U.N. sanctions. But Chevron is expected to acknowledge that it should have been aware that illegal kickbacks were being paid to Iraq on the oil, the investigators said.

The fine is connected to the payment of about $20 million in surcharges on tens of millions of barrels of Iraqi oil bought by Chevron from 2000 to 2002, investigators said.

These payments were made by small oil traders that sold oil to Chevron. But records found by United Nations, American and Italian officials showed that they were financed by Chevron.

The negotiations, which might take several weeks to conclude, follow an agreement reached in February by El Paso, the largest operator of American natural gas pipelines, to pay the United States government $7.73 million to settle allegations that it was involved in illegal payments under the oil-for-food program.

The settlement discussions are a result of months of work by a joint task force of the United States attorneys of the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, with help from Italian authorities. Kent Robertson, a spokesman for Chevron, said “regarding the oil-for-food program generally, Chevron purchased Iraqi crude oil principally for use in its U.S. refineries and the United Nations approved the initial sale of all cargos ultimately purchased by Chevron.”

He said Chevron has cooperated with inquiries into the program “and we will continue to do so.”

The United States attorney’s office and the office of the New York district attorney both declined to comment.

Thus far, only former United Nations officials, individual traders and relatively small oil companies have come under scrutiny in the United States.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, referred inquires to Chevron.

According to Chevron’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the public policy committee met three times in the course of 2000. Chevron declined to comment about the private deliberations of its board.

On Jan. 26, 2001, Patricia Woertz, then president of Chevron Products, stated in an internal communication that “the payment of such a surcharge is prohibited by U.N. sanctions against Iraq,” according to documents provided by Chevron to the Volker committee.

In any transaction involving Iraqi oil, Ms. Woertz wrote that the company should consider the “identity, experience and reputation of the selling company,” as well as “any deviation of the proposed pricing basis or margin for the transaction from historical practice.”

According to American and Italian investigators, however, a list of Iraqi oil transactions from June 2000 to December 2002, which Chevron provided to the Volcker committee, showed that the premium Chevron was paying to third parties went up after August 2000, when the illegal surcharges began — and continued to be paid even after Ms. Woertz’s warnings.

The company also did not carry out Ms. Woertz’s demand for what amounted to a credibility check on companies that sold Iraqi crude to Chevron. Chevron bought tens of millions of barrels of Iraqi oil from companies that included previously unknown players with no record in the oil business, investigators say.

One such company was Erdem Holding, which sold Chevron 13 million barrels of oil, according to Chevron’s list. This company was owned by Zeynel Abidin Erdem, a Turkish businessman who sat on the board of the Turkish-Iraqi Business Council.

On Feb. 15, 2001, about two weeks after Ms. Woertz’s internal memo was sent, Chevron bought 1.8 million barrels from Erdem, the Turkish company, at “OSP plus 36 cents.” OSP stands for the official selling price approved by the United Nations for Iraqi oil.

On other occasions, the extra payment went as high as 49.5 cents a barrel, according to the Chevron list.

In sworn statements last year to an Italian prosecutor, an Italian businessman, Fabrizio Loioli, said he sold Iraqi oil to many companies, including Chevron, and all were aware of the Iraqi request for payment of a surcharge. “In fact, each final beneficiary involved used to add this amount to the official price to disguise it as a premium to be paid to the intermediary,” Mr. Loioli said in his statement. “In reality, they were perfectly aware that only a part of that would go to the intermediary, while the remaining part was to be paid to the Iraqis.”

Italy’s financial investigators, the Guardia di Finanza, found specific evidence that Mr. Loioli’s company, Betoil, paid surcharges to the Iraqis for oil bought by Chevron. The documents, seized in Betoil’s offices, indicate that $45,000 was sent to a secret Iraqi account in Jordan as payment for surcharges on oil loaded by the tanker Overseas Ann on behalf of Chevron on March 13, 2002.

Mr. Loioli was convicted in the United Arab Emirates for fraud and is currently under investigation in Greece and Italy, according to an Italian investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still active.

Investigators in Milan found evidence that Mr. Loioli brokered the sale of some 155 million barrels of Iraqi crude and, directly or indirectly, paid $4.5 million in surcharges. In the case of Chevron, Mr. Loioli said in his deposition that he dealt with an official in the company’s London office, Michael Dugdale, who handled the purchase of Iraqi oil.

An internal Chevron e-mail message found by United States investigators suggests that Mr. Dugdale informed the company that the premium to Mr. Loioli had the illegal Iraqi surcharge embedded in it, according to a person close to the investigation.

Mr. Dugdale left Chevron in the fall of 2005. In a telephone interview from London, he confirmed dealing with the Italian intermediary, but denied knowingly paying surcharges to the Iraqis or trying to negotiate any discount on them. “Every deal I did was approved by senior management,” Mr. Dugdale said, adding he had informed them about his negotiations with Mr. Loioli.

Minister Calls Int. Companies for Investment

Amman, 09 May 2007 (Al-Sabaah)

Minerals and industry minister engineer Fawzi Harerry, called through his participation in Iraq re-building fair and conference in it's 4th cession which currently hold in Amman from 7-10 May the international companies and the businessmen besides the investment men to doubting a seriously in cooperation, investment and high participation for well using of the chances towards special invest mental files of cement, irons, steel, petrochemical, chemical fertilizer and engineering industries besides ceramic and glass industry.

On the other hand, he said that, the Iraqi industry finally exist from the central system which supported by the government up to the opening system to offer more chances for competitions among the companies and businessmen.

Originally Posted by jsfletcher

ZURICH (Reuters) - Warren Buffett is confident that Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile , Research)(BRKb.N: Quote, Profile , Research) can conclude several large takeovers soon, Buffett told Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft in an interview on Wednesday.
"We are primarily interested in larger takeovers. I'd happily buy something in the area of $5-$20 billion, but unfortunately targets with potential are rare. I'm confident that we are going to be able to conclude several larger transactions soon," he told the newspaper.
Buffett said insurance and investment group Berkshire, which he heads, was not as active in the currency markets as it once was.
"Today, we're only actively buying one currency. You'll find out in one year which one it was," he said.

Buffett sharing $620,100 lunch with investor | Chicago Tribune

Buffett is betting against the USD that is for sure and rightly so. It would be great if he was actively buying the Iraqi Dinar but the Euro is a likely candidate as well.