Latest Business News

The iPhone 4, the latest and hottest gadget to hit the markets, carries an astonishingly low up-front price tag. On AT&T’s website or in its stores, bright orange letters blare out the bargain – only $199 for the pinnacle of Steve Jobs’ engineering and design.

But as with all things, there’s no free lunch – and there are no real free phones, either. In the tech industry, products like the $299 Xbox 360 and $199 iPhone 4 are called loss-leaders. The company will lose money up front on the hardware, then make it all back on the software and services.

With an iPhone, you must sign up for a two-year deal to get the $199 price. Full Post…

“When the well started to flow, I knew what the capability would be, and it looked to me like it was going to spread everywhere and be at the mercy of the winds,” said Williger, a Texan who works in the oil business. “I really liked the unit, and really liked the price, and everybody was happy with everything.”

No one can quantify how many homebuyers are abandoning deals because they fear oil may come ashore in Southwest Florida, but it is happening.

Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate says that six of its 22 sales that failed to close in late May and early June were on waterfront homes and the direct result of buyer qualms about the spill.

Realtors are reluctant to share such stories.

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The man in charge of AIG’s doomed Financial Products division in London has defiantly denied taking reckless risks on hefty derivatives contracts that were widely blamed for pushing the huge US insurer to the brink of bankruptcy.

Joseph Cassano, who ran AIG’s financial products unit between 2002 and 2008, will tell the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today that his division, widely derided as a hedge fund attached to a stable insurance company, took “prudent” and “appropriate” decisions but was undermined, in part, by an intervention from external auditors.

However, one of his superiors, AIG’s former chief risk officer Robert Lewis, will offer a bleaker picture to the commission, admitting that AIG was “wrong about how bad things could get”.

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Let’s start with Warm Mineral Springs, the health spa/archaeological tourist attraction the city commissioners decided to buy for $6.3 million.

Buying the springs to protect it from private development and protect public access makes sense, but the deal approved Monday would place it in private hands for the next 30 years, which isn’t exactly the same as outright ownership. A lease that long is asking for trouble.

The city has also left in the lurch a willing co-buyer in Sarasota County, which has the money and staff to manage the property. That could save more than $3 million just in the purchase price, but who’s counting?

Apparently no one, or the commissioners wouldn’t be mulling plans to build a regional water park.

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EVERY year the Banker magazine publishes a ranking of the world’s banks by profits, assets, losses and the like. The latest ranking confirms a shift in power towards banks based in emerging markets. Three Chinese banks make it on to the list of the 20 biggest banks. Agricultural Bank of China, which is about to embark on the world’s biggest IPO, does not quite make the cut. Among the big losers of 2009, European banks, which bought so much toxic securitised sludge, are well represented.

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