Business Highlights + MORE Feb 16th

OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says sales of existing homes rose by eight per cent last month compared to a year ago, while the national average home price soared 17 per cent.
CREA says the national average home price was $470,297 in January, fuelled largely by price gains in greater Vancouver and greater Toronto.
However, excluding the piping hot markets of Ontario and British Columbia, the average sale price actually edged lower by 0.3 per cent from a year ago to $286,911.
On a month-to-month, seasonally adjusted basis, CREA says national home sales rose 0.5 per cent in January, compared to December of last year.
Canada’s top cities to buy real estate in »
Meanwhile, the number of new listings on the Multiple Listing Service declined by 4.9 per cent in January, compared to December.
CREA chief economist Gregory Klump said single-family homes remained in high demand in Toronto and Vancouver last month, while a number of Alberta markets continued to see ample supply while potential buyers sat on the sidelines…

OMAHA, Neb. – Berkshire Hathaway Inc. on Tuesday revealed that it has made a new investment in pipeline operator Kinder Morgan and unloaded its stake in Chicago Bridge & Iron as part of several changes to its stock portfolio.
Warren Buffett’s conglomerate filed an update on its U.S. stock holdings at the end of the year with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It said it owned 26.5 million shares of Houston-based Kinder Morgan Inc. at the end of December. Pipelines are a business Buffett understands well because Berkshire’s utility unit owns several natural gas pipeline companies.
Berkshire did not report any shares of Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., which builds energy infrastructure projects. At the end of September, it held 1.98 million shares.
Buffett’s remarkably successful track record means that many investors look for ideas to copy in these quarterly filings.
But the combined filing also includes investments made by two other Berkshire executives who manage part of the company’s $132 billion stock portfolio…

WASHINGTON – A Federal Reserve official who played a key role in the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis says the government should do more to prevent a repeat of that crisis, including considering whether the nation’s biggest banks need to be broken up.
Neel Kashkari, the president of the Fed’s Minneapolis regional bank, said Tuesday that while significant progress has been made to strengthen the financial system since the 2008 crisis, Congress did not go far enough in making changes.
“I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy,” Kashkari said in a speech to a conference at the Brookings Institution.
Kashkari, as an adviser to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, was a key architect of the Bush administration’s effort to deal with the 2008 financial crisis. He served as the first head of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout program that Congress created at the urging of the Bush administration…

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The Big Uh-Oh: Global economy shaky and cavalry may not come
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight years after the financial crisis, the world is coming to grips with an unpleasant realization: serious weaknesses still plague the global economy, and emergency help may not be on the way.
Sinking stock prices, flat inflation, and the bizarre phenomenon of negative interest rates have coupled with a downturn in emerging markets to raise worries that the economy is being stalked by threats that central banks may struggle to cope with. Meanwhile, commercial banks are again a source of concern, especially in Europe.
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Russia, Saudis tentatively offer to freeze oil output levels
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Oil powerhouses Russia and Saudi Arabia joined Qatar and Venezuela in pledging Tuesday to cap their crude output if other producers do the same, aiming to halt a slide that has pushed oil prices to their lowest point in more than a decade.
The decision followed an unexpected closed-door meeting involving the four countries in the Qatari capital, Doha, and reflects growing concern among big producers about the effects the slump poses to their domestic economies…

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