Top Stories for the Week at VIN

This is a stock report (13 pages, PDF format) I recently wrote on USG.

The Wintergreen Fund’s David Winters will tell us why he continues to emphasize international investing. And Jim Grant, the Editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer will pull no punches about the outlook for the credit markets in 2008.

Long post on Berkshire Hathaway’s “business model” – how it grows and why the model works even if Buffett isn’t at the helm.

Marty Whitman and Al Zucaro, stock pickers with a knack for buying low, may be dripping in sweat after they snapped up U.S. mortgage insurers that shed more than 40 percent of their value in the past three months.

Does the upcoming break up of Altria represent any value for shareholders?

Barron’s thinks Loews is selling below net current asset value and shares could benefit nicely form a spinoff of their Lorillard tobacco unit.

As usual, there are multitudes of opinions concerning the stock market, and if you focus only on your data and reasoning, you will be right more often than you are wrong.

In typical fashion, Warren Buffett made some big acquisitions last week, and he made them quickly. The ever-patient Buffett can wait years to do a deal, but when he finds something he likes, he needs only days, sometimes just minutes, to wrap things up. This past week was no exception.

I don’t know many people who’d be happy to get a phone call from the IRS. I did not think I’d count myself as one either. But right after I wrote above article about refund anticipation loans (RAL), I got a return call from the IRS’s office of Procedure and Administration, the entity that released the ‘Advance notice of proposed rulemaking’.

Warren Buffett has added over 500,000 shares in 4 transactions