Warren Buffett voted with his pocketbook this past week, investing $26 billion to purchase Burlington Northern Santa Fe. It is one of America’s oldest railroad networks and the backbone that helped build the country. 

The Oracle of Omaha - as Buffett is fondly referred to due to his Mid-Western roots in Nebraska - is also big on animal instinct.  The concept is simple: we all need to be aware to both survive and smell opportunity when it beckons.

In that spirit, Buffett is probably letting economists debate the merits of whether this is a V shaped recovery, a sharp downturn and straight line back to growth or a recovery that reflects a W, where the economy recovers, dips and bounces up and down for a few years. 

Maybe I am a child of the 1960s, but my fond recollection of those letters has more to do with the VW Beatle that headed to the beaches of California, not illustrations to guide economics.

In October, my three visits to the Middle East, which included Dubai, Qatar and Abu Dhabi during the Formula One festivities and the launch of our regional hub in the UAE capital, led me to put aside traditional economic research. 

Instead, I relied entirely on animal instincts and, going back to my Greek roots, I used the agora to get the latest reading of what was happening.  Bankers confidently said that the road show to raise $6.5 billion in Dubai would be well received.  The first portion of that offering was three times oversubscribed.

Businessmen noted that they felt the worst was over in the local property market and that foreign buyers had started to show interest again.  Colliers International released figures this week indicating that prices rose 7 percent in the third quarter, although they are down 47 percent on the year.  Again, the figure does point to a bottom being reached.

In Qatar, despite the bottom following out of the natural gas market (trading one-fourth the equivalent of crude prices right now), the economy is hardly suffering amid the “recession” as growth has reached 8.5 percent this year.  The greatest challenge is completing projects on time and allowing the market to catch up with all the construction.   

Finally, the Formula One race looks to be only a starting point for Abu Dhabi. I was surprised enough at the $40 billion officially spent to build up Yas Island and the infrastructure around it to host the circuit.  According to Economy Minister Sultan bin Saeed al Mansouri that is only the beginning.

He says that the Yas Marina complex will be a blueprint for future developments with an eventual commitment of $1 trillion dollars - for roads, power plants and rail links.  That is an eye-popping number that others within the government were, shall we say, shy to commit to, but it does give a sense of how the old economy will help build the new one and how the future won’t be measured by a V or a W in the region.

LONDON, England - When it comes to the number three, there are two conflicting philosophies: The first says everything comes in threes, the second says third time lucky (or unlucky.) This weekend the G-20 leaders have been meeting for their third meeting in a year.

G-20 leaders are all smiles, but for how much longer will the unity last.

For an organization that had never met before at heads of state or government level, this is something of an achievement. But then rarely have they had to ride to the rescue of the global economy that was about to collapse.

Twice before when they met, they agreed to halt the blame game of how we got into this mess. They worked together to get us out of it. This was no mean feat since it involves countries from communist China to capitalist America and all shades of political persuasion in-between. Their ability to coordinate and cooperate has been noted time and again as one of the great advances in summitry.

In Washington last October, they ignored the fact President George W. Bush would be out of office within months and built a plan, calling it "The Washington Action Plan." By the London meeting at the beginning of this year, trillions of dollars had been spent and the leaders met to coordinate how their posh-sounding plan was performing. They tinkered and tweaked and gave some more money to the IMF and carried on cooperating. They didn’t have any other choice. Now, with Asia decoupled from U.S. and European growth, what next?

Everyone agrees it is too soon to take away the stimulus that is keeping developed economies afloat. Everyone agrees that they will have to coordinate their exit strategies when that time arrives. Oh yes, they even agree banks need to have some strict reform of the rules (and, yes, that includes big bad bonuses.) This is all done on the basis that "we are not letting this happen again."

But the issue is whether they can keep agreeing. France, for instance, is keener on stricter regulatory reform than, say, the UK. Britain has much to lose if Europe’s financial headquarters, the City of London, becomes over-regulated. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told me that restricting bankers’ bonuses was a symbolic way of proving no more business as usual. Only by imposing discipline and regulatory systems could we reign in the financial world, she said. Such a view of course, is very much at odds with what might be expressed in Washington.

The G-20 now finds itself rather like a group of passengers who have just been rescued from a sinking ocean liner. When facing disaster, all classes from captain’s table to steerage, share laughter, friendship and love. Now as the good will of rescue starts to disappear, old rivalries resurface and political ideologies put to one side are restored.

Which brings me back to my first point. Can the G-20 hold it together for a third time? They probably will, simply because this crisis is not over yet. Longer term, as the G-20 presidency passes from the UK to South Korea, the axis of power shifts. Well, I have more doubts.

Crises breed cooperation. Recovery may well breed resentment. Even if the third summit works, don’t bank on success for the fourth and beyond.

LONDON, England - Wherever you live, there’s always a local oddity or two: uniquely strange driving habits on the roads, maybe, or fast-selling products whose actual use is obscure. Here in England, it’s the strange phenomenon of the fiver famine.

The fiver, let me explain, is our smallest banknote, both in size and value: the five pound note. You would have thought they’d be common – not exactly two-a-penny, but fairly easy to find.

Er … no. The fiver is a rare bird which only occasionally flits across one’s path in its gray-green plumage, whereas its plumper companion, the £10 note or tenner, a classic brown job, flies out of cash dispensers with great regularity.

And here’s the second oddity: when your patience pays off and you do track the rare fiver bird down, it’s usually in a sorry bedraggled state.

People here were quick to embrace credit cards and then debit cards, and the old-fashioned cheque is still around in the background, no doubt still recovering from the excitement of its 350th birthday party earlier this year.

But the shortage of handy fivers is a nuisance for people who are forced to use a lot of cash, like market traders and taxi drivers. I’m not saying they’d change a tenner for a fiver just to make life more convenient, but they dislike having to give their customers a clunking great pile of our weighty little £1 coins rather than a handy banknote.

Talk to the Bank of England or the Payments Council, which monitors all kinds of payment on behalf of retailers, and they look in all directions and usher you into a private room before revealing a dirty secret about us Brits: we abuse our banknotes.

I’m serious. Those big denominations get treated with respect, of course: the average £50 notes can look forward to a decade of pampered life, lovingly tucked into fat wallets or squirreled carefully away in safes. By contrast, a tenner might last only a year or two, while the unfortunate fiver is treated as small change and handled accordingly: scrumpled up into a ball, stuffed into pockets next to bunches of keys, put through the washing machine, and generally viewed with scant respect.

So as fast as the Bank of England issues nice fresh notes, they’re soon transformed into limp dog-eared little rags that are simply not crisp enough to put through the machinery that counts banknotes. That means they have to be weeded out, and banks generally prefer to save themselves the trouble and cost involved.

That means fivers aren’t available from cash dispensers (with exceptions; I was intrigued to be issued with £5 notes when withdrawing money on a recent visit to Liverpool). Given that nearly two-thirds of the cash withdrawn in the UK comes out of those holes in the wall, the result is a shortage.

Just to tighten the vicious circle, retailers generally don’t even bother to bank the fivers they accumulate. So even if the banks could put them into cash dispensers, they’d be short of them anyway.

So while it’s tempting to think that this is all down to the recession here and our wanting to spend less and take out smaller denomination banknotes, it’s really all about printing more of the kind of money we like to use most.

Now the retail banks and the Bank of England are working together to address that. For a couple of months now they have been running a pilot centred on Central and Southwest England.

It’s too early to say whether this will mean more fivers everywhere; I personally fear a lot of banknote printing machines will burn out as the Bank of England tries to cope with the fiver famine and the need to pump cash into the financial system.

For the past 12 years, some 50 of Europe’s top corporate leaders have been under special surveillance.

Wendelin Wiedeking's time at the head of Porsche has come to an end.

This has nothing to do with this week’s revelation that Frankfurt state prosecutors are deciding whether to bring criminal charges as they investigate allegations of illegal tactics by private detectives on contract to Deutsche Bank – though that mighty bank’s former CEO and Chairman, Rolf Breuer, is among the names being watched.

In 1997 and 1998 I was part of a CNN team that made some 50 programmes about individual company bosses in a series called “Pinnacle Europe.” We spent at least a day with each one, talking to them about how they’d got to the top, what they’d done for their companies, how they planned to stay ahead and what they did outside the office.

The series producer, Jeff Nathenson, and I still regularly exchange banter about what has happened to each of the CEOs we profiled; he maintains there is a “curse of Pinnacle” that gradually topples them, one by one. So we continue our casual surveillance of all 50 – by the boringly legal method of watching the headlines, I should add.

The fact is, though, that many are now ex-bosses. Many crashed and burned; they fell victim to boardroom knife attacks and are spending more time with their families. Some, like Jorma Ollila of Nokia, completed their distinguished careers and moved on to even higher things. Others sold their companies.

A handful have survived. Sir Richard Branson is still running Virgin in his unique way and is even wealthier than he was in 1997; Daniel Vasella is still atop the Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis; and Klaus Schwab is still head of the World Economic Forum.

But today one name did fall victim to Jeff Nathenson’s putative “curse of Pinnacle.” Germany woke up this morning to learn that one of its corporate titans, Wendelin Wiedeking, had been ousted as boss of Porsche, the role in which I had interviewed him for our CNN profile early in 1998, and which he had held for a very successful five years before that. With Wiedeking and his impressive collection of model cars evicted from the Porsche headquarters, talks are now underway to bring about a merger of the sports car maker and Volkswagen.

Dr Wiedeking had sought exactly the same thing, but in a different format. Having rescued Porsche from the weak dollar of the early 1990s (US sales are crucial to the company), he launched new models, shifted some production out of Germany and made the Stuttgart-based icon one of the jewels of its sector: prestigious and profitable.

Money piled up at the bank – and in the CEO’s personal wallet. His contract awarded him 0.9% of Porsche’s pre-tax earnings, a bonus reported at some 77 million euros in 2007-08. Confident in his ability to run any car company, even Europe’s largest, Wiedeking set his sights on a takeover of Volkswagen.

That proved his undoing. Like the Icarus of myth, this high-flier had ventured too close to the sun. True, Porsche amassed more than half of VW’s shares and had options on a further 20 percent. But it had also run up $14.2 billion in debt, and as the credit crunch bore down on big corporate borrowers, that burden crushed the life out of his ambitions.

Family politics also played a part. Porsche and Volkswagen have always been intertwined. Before World War II, Ferdinand Porsche designed the original Volkswagen or “People’s Car” – the evergreen Beetle. When the War was over he built his first Porsche model in a shed up an Austrian mountain, shifting production to Stuttgart when his sports cars started selling in big numbers.

Ferdinand Porsche’s descendants still control the company he founded – but one of his grandsons is the redoubtable Ferdinand Piëch, the Austrian former Volkswagen CEO, now its chairman. Wiedeking’s designs on VW split the extended family, and made an enemy of Piëch, a man not to be crossed.

History will shake its head at the ill-fated ambitions of Wendelin Wiedeking, while admiring the way he rescued Porsche, and that neat clause in his contract which rewarded him so handsomely for genuine, measurable success.

But why am I writing him off? He still has some interesting directorships – Novartis, for example. He has no need of money, even giving half his $70 million pay-off to charity, but driven people like that don’t just retire to the golf course. They waste no time in passing out their telephone numbers to the head-hunters.

There aren’t that many executives who can say they’ve rescued a major car company once before and left it wonderfully profitable, and these days those qualifications are badly needed. Like, who’s going to run Opel once it’s been sold off by GM?

NEW YORK – Disgraced financier Bernie Madoff stood up in court in New York on Monday and told some of his victims that "I live in a tormented state for all the pain and suffering I created."

Miriam Siegman’s life has been turned upside down by Madoff’s crimes.

Facing them head on, he said he was sorry - but his words rang hollow.

Speaking to us just after the sentence was handed down, many victims said if Madoff was truly sorry he would have stopped years ago and owned up to his mistakes instead of living a life of luxury.

Others felt bitter that Madoff has not told prosecutors who else was involved and where any remaining money might be hidden.

Victims, who attended a rally after the hearing, are vowing to fight on.

But many acknowledge they will never recoup their life's savings.

One woman, Miriam Siegman teared up as she told how she now lives on food stamps.

She admitted she turned and walked out of the court room when Madoff gave his statement. It was simply too little, too late.

The 150 year sentence Madoff received was the maximum allowed and was based on several factors including the number of victims, the amount of money involved and the damage caused by his acts.

In delivering the sentence the judge said he understood the ruling was largely symbolic since, at age 71, anything over 15 years would likely mean life in jail for Madoff.

But Judge Denny Chin said he wanted to send a strong message to those who would think about perpetrating similar crimes.

This is by far one of the harshest sentences ever handed down for white collar crime in the U.S., but Madoff's crime was unprecedented and has badly damaged investor confidence.

What do you think? Did Madoff get what he deserved or is 150 years overkill? Did he act alone or will the government be successful in charging any accomplices? And will the harsh punishment deter others?

NEW YORK - “I’m at a point in my life where I was not opening envelopes ... I was not looking at stuff and I need to make a decision to be active in my life.”

Sound familiar? It did to me. The quote is from a woman attending a seminar I sat in on as part of our Road to Recovery coverage.

Each week about 30 women gather to participate in a class that is designed to help them regain control of their financial lives. It is a bit like weight watchers, but in this case they are counting coins, not calories.

As I listened to their stories, I felt an immediate connection. I also have a pile of statements about my retirement funds that I have been too busy – and secretly too stressed – to look at!

It turns out that many of us are carrying around the dirty secret that we are not nearly as informed about our finances as we should ... or certainly could be.

Gallia Icon is out to change that. A personal finance advisor, she and her co-instructor M.P. Dunleavy started these weekly money classes to help give women a basic education in personal finance.

The courses, which last for 12 weeks, are set-up like a support group – complete with weekly check-ins. The women set concrete goals at the start of the course and then give updates each week on the progress they are making.

The dozen or so ladies we visited came from very different backgrounds but they had one thing in common: For too long they had let other people make decisions about their money.

"Women, in particular, do not make money a priority and tend to let partners handle much of the responsibility. If they are taking care of the household finances it is usually rushed at 10 p.m. at night after they are done working and have put the kids down for the night," says Gichon.

The classes cover everything from understanding mutual funds to saving strategies to wills and life insurance. In the sessions no question is off limits. Participants say the female-only format helps keep the conversation free and open.

I went in not knowing what to expect, but I left inspired. After putting up pretenses for years, these women were ready to bare all. They asked detailed questions and offered each other support and information.

After just a couple of classes, many had already made big changes. One woman had started reviewing her retirement program at work and making changes to her fund allocation. Another had paid down debt and was ready to invest for the first time.

And – my favorite – had moved all her information online and was getting ready to sack her current adviser whom she felt had always talked down to her!

In this tough economy it is easy to ignore this part of life and hope the problems just go away, but they rarely do. These women show that with a little instruction and the support of your peers you can regain control and banish that nagging voice that has been telling you could do better when it comes to your money.

NEW YORK - General Motors announced Wednesday that investors who had lent the company money over the years, through purchases of bonds, overwhelmingly rejected the company's offer to swap out that debt for stock.

It now seems certain the company is headed toward a bankruptcy filing.

Whatever the outcome, this event will surely be a critical turning point for the U.S. economy.

Analysts say if the bankruptcy is quick and surgical it could help give another boost to fragile confidence.

But, if the long list of creditors engage in a drawn out legal battle it raises the risk that GM may not survive at all.

It reminds me of a scene from a racing movie where there is a horrendous crash on the track and all the drivers in the back are racing for this big cloud of smoke. Most hit the brakes. But the leading man grips the wheel and hits the gas.

The driver is either going to crash into another vehicle in that smoke or avoid the crowd and come out in the lead. In Hollywood the hero comes out in the lead, having conquered both the competition and his fear.

But this is real life and things tend to be messier in real life.

The automotive industry is not as central as it once was, but its economic footprint extends to suppliers, dealers, restaurants and entire towns. Industry experts say GM only has about 3 or 4 weeks to prove it can emerge from bankruptcy quickly.

Many believe GM is too big and too complicated to achieve that.

But Chrysler’s journey through bankruptcy has defied the skeptics. The troubled company looks set to emerge from Chapter 11 next week. With the government’s heavy hand in the game, GM could also surprise.

What do you think? Will GM be able to come out stronger or is this the end of the road? Any optimists buying a GM car right now?

NEW YORK - It was too good to be true and in our hearts we knew it.

A slew of U.S. earnings reveal the extent of the economic gloom.

In early March stocks embarked on an explosive six week rally that seemed to signal the global crisis was ending.

Oh, there were plenty who warned that it was just a bear market bounce. But it was much more comforting to think the aggressive action taken by policymakers around the world laid the seeds for a speedy recovery.

This week reality hit.

As hundreds of U.S. companies report earnings, it is clear we are far from being out of the woods.

The American consumer is still in a world of pain.

Monday, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis warned that credit was bad and getting worse. More and more consumers are falling behind on credit cards and loans.

Tuesday, Delta warned it expects more empty seats in the second quarter as consumers cut back on flying.

And it is not just vacations that are put off. Merck is seeing lower sales on many of its major drugs. Caterpillar, the company that makes the diggers and tractors that build new homes, sees no recovery in profits or sales.

And we aren't even half way through the week!

Trader Yra Harris of Praxis Group in Chicago told me this morning: "I can't listen to this concept anymore of green shoots. It's nonsense.

"You still have to clear out this issue of the solvency or insolvency of financial institutions because that what the real health of the market is dependent upon."

The U.S. government is going to try to do that when it releases the results of its bank stress tests on May 4.

In theory that should clear the air, but I am hearing a huge amount of skepticism already and we don't even know the details of what the tests consist of.

And there is something else I'm worried about. In order to be credible these tests will have to identify losers. What happens when they do, will be unsettling to say the least.

The bears were in hibernation in March, but they are awake now. And they smell a trading opportunity.

NEW YORK - This week Ben Bernanke threw out the central bank rule book.

Bernanke has been picking up new nicknames as he battles the financial crisis.

First he did a sit-down interview for a major media outlet that aired just two days before a policy meeting, in violation of the traditional black-out period.

He then shocked markets by announcing the Fed would start buying billions in long-term treasury bonds, as well as billions more in mortgage-backed debt and agency bonds.

The response has been dramatic. Mortgage rates dipped below 5 percent Thursday.

Almost everyone I know is calling to try and refinance. Officials hope new home buyers will also move off the sideline and start to chip away at the inventory of unsold homes.

Bernanke is following through on his promise to use every tool the Fed has to help fight this global crisis.

In cartoons he has gone from being depicted as Helicopter Ben, willing to throw money into the economy, to Bomber Ben ... dropping crates full of cash across the U.S. economy.

Most traders and analysts are applauding Ben's bold action. Some, however, do worry the solution will just spawn new problems, especially rising inflation.

I'm sure Bernanke is worried about that too, but in triage you do what you can to save the patient and worry about everything else later.

I don't know if he has the right answer, but for now I am willing to put my trust in Ben.

What about you? Do you think the Fed chairman is taking the right approach or is he just laying the ground work for another bubble?

NEW YORK– Bernard Madoff will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, but that is little comfort to the thousands of investors who lost their life savings because of his actions.

Madoff arrives at court Thursday.

After he entered his guilty plea, Madoff addressed the court and said he was deeply sorry and ashamed.

Sorry ... Sorry? This was not a one-time mistake, but a multi-billion dollar fraud carried out over decades. He ripped off friends, neighbors, charities and pensioners.

It seems incredible that he asks anyone to believe he has a conscience.

At the end of the hearing Madoff was ordered to go directly to jail while he waits for his official sentencing, scheduled for June 16.

Government prosecutors will no doubt declare victory, but victims are angry there was not a trial.

Richard Friedman, who lost $4 million in savings, told CNN: "It's not enough just to say, 'OK, I'm guilty, put me away.'

"What about all the other people involved? What about his family? I want to know. What about the money? I don't think there's $50 billion out there. I think a lot of it is with the IRS, but whatever money he had, I think that that should come out. Where is that money?"

Legal experts say we may never know where the money went.

Right now investigators have found just under $1 billion, a fraction of the $60 billion that some estimate he swindled.

The other unanswered question that I struggle with is: Why?

When people commit a crime it helps to understand the motive. Why did this respectable and, by all measures, successful man do this?

Why didn't he turn himself in earlier? He said in his opening statement he always knew what he was doing was criminal and that he would be eventually be caught.

How could he have ruined so many lives? One of his victims said simply, "He is evil."

I think it may have more to do with greed. Yes, at the age of 70 he now faces jail time, but for the last 20 years he has lived a life of extreme luxury.

If he is the only one to serve time for this ... has justice really been served?