http://assetinternational.com/ASMW60http://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=1052&blogid=226A weaker Euro helps German exports just as a weaker dollar helps U. S. exports. Germany is gaining far more from the weaker Euro than it is paying to bail-out Greece.ROBERT X. CRINGELYSun, 16 May 2010 11:51:27 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=1045&blogid=226This study proves not just that western governments can make significant budget sacrifices, it shows that they will make such sacrifices -- because they must -- again and again.ROBERT X. CRINGELYFri, 14 May 2010 01:39:22 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=965&blogid=226Yesterday stands as a metaphor for the market as a whole in the last decade, when clever substitutes for smart and size trumps sense. When too big to fail means too big to even care, something has to give.ROBERT X. CRINGELYFri, 07 May 2010 11:14:10 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=902&blogid=226Bond ratings should be like getting your home inspected in California: the inspector (the rating agency) should be liable for his or her mistakes.ROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 27 Apr 2010 00:47:32 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=882&blogid=226Hedging risk is great in theory but often hard to do well, as the Great Recession clearly shows.  Goldman Sachs, in fact, may have hedged itself all the way out of business.  Really.ROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 20 Apr 2010 12:04:24 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=876&blogid=226Trust through transparency is a completely different creature based on the novel idea that people say what they mean, do what they say they will, and make things that work because you can see how they work inside. Those workings are transparent, get it?ROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 19 Apr 2010 09:51:30 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=837&blogid=226Seventy percent correct, while it may sound good, actually isn't good at all, as Simonyi proved. Seventy percent is terrible. What's amazing is that Greenspan still doesn't seem to understand this today.ROBERT X. CRINGELYWed, 07 Apr 2010 16:54:39 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=834&blogid=226Cities come and cities go and Detroit is in the process of going, replaced perhaps by Dearborn, home of Ford Motor Company, which still makes money. Dearborn has more space than squalor, a good tax base, and an educated population. Dearborn is the anti-Detroit to its sister city.ROBERT X. CRINGELYWed, 07 Apr 2010 10:22:41 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=785&blogid=226Whatever Bernanke, Dodd, Geithner, and Obama finally do to reform the current U. S. financial system may matter less to our future prosperity than the painful lessons we’ve been learning as a people. It’s us, not them.ROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 22 Mar 2010 23:39:44 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=780&blogid=226It was all about fooling the Saudis and the Chinese, then, and the American people. It is doubtful that M3 was killed to deliberately set the stage for the Great Recession. But that’s what happened.ROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 22 Mar 2010 13:14:25 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=778&blogid=226By dropping M3 the Bush Administration was deliberately blinding both itself and the markets -- poking out eyes apparently to keep the good times rolling for a few months longer.ROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 22 Mar 2010 11:23:50 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=765&blogid=226The range of savviness among these major banks hasn’t been much.  If the distance form dumbest to smartest is only 2.0, as it appears to be, then God help us all.ROBERT X. CRINGELYWed, 17 Mar 2010 12:26:48 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=700&blogid=226There are likely to be some technological effects coming along that will change almost everything we worry about today. For example, what would be the impact on Social Security, Medicare, and U. S. federal entitlements (and the national debt as a consequences) if we all lived essentially forever?ROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 08 Mar 2010 10:29:39 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=692&blogid=226Recessions aren’t supposed to be subjective things.  They come down to GDP growth or the lack of it.  If GDP growth is negative, we are technically in a recession.  If GDP growth is positive, we are not in a recession.  Right now, technically, we are not in a recession.  But practically we are still in a recession.ROBERT X. CRINGELYThu, 04 Mar 2010 18:00:49 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=671&blogid=226According to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession wasn’t the result of a bursting housing bubble at all but rather a bank panic in the long tradition of American bank panics. Yes, subprime mortgage securitization was a mess -- a house of cards probably doomed to fall -- but subprime by itself simply wasn’t big enough to put the entire financial system at risk. That required a failure of the Renew Sale and Repurchase (REPO) market for collateralized securities that over the last 30 years had quietly come to backstop global financeROBERT X. CRINGELYThu, 25 Feb 2010 12:15:02 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=668&blogid=226If Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein were the boss of a Las Vegas casino instead of a New York investment bank, his firm’s front-running and derivative trading against customers would have been a class B felony. Instead of $9 million in Goldman shares, his bonus this year would have been 1-6 years in prison and a minimum $10,000 fine on each count, of which there were presumably thousands.ROBERT X. CRINGELYWed, 24 Feb 2010 17:29:11 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=661&blogid=226 The Credit Suisse Risk Appetite Index is headed down again toward Panicsville even before we’ve left for sure the Great Recession. America has an employment crisis atop a housing crisis. Government stimulus is ending before it has done enough good, yet government seems to have no new ideas. And meanwhile the moneyROBERT X. CRINGELYWed, 17 Feb 2010 04:20:08 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=660&blogid=226 I read The Black Swan in 2007 when it came out, and found it very intriguing. It is a mixture of autobiographical anecdote and sharp statistical analysis. I used the idea as part of a speech at Harvard, and the audience, at the question time, ignored most of my talk and concentrated on my discussion of Black Swans.ADAM SMITHTue, 09 Feb 2010 14:34:39 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=659&blogid=226 The founder of every new business hopes that what he or she creates will eventually become not just a business, but an industry. When I started in the personal computer business in 1977 it wasn’t an industry; global sales were probably under $30 million not just for Apple, where I worked, but for all the little PC ROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 09 Feb 2010 14:08:59 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=658&blogid=226 Last time I wrote about the importance to the U.S. economy of technology startups -- an importance that is generally misunderstood by government.  More on that below.  But first let’s take a look at how venture capital has failed America. There was a time in Silicon Valley when starting a company meant buildiROBERT X. CRINGELYThu, 04 Feb 2010 14:39:32 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=657&blogid=226 Small companies create jobs in America. According to a recent study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, companies less than five years old generated nearly two-thirds of the new jobs created in the U. S. in 2007. But what’s even more important is that without these startups more jobs would be lost than createdROBERT X. CRINGELYFri, 29 Jan 2010 11:17:13 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=656&blogid=226 As my buddy Adam Smith points out, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker is suddenly back in the news providing gravitas and moral outrage to support proposed new restrictions on how banks can trade for their own accounts. Nobody was listening to Volcker, Adam tells us in Volcker’s own words, and then suddenly the WhROBERT X. CRINGELYMon, 25 Jan 2010 10:30:59 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=655&blogid=226 A couple of weeks ago, I saw Paul Volcker on the street, with his secretary and close friend, Anka. (Possible conflict of interest in this story: Volcker was on the Advisory Board of Adam Smith Global Television. He didn't advise much, and it was good of him to let his name be used on the stationery. Mostly, AADAM SMITHSun, 24 Jan 2010 15:05:18 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=654&blogid=226 It’s a shame that thoroughbred horse racing is in decline as a sport because there are so many good lessons to be learned at the track. But high real estate costs and declining attendance of an aging fan base suggest that we’d better learn those lessons as quickly as we can, so here’s the first. Any old handicapperROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 19 Jan 2010 12:05:16 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=653&blogid=226 The New Yorker issue of January 18 is worth reading just for six paragraphs. That is, for the investment minded. The magazine is consistently interesting in many areas, but this issue has an article called "The Sure Thing," on risk and the perception of risk. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote "The Tipping Point,"ROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 19 Jan 2010 12:03:03 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=651&blogid=226 This is my first post explicitly for Adamsmithsmoneyworld.com, so let me introduce myself. I’m Bob Cringely, Adam Smith’s sidekick. My background is in technology. I am Stanford to Adam’s Harvard and Oxford. I’ve been a blogger since 1997 over at cringely.com where I have more than 300,000 weekly readers. But they ROBERT X. CRINGELYFri, 15 Jan 2010 14:22:44 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=650&blogid=226 " All politics is local,” said Tip O’Neill, and it is true. Even politicians on the national stage are dependent on local or regional voters to return them to office. And so despite the national or international rhetoric, local values and concerns always have to be met in the end, something we are likely to see ahROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 12 Jan 2010 12:24:15 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=649&blogid=226 Paul, When I was at your house on Sunday, you said the stimulus was not going to be enough, and faulted Bernanke for not backing additional stimulus. But additional stimulus would have to be voted by the Congress. And all the political folk say there is “no political will” for more stimulus. Furthermore I menADAM SMITHTue, 12 Jan 2010 12:23:39 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=648&blogid=226 Sometimes, only sometimes, the financial community comes up with an apt metaphor. One that struck me recently from a Wall Street Journal conference on lessons learned from the Great Crisis of 2008 is that large banks should have “Living Wills.” If you don’t personally have a Living Will, you should probably thinADAM SMITHTue, 12 Jan 2010 12:23:04 GMThttp://assetinternational.com/ASMW/PostDetail.aspx?id=647&blogid=226 Time made a mistake when it announced this week that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke should be its Person of the Year . But if Bernanke was a mistake, who should be Person of the Year ? I nominate Grandma — your Grandma, my Grandma, every Grandma — because Grandmothers as a group are doing a better job ROBERT X. CRINGELYTue, 12 Jan 2010 12:22:07 GMT