He is not Happy

Here is a pic taken with my i-phone in South Africa in Lion Sands. I love the safari there is no regulator/compliance there. You have to be smart or die. No one will bailout you.
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Equal opportunities is a must , equal results is communism.

Big Get Bigger

S&P and DAX just made all time highs in the last 2 days. These are the only 2 Country indexs that are at the all time highs. Germany & USA are the biggest winers from the Globalization game. Big get Bigger is the name of the game. And the biggest companies in each sector many times ate in Germany & USA.


Financial Times economics editor Chris Giles says French economist Thomas Piketty's best-selling "Capitalism in the 21st Century," about rising inequality in the West, contains serious errors that undermine his conclusion that wealth distributions are widening.



I don't intent to check Mr Piketty numbers but i think it's obvious to say that capitalism is a system where the winner takes all. More than capitalism Globalization makes the winner win big. I haven't read the book but it's obvious that when you own the stock of a company and that company does well you make millions of times more money than your employees! That is the system.

Should we twist things to prevent the inequality. Of course not, everybody can be a boss and that possibility we should guarantee. Equal opportunities is a must , equal results is communism.
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The cost of doing one digital copy of a book is the same of doing 1 million copies!

From the FT

Ford chief Alan Mulally warns on European overcapacity

By Henry Foy, Motor Industry Correspondent

Alan Mulally, chief executive of Ford, has warned that European carmakers need to cut back further the numbers of cars they can build as excess capacity on the continent remains at dangerous levels.

Idle production lines and underproductive factories have plunged almost all of Europe’s major carmakers into billion-dollar losses in recent years after annual sales on the continent fell by about 4m cars between 2007 and 2013.

Why people should invest if there is already overcapacity in many industries? The cost os setting up a production line is huge but to produce more 10,000 cars it's easy.

The cost of doing one digital copy of a book is the same of doing 1 million copies! This is very deflationary.

I think automation and digitization are very deflationary and very economic people wise. Unemployment is not going down soon. 
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A Good day of Work in NY


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Clean people are taller!

Well if you want your kid to be taller than you, to beat the genes that he inherited he must avoid infection & diseases until he reach the end of puberty.

From the Atlantic

"If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives." ........

We eat food to keep our inner engines running. Our bodies then use those calories to lengthen our bones and multiply our cells until we reach the end of puberty. But when we’re ravaged by infections or deprived of nutrients, growth takes a back seat to keeping the heart and organs functioning. If we’re struck by too many diseases and deficiencies, we stop short (literally) of the height we might have achieved.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/how-we-get-tall/361881/
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Reputation + No surprises = Big Profits

Nothing new here, if you can build a reputation people with do business with you without extensive due diligence & comparison with the competition. If you have a good marketing person build a reputation and don't disappoint the customer. 
A good reputation & a good execution without surprises is enough to make a lot of money.
To build a good reputation is the difficult part. 


Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

Peter Drucker 


The ‘power’ of brands has grown substantially since the recession, that is, more consumers are purchasing solely based on the brand,” says Mr Walshe. “There really is something different about this top 100.”
Mr Walshe points out that those joining the list for the first time – such as Twitter and PayPal – have more than two-and-a-half times the ‘brand power’ of an average company. “Newcomers are really playing the branding game,” he says.
“One of the themes is that these brands are becoming part of our lives,” says Elspeth Cheung, head of BrandZ valuation at Millward Brown Optimor. “The other big theme is globalisation as western brands are coming back this year.”
Despite the new entrants, the names at the top are familiar. Technology companies dominate the top 10, although their order in terms of brand value has shifted.
Google has bounced back as the most valuable global brand, with a brand value of $159bn, up 40 per cent since 2013. Google held the number one slot from 2007 until 2010, but fell to second or third place in the years since 2010.
Apple, in turn, has slipped down to second place. Its brand value of $148bn has fallen by a fifth over the year, while the brand value of the technology sector as a whole has grown by 16 per cent. “Different brands have different strengths,” says Ms Cheung. “Google performs particularly highly on being meaningful to consumers.”
She argues that the more powerful a brand a company has, the greater a premium it can charge for the same product compared with competitors.


From FT
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d8ea4e6e-da79-11e3-a448-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32Qu3tbAR


More on the same subject

http://thoughtmeme.blogspot.pt/2013/10/put-marketing-people-in-charge.html


http://thoughtmeme.blogspot.pt/2013/10/something-unique.html
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Everybody is better off

Just came from 1 week of meetings in NY with Hedge Funds

some impressions

America is Cheaper than Europe
Americans work much more than we do
Take less holidays
Roads are a mess with many potholes
Traffic is a mess
Garbage is at the open in the streets to be picked up later
In many meetings people order sandwich & salads. The size of the servings is huge. Enough for 15 people in Europe.
Everything is old but works fine

I came across this yesterday from WSJ,  By NEIL GILBERT

When households are then divided into five equal income groups, the data reveal that average disposable household income has increased across all groups since 1979. The average household income grew by 40% for the middle quintile and increased by 49% for the bottom quintile...............

But consider everyone else on the planet: The American middle class boasts the fourth-highest disposable household income in the world. The U.S. finishes behind only Luxembourg (a country of 500,000 people), oil-rich Norway, and Switzerland, which stayed out of both World Wars and imposes the strictest immigration laws on the continent. The average U.S. family has 38% more disposable income than a family in Italy, 25% more than a family in France and 20% more than a household in Germany, when adjusted for purchasing power, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Inequality in the U.S. is not a struggle between the "haves" and the "have-nots," but a social friction between those who have a lot and others who have more.
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