I just found out that Martti Ahtisaari, the father of my dear friend Marko Ahtisaari has won the Nobel Peace Prize. In times like this when global recession is almost a certainty men lke Martti Ahtisaari, who are few and hard to come by, will be in more demand than ever. Last time we had a global recession we ended up in WWII. Poverty makes people compete harder and sometimes war is simply seen as competition via other means. And it is then that a man with the incredible track record as a pacifist as former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari is needed more than ever. Congratulations!

And btw, he can smile and relate well to people, but this is the only picture I could find sorry. Ok now I have a better picture here from Marko and Lisa´s wedding. Thanks Rodrigo!

Both Danny Rimer of Index Ventures and Mike Moritz of Sequoia are my partners in Fon. At the same time I am an investor in Danny Rimer´s fund. What I would do if I was a top tech VC? (I consider Mike Moritz the top tech VC in USA and Danny Rimer the top tech VC in Europe). I would buy stocks of the listed companies who tend to buy the companies I invest in. If that requires consent from my investors I would try to get it. Why? Because Cisco, Nokia, Google, Yahoo, Apple, are all down over 50% and frankly I see a much better opportunity for Danny, Mike and all other VCs to make money in the next 18 months buying shares in these companies than investing in the next start up. Plus these companies need somebody who wants to invest with them now! I would put half of the remaining funds in the top tech stocks and the other half in start ups further rounds. As far as new start ups, I would get out of that business altogether for a while. We know what happened to Bush we chose to go into Iraq before succeeding in Afghanistan. Overstreching is bad.

Before the rescue packages were announced I said in my blog that a gigantic rescue package was needed to restore the economy. In an article in the Huffington Post entitled Robin Hood Bush I also said that these packages could actually make money for the taxpayer as government bought mortgage pools for what the market thought they were worth (very little) and held them for 5 or 10 years and found that the actual money lost on them could be less than what the market thought now. I also shared with my readers that I had bought stock in Citigroup and Bank of America and recommended to sell these shares as I did when the package was announced. My thinking then was that C and BAC were still too risky as people did not really know what the rescue plan, then announced would entail. And frankly people still do not know. And there is tremendous uncertainty. In the end the argument that got packages approved around the world including the ones in Europe this week was the Robin Hood Bush argument extended to the Robin Hood Gordon Brown or the Robin Hood Merkel, or the Robin Hood Zapatero (he likes to think that he is more frequently Robin Hood). First Paulson said that US taxpayers could make money with the $700bn for the bailout aka rescue. Now every Secretary of the Treasury around the world is saying the same thing. Spain for example copied the US model and prepared a $70bn rescue which is probably a bit higher than the US rescue if GDP weighted. And Pedro Solbes assured Spanish taxpayers that the package would not cost them anything. By now I think we have gone too far with these assurances. The truth is that nobody knows if these packages will make or lose money for the taxpayers. We can only hope they will. We can only hope that what is coming in the next 5 years is a recession but not a depression as the markets now believe because current share prices are depression prices. Personally I am still optimistic that the markets are over reacting now. Not in bank shares themselves which I bought and got out as they are the “eye of the hurricane shares. But in companies like Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Nokia, Apple, BT, AT&T, and other global giants. Currently most technology companies are down between 30% and 65%. I started buying some of their shares in prudent quantities this week. As an entrepreneur with the natural optimism of entrepreneurs I just can´t believe what markets are predicting namely a global depression. The case of Dell or Apple are interesting. These are companies with tremendous cash in their balance sheet, growing fast and their shares are down over 50% of their highs. So I don´t know if governments will make money buying cheap bank shares and discounted mortgages. And I don´t know if I will make money buying big tech stocks. But as I said I started buying and will continue to increase my holdings if they go down.

In 2005 I wrote this short article called Is Writing Dead?. In this post I predicted that writing as we know it was going to fade away and that writers were going to evolve into formats that integrates all the possibilities of digital life. This morning my son Tom and I were watching game reviewer Ben Croshaw known as Yahtzee “post” or “video” or whatever his amazing reviews can be called and I remembered that article. Watch this review of Star Wars; the Forced Unleashed by Yahtzee and tell me if it´s not much more entertaining to “watch” a review than to read this review on the Wikipedia.

I was just reading about how Russia lent 4 billion euros to Iceland to shore up its financial system. I was very surprised that the EU or USA had not helped out. The Iceland bailout may be the beginning of bailouts of small countries by larger countries. A global financial crisis, such as the one we are going through right now, shows the benefits of being part of a larger country or belonging to a country association such as the EU. The little country that must be most worried now is Switzerland. With its federal system, how are the small cantons going to be able to help out if one of the Swiss giants needs $100?

What the world now needs is a well functioning global financial institution. An IMF that is not neoliberal but who understands that what works around the world is sociocapitalism not pure capitalism and stands ready to help.

Update: Since I wrote this article I see that something close to what I was proposing is happening.

US please tell every bank depositor that all their savings in US banks regardless of the amount, are insured by the FDIC. Not doing this is creating silent runs on banks. Especially from big customers who can go outside USA. Moreover it is making people move away from banks as depositors to banks as custodians and shifting from deposits to bonds. That´s what I did with all my liquid funds and it only hurts the system. If USA guarantees depositors then people will stop running from bank to bank or leave their funds as deposits and banks will not go bust. More important they will go on lending. And then they will focus on rebuilding the asset side of their balance sheet (which is for all of us, our liabilities).

A year ago my friend Loic Le Meur already had 5000 friends in Facebook and was complaining that he maxed out. Indeed at the Monaco Media Forum he asked Owen who since then left Facebook why wasn´t he able to export his friends into another more “friendly” platform. At that time I considered Loic´s complaints absurd but now I am realizing that there was something to what he was saying. My efforts to filter people in Facebook are failing miserably. First I only accepted people I knew. Then I started accepting people I did not know but with whom I had many friends in common and in this way I got to hundreds of friends. Then a waiting list started accumulating of people wanting to be my friends and yesterday I declared Facebook bankruptcy and accepted everyone who was on that list and got to 1220 friends. But in a few hours I had many more requests. I guess for a blogger Facebook is another self expression platform like Twitter and less a friendship management tool. For many the only difference is that Facebook has helped move the personal stuff away from the work email platform. You manage your work in your x.com account and your private life in Facebook that is like a complex email with all sort of messaging choices. But as I meet with Mark Zuckerberg next Monday for the Madrid Facebook Developer garage that I am hosting for him I plan to bring this up. I know he and the other Facebook managers know FB better than all of us put together but what I am beginning to miss in Facebook is better search. Facebook now for me is like a conference. It´s fun but I want to know where my close friends are and hang out with them. I want more signal and less noise. Facebook tries to give me less noise. But it should try harder.

Considering how the markets are moving today I think it´s time Forbes puts all the net worth data that they have on the richest people in the world and create the moving Forbes 400. I just read that Carlos Slim is down $34bn. There´s probably a lot of other movements around the list. While the accumulated wealth of the wealthiest people in the world is down a lot the relative positions in the list must be changing by the hour. The moving Forbes 400 would be accurate on all the publicly traded securities the richest people have and only a guess on their private stock and real estate, but it would still be a good indication. Other than the cruelty value of the average person that watches that insofar as they still have their job their own net worth is much less volatile than that of the very wealthy I believe this chart would have academic value as it would be a quick look at how all the sectors of the global economy are doing vis a vis each other. As I write this I can imagine that members of the list who have cashed out and gone liquid are rapidly gaining positions over those who are still in the game.

Nouriel Roubini is an academic at New York University, but he is also in the business of doom. Roubini was mostly unknown until he became a star in the States for predicting the current mess we are in. Now, as many others sink, he is world famous and making more money than ever. Not a day goes by without some friend of mine who runs a top bank or top hedge fund sending me another Roubini article about how everyone in Wall Street and in government is an idiot and he is so smart and proves us all wrong.

But while I believe that Nouriel Roubini has been proven right til now as stocks and the economy sink, I also think that when stocks turn around, and turn around they will, it won’t be Nouriel Roubini who will be the one who will let you know. All good things come to an end, but so do bad things. In my view, those who go long next week and stop looking at their portfolio for the next few months until the new administration is in place, will not be sorry they bought two years from now. That’s what I will do at least.

I had been out of stocks for 5 years. I started buying some this summer as I said in this blog. I now have 5% of my net worth in stocks. I will increase that. I dont know what the bottom will be. But if we are not there now we will soon be and as a non trader, but a person who rides long trends, I know I will never get it just right.

What would I buy? Big banks (yes big banks like C, BAC, JPM that are trading at near death), big tech companies like AAPL and Nokia, alternative energy companies like Iberdrola Renovables, big Chinese stocks, some stocks from my native Argentina like TEO (now so depressed). In short a collection of 30 global stocks which are now down 50% or more, but have a bright future after this recession.