In September of 2001 Islamic terrorists murdered 3000 innocent people and caused enormous damage to Wall Street, the heart of the American economy. Seven years later we are seeing great economic damage taking place again. It also happens in the area of the Wall Trade Center. But this time it is not foreign terrorists but the combination of irresponsible US banks and poor US government regulatory oversight who are responsible for tremendous economic losses. And while Americans are still the most creative and hard working people on earth and the US economy is still the biggest in the world, this year the US has gone from being the world´s growth locomotive to slamming the brakes on world´s growth. This is not the emerging markets crisis, this is not the Asian flu, this is not Russia´s default. This is the first time America is sinking the world.

A blog is not a place for extensive analysis. Attention spans on the internet are very short and I am the CEO of a company so I have to be brief. What I am going to do is to outline what could be a more in depth article about the main reasons for the decline of the US as a global power. I will also explain as to why after being away from the dollar during the Bush era and moving back to the dollar this summer I may go back to the euro again. I love America and as an investor I want to trust it. But after another crazy weekend in which two of the largest investment banks in America, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, disappeared I am beginning to wonder.

What is wrong with America:

The 2 wars in Irak and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and appear to have no clear exit strategy. Moreover with McCain continously talking about expanding military spending and American voters not yet satisfied in spending already half of what the world spends in the military it is not clear that America will not make the same mistake as the Soviet empire and spend its way into bankruptcy. Obama by the way is not much better because even though his instincts tell him that America´s military is embarked in useless expensive missions unfortunately American voters do not understand that the solution is not to win every conflict but to pick conflicts that you can win or else not get involved. Afghanistan was reasonable. Irak was not. Saddam Hussein was not more dangerous to USA than Iran now. A trillion was spent and USA is not in a better position than it was in 2000.

Americans keeps accumulating budget deficits at federal, state and city levels and trade deficits in spite of the dollar being extremely weak. Americans spend more than what they make and survive thanks to the savings of the Asians and now the Arab countries. America owes to China more money than the GDP of Alaska. America may have won the cold war but China and Russia now own a lot of the US economy as huge creditors.

American overspending is not only seen in the perennial budget and trade deficits but in the last years it reached historical heights with the absurd secondary mortgage market that is bringing the US banking system to its knees. Bear Stearns is gone, Lehman is bankrupt, AIG is shaking, Citigroup is 75% down, Merrill was just rescued by Bank of America and is also 50% down from its peak. USA is paying dearly for the combination of the desire of US elected politicians to please voters and overspend and the desire of the average American to live beyond his/her means and take unpayable mortgages and overspend.

The desire of Americans to have tailor made justice and tailor made medicine has made American businesses weak. American legal and medical costs are so much higher than those of other economies that the tremendous advantage that US businesses have in terms of the drive and creativity of its people is lost in legal uncertainties, lack of standards, and a medical system that is both unfair and tremendously expensive. Moreover the results are appalling: USA is a less just society than Europe or Japan and a less healthy nation. US longevity is trailing way behind that of the EU and Japan.

America has the best universities in the world and that is true. But Alexa Varsavsky, the eldest of my four kids, just entered Columbia University and the whole incoming class was 1200 students. Of course I am a proud father knowing that out of 1000 kids who may want to get into Columbia University, 200 who can get in dare to apply and then only 16 get in. But what happens to the other 984 kids? When is America going to realize that it can´t have an education system geared to excel at the extremes and not to raise the mean. Because while USA has the most Nobel prizes it scores very poorly in standardized tests. In general USA is a nation focused on Oscars, Olympic Medals, Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers, which is fine. But if there are 4 million high school graduates in the country and the top 50 schools only take 1000 incoming students each what happens to the other 3.95 million students?

On top of this America´s environmental policies are horrendous and America´s energy efficiency as measured by energy use per unit of output are pathetic. I read somewhere that if Americans drove the same cars that we drive over here in Europe America´s oil deficit would be practically wiped out. And we do have a lot of SUV´s in Europe as well. So why is offshore drilling such a big part of the Republican platform? How many hits does Texas have to take until Americans change their habits and begin behaving responsibly? In one of those weird twists of environmental justice hurricanes don´t happen in Europe but global warming is a certainty now and the quickest way to slow it down is energy conservation.

So this is what is wrong with America. But as Bill Clinton said, there´s nothing that is wrong with America that can´t be fixed by what is right in America. And I hope that Americans once more show that they can turn this enormous mess around. They have a lot of work to do: they have to change their energy consumption habits, their spending habits, accept that an open ended ability to litigate can be harmful to the economy, accept that a little less quality in medical care for some can result in better health care for all, they have to make it harder to sue medical professionals, they have to spend less in the military and more in foreign aid, they have to act less alone and build lasting friendships around the world, they have to accept that sometimes it is government and not banks or corporations that have to set policy, they have to restrict lobbying, they have to focus less on the exceptional people and more on the average person who has not seen his/her income rise in 30 years. In short, there´s a lot of work to do in the States and with all my love for the country that I called home for 18 years I sincerely hope it reforms. As opposed to what most people now think around the world I think that overall America has been a force of mostly good in the world during the last century and I hope that it can overcome its failed policies and continue in that role for the next century.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Going to the States is great for many reasons. One of them is to test whatever is new in the States vis a vis telecomunications and the internet. While there are tons of innovation on the internet, USA is pretty backwards when it gets to telecoms. But there is a shining star and that is T Mobile, a German operator who seems to be very progressive only oustide of their own country. Among the T Mobile novelties is their UMA implementation. UMA is a standard that allows you to seamlessly transfer calls between WiFi and GSM. And as you can see here there are now many UMA handsets. UMA is great in the States because mobile coverage is so poor. With an @home router from T Mobile you achieve the same as with a Femtocell, you at least have coverage at home. On top of that you get all the calling you can eat fixed and mobile for $10 per month out of the same WiFi router. Pretty good. But UMA is not only developing in the States. Orange has a million UMA subs and here´s a great presentation in French about their service (don´t be intimidated, the graphics are great). Other operators with UMA-based offers are TeliaSonera in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, NetCom in Norway, ONO in Spain, Fido and Rogers in Canada.

But neither T Mobile nor France Telecom have copied the Fon model. If the T Mobile or Orange WiFi routers  came with 2 SSIDs or were Foneras which already come with 2SSIDs and global roaming, their services would make much more sense and sell better. Then you could go around with your phone and connect to any Orange router or any T Mobile router and not just yours. We will at Fon try to contact T Mobile and France Telecom to try to team up as successfully as we did with BT in BTFon as well as other operators. But as laptops shrink and handsets grow and both converge into little data hog devices like the iPhones WiFi becomes the least expensive solution to the problem of how to satisfy consumers who want movies and music but don´t want to pay more than 30 dollars/20 euros per month for mobile data.

As things stand I see Fon as a great potential partner for an MVNO who is paying a Vodafone say a fortune for their minutes and making tiny margins, because with Fon this MVNO can make higher margins when the calls go over WiFi. The margins at T Mobile btw are great because when you use your own WiFi you are paying them the same rate as when you use their expensive network.

Fon is also a great potential partner for a 3G operator who finds itself more and more selling handsets that stream movies, games, tv, music, and are very demanding on their networks. Indeed the iPhone does not let you buy from iTunes over 3G but only for WiFi. I find this remarkable since when you buy from iTunes you are paying! It says a lot about the cost of downloading heavy files like TV series over 3G networks. Again UMA is important here as well.

In this video I argue what you would probably not expect from me the Internet entrepreneur and founder of Educ.ar and that is that television, and I don´t just mean science documentaries but all television series including Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, 24, House, Friends and others, can be a great complement to a child´s education. In other words, I don´t think text books, other books, teacher presence, and the internet are enough for a well rounded education. This is especially true if you are trying to give your children an education in which English plays a very important role but you live, as we do, in a non English speaking country. Spain in this case.

I was thinking about Sarah Palin and her daughter, and thought of the fact that, at one point, they ask the heroin of Juno, the movie, if she is named after the city in Alaska was a premonition of what was actually coming from Alaska. This is another case of movies anticipating reality in some weird way. And if you Google Juno Palin, you will see that many writers thought of the same comparison.

To me, the sad part about the movie and the present election is that Juno manages to convince you, the viewer, that getting pregnant while being a teen and giving your child up for adoption, can actually be a great thing. From that to believing that the same is true for a Vice Presidential family is a short way. I am beginning to be sorry about the movie.

My hope for a real change in America is fading away.How can we leave the management of the world to American voters, who are simple minded enough to be seduced by Sarah Palin?

My friend Lukasz Gadowski has just announced the launch of Team Europe Ventures, a new home for his large portfolio of Internet companies. Lukasz is a successful entrepreneur who founded Spreadshirt in 2002 and cofounded StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network (sold to Holtzbrinck last year) and is also an active business angel investing in Internet companies (he invested in more then 50 companies worldwide).

With Team Europe Ventures Lukasz will keep investing in early stage European Internet ventures and will co-invest in later stage rounds (Series A or Series B). In the last twelve months Lukasz was involved in the creation of many Internet companies like Brands4Friends, MisterSpex, Absolventa, Triphunter, Playnik and Käuferportal.

I also invest in very early stage internet companies. The companies that I invested in appear on the right of my blog. But lately I feel what is missing from the internet companies is concrete ways to generate revenues. The Google Ad model, or the advertising model, is mostly broken for anyone but Google. Companies like Fotolog have shown that is not enough to have enormous traffic volumes but that revenues other than Google are needed to be successful. Fon for example would die if it had to survive out of advertising alone and not from selling routers and passes. Another model that has greatly intrigued me lately is a company that David Cantolla, a Spanish acquaintance of mine launch. It is the company with the rights to the child series Pocoyo. In their case as you can see the series themselves which are available in DVDs in many countries are also available in Youtube. But that is because the money in Pocoyo is not in the series itself but in the fanaticism that the series engenders among children who like my son Leo who is younger than 2 then want in merchandising. Internet sites should learn from Pocoyo and find something real that they can sell out of virtual fame. Something like the T Shirts that Lukasz started with.

This traffic analysis shows what I have been saying for years now and that is that streaming will kill P2P as what people want is to see things, not so much to own them. Moreover legal streaming is making a great deal of progress over illegal streaming thanks to sites like Joost or Hulu. People don´t necessarily want to break the law. They want great services. Streaming with a few ads is acceptable.

I recently bought the Panasonic with WiFi. These are my first impressions. The Panasonic Lumix TZ50 is a 9.1 megapixel camera with great optics for its size (8mm wide-angle Leica DC lens, with 10x optical zoom). The camera is actually quite big for not being reflex type, but there is no such thing as good quality pictures in flat, small cameras – it’s a trade off. The camera also takes video in HD quality which is rare. But what really makes me love this camera is its WiFi integration. The best I’ve found so far. Other cameras with similar functionality see WiFi as something akin to Bluetooth, but the Panasonic is different. The TZ50 works with any open or encrypted WiFi network and can also connect to the T-Mobile HotSpot Service which is available in more then 8,800 public locations around the US. Once connected to the Internet, this camera can upload your pictures to your Picasa Web Albums account (here is mine), so you can share them with your friends and family or the general public while you’re still travelling and not days later when you come back home. This is a whole different experience to photosharing, something more similar to a photo diary or to Twitxr. You can also register an email address and get a link to your photo album just after it’s uploaded, so you can simply forward the URL to your friends using a smartphone. One drawback though is it doesn’t work with Flickr.