I was reading Spencer Ante´s new blog  (Business Week journalist) about how hard this Tech recession will be and I agree with him.  I know it could be wishful thinking as I am in a new capital raising round for Fon that I think that this market downturn will be short lived but  as he says the fundamentals are not seriously hurt and this investment levels have been reasonable.  As I said the Apple shares fall from 202 to 126 low today are one example of a market going manic depressive with the truth most likely being somewhere in between.

There are two moments in which human beings seem to completely lose control of their financial life.  In both cases it seems to be out of love.  The first one is getting married and the one involves putting all personal savings in a highly leveraged transaction called purchasing a home.  But somehow this transactions are synergistic as many of a marriage was saved by the risk of insolvency.

In this video you can see Linda Stone, Hubert Burda and Naomi Campbell sharing their views on DLD.

Before this video was shot I sat at lunch next to Linda Stone and became very interested in her Continous Partial Attention theories as I thought they could explain why I rarely finish a book. But this conversation was interrupted by the arrival of stunning 37 year old Naomi.

As far as Naomi Campbell is concerned I can only quote my 13 year old son Tom. When he saw her he told me that it was time that pedophilia be redefined. No comment on that one.

You can also watch this video in Youtube

Today at DLD Naomi Campbell made a cameo appearance. As you can see in this video taken from my N95 (iPhone when are you going to film??), Kara Swisher and Simon Levene from Accel were not impressed. In the end Steffi from DLD explains to Kara that “this is Munich” and everyone has fun.

You can also watch this video in Youtube

My dear friend Ola Ahlvarsson was world champion of kickboxing in 1997. During our last vacation in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay as you can see in this video Ola gave my son Tom his first training less on boxing. I used to think poorly of boxing and I still do when it gets rough but as training it seems to be safe and fun.

You can also watch this video in Youtube

I come from one of the only countries in the world that has moved from the ranks of the developed world to the less developed world. Argentina´s GDP per capita was higher and better distributed when I was born in the 60s than now. And as recent as 2002 the country was in the ropes with nearly half of the population living below the poverty line, the largest default in human history (3 times the size of Enron) and enormous unemployment. Yet, declaring default and mostly not paying its foreign debt turned out to be an incredible blessing to the country which saw most credit disappear and now lives in a mostly cash, equity economy. Argentina has very little consumer credit, very little foreign debt, very little national debt, very little corporate debt and very little mortgage debt. In Argentina cash really is king as the other forms of payment are practically non existent. So as the world goes into a US promoted credit crunch Argentina finally finds itself in a lucky position which is that of mostly having no debt isolated from global financial problems. In a way it is interesting that USA has been going around the world promoting credit as the cure to all problems using the IMF and the World Bank as its flagships and now finds itself drowning in its own medicine .  In the meantimeformer failed states such as Argentina discover that a mostly equity economy it´s much better in times of financial crisis than the indebtedness that the US was predicating for decades.  Especially when the country while in an all cash diet has been growing at 9% for the last 5 years.

PS: due to my many activities I don´t have time to research this subject but if you are an economist I would be interested in cowriting a study on all equity economies as I would be interested in studying the subject in depth.  I believe that mostly equity economies are likely to outperform heavily indebted economies as the USA in the future.

Three years ago (maybe 4) I met Erik Wachtmeister, the founder of A Small World and heard about his idea to start the social site for the jet set. I liked it, I figured that great parties would come out of it but I immediately thought that something more interesting that getting jet setters in a web site would to get the smartest people in the world in a web site. And together with my friends Andrew McLaughlin (Chief Policy Officer of Google) and Joshua Ramo of Kissinger Associates we thought of starting A Smart World.  The concept was a social site for intellectuals, scientists, writers, professors or anyone who his peers would consider a “relevant, creative thinker”.  But the idea never got off the ground as we were all very busy with our own jobs and projects. But recently I came across examples of A Smart World in different formats. One is BigThink, the vlogging site for the “smart” (horribly designed btw). Another one is Culture Hub, Stan Stalnaker´s project (I ran into Stan at a party in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay this week).  Yet nobody seems to get it totally right.