Why is it that none of my friends gamble and yet so many people do? Probably because my friends are intelligent people who have long discovered that betting in casinos is an idiotic activity that, given enough tim,e will lead to the dwindling of your savings. And yet there seem to be millions (if not billions) of people interested in gambling and, as a result, yesterday Aristocrat Technologies, represented in Europe by Nicholas Khin, announced that 25 million of these simple minded people are expected to go every year to lose money at a 2000 hectares 32 casino gambling paradise that his company, the second largest gambling group in the world, will build in Aragon, Spain.

This park is expected to be Europe´s Las Vegas, the second largest gambling destination in the world. It will have the same idiotic architecture as Las Vegas, similar historic themes with the Egyptian being a perennial favorite. Among the curiosities one of the theme parks there, Spyland, is centered around the theme of spying, another mostly useless activity that costs the world billions of dollars and few have been able to prove its worth (e.g. with all the spying resources of the United States, Bush Sr did not know that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait until he did it). Another one will be the typical gigantic water park so the kids can splash while dad loses his savings.

On one side, my libertarian instincts tell me that investments like this should be allowed since they make the economy grow, generate tens of thousands of jobs and if people want to be miserable so be it, but, on the other my environmental and overall ethical views make me feel that flying 25 million people throwing tons of gases in the atmosphere so they can lose their hard earned savings is just wrong.

I am in NYC now and thinking about the volatility of gasoline prices in the States I came up with an idea for a credit card that fixes the price that you will pay for gas for the next 5 years.  The concept is that you would commit to buy a certain amount of liters at a certain fixed price for 5 years and with this credit card every time you go to a gas station you would pay this price at the pump and the credit card company would pay the rest or collect the rest from the gas stations.  What this credit card would do is to bring to the average citizens the financial tools for hedging already available to large oil companies in the form of a credit card, an instrument that everyone is familiar with.  Since I am too busy to develop this idea….I blog it.  Maybe it exists already.  If it does I apologize.  I have not even had time to research it.

The US government says it now believes that Iran stopped its quest for an atomic bomb in 2003, I guess it took a while for the Bush administration to find out. After the news this morning that Chavez lost its referendum we can all feel a bit better. Almost good enough to counteract the sad news that Putin won the election to become father of the nation (I guess it´s ok to be authoritarian if you are a “father”). What Iran, Venezuela and Russia have in common is that they are all energy exporters. Energy exporting countries tend to fall in the hands of dictatorial fatherly figures who are frequently tinkering with the constitution because in those countries whoever controls the energy exports controls the money flow into the whole nation. Having oil is in the end a curse, an addiction. Citizens of energy exporters tend to become pretty incompetent at doing anything else because few activities compete with pumping energy and getting rich.

But the news of Iran being now certified as a non atomic bomb producer is in itself disconcerting. Is it true or is it simply that the US government has decided to certify some countries that do not have atomic bombs as Iraq dangerous and those who do like North Korea and Pakistan as harmless? Iran is a country whose leaders hate us but their people love our modernity. Instead Pakistan is a country whose leaders like us and whose people hate us and they do have atomic weapons (a Pew Institute poll said that if Osama Bin Laden ran for elections majority Pakistanis vote for him). In any case it is a sad world in which what matters is not what a country does but what the US government believes it does. Most of the US people and the vast majority of the citizens around the world can´t wait for Bush to go and for some clarity to return to world affairs.

The dollar is very weak now.  At close to $1.5 per euro some call it the new peso.  European companies are hurting when it gets to export but at the same time they have an incredible currency as their market caps in dollars are going through the roof.  Telefonica for example is worth around $160bn, that´s serious money when Verizon, the second largest US mobile and fixed line operator is only worth $124bn.  And some huge internet companies are now very affordable to a company like Telefonica including Yahoo which has a market cap of $35bn and Ebay, of $45bn.  Only a few years ago the market caps of Verizon, Yahoo, and eBay were all larger than that of Telefonica.  I think that this is the time for Telefonica and many other European companies whose earnings are mostly in euros to diversify their profit base and go into major acquisitions on the other side of the Atlantic.  And I am saying this knowing that it´s traditionally been hard for Asian and Europeans to manage Americans.