Like a heroin addict who just can’t wean himself off of the good stuff, General Motors is going back into subprime lending to finance new auto sales. Although the much diminished company is still largely government owned, and has made great strides at reforming its errant ways, they still do not understand their fundamental problem. [...]

Feel Like Investing in a State Sponsor of Terrorism? How about a country whose leaders have stolen $400 billion in the last decade and have seen 300 foreign workers kidnapped? Another country lost four wars in the last 40 years. Still interested? How about a country that suffers one of the world’s highest AIDs rates, [...]

Often while searching for a piece of data through Google, I stumble across something else, which is far more interesting. That is how I found the table below of international savings rates. Why should you care? Because countries with high savings rates tend to have strong economies and great stock markets, since there is plenty [...]

Where is the 2012 London Olympics turning to meet gargantuan cost overruns? None other than BP, which is going the extra mile to burnish its tarnished image. With the British economy mired in a vicious financial crisis, many are wondering if hosting the games was such a great idea. The original plan was to convert [...]

My former employer, The Economist, once the ever tolerant editor of my flabby, disjointed, and juvenile prose (Thanks Peter and Marjorie), has released its “Big Mac” index of international currency valuations (click here for the story). Although initially launched as a joke three decades ago, I have followed it religiously and found it an amazingly [...]

“When the fools are dancing, the greater fools are watching,” according to an old Japanese proverb.

Jim O’Neill, the clever Goldman Sachs analyst who came up with the term “BRIC” a decade ago, has cooked up a new, catchy investment theme. Get ready for the “N-11”, shorthand for the “New 11”, a gaggle of early stage emerging markets who will become the inheritors of the BRIC’s high growth rates. The basic [...]

As part of my never ending campaign to get you to move more money into emerging markets, please take a look at the chart below from Goldman Sachs. It shows that the global middle class will rise from 1.8 billion today to 4 billion by 2040, with the overwhelming portion of the increase occurring in [...]

I have just finished leisurely reading Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century On-Line Pioneers. Standage discusses the creation and development of the telegraph system and how it revolutionized communication in the nineteenth century. The book claims that Modern Internet users are in many ways the [...]

My friend, Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a global risk analyst who I regularly follow, will soon publish another book entitled The End of the Free Markets: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations. I find this highly depressing, as it takes me as long to read one of Ian’s books as it [...]

Every day, I get pounded by experts who insist that the bottom is here in real estate and that it is time to load the boat. I therefore find the chart below pricing US residential real estate in gold for the last 40 years. After peaking in 2002, house prices have death spiraled 75% when [...]

I have long sat beside the table of Mckinsey & Co., the best management consulting company in Asia, hoping to catch some crumbs of wisdom. So, I jumped at the chance to have breakfast with Shanghai based Worldwide Managing Director, Dominic Barton, when he passed through San Francisco visiting clients. These are usually sedentary affairs, [...]