bogdanpopa.ro/LIFESTREAM

O fost colega si buna prietena din Advice Students, Alexandra Tamasan*, m-a rugat cu ceva vreme in urma sa-mi dau cu parerea, din perspectiva unui “outsider” (i.e. care nu traieste in Romania), despre cum va afecta actuala criza Romania si cum ar trebui ea sa fie rezolvata sau cel putin intampinata de Guvern. Iata ce-a iesit

The today’s euphoria in the world’s markets is most welcomed and long awaited. After the Euro potential "bail-out" plan orchestrated this past week-end, a wave of long awaited optimism has stroke the financial markets, prompting a spectacular come-back for the main indexes. As I wrote this lines, the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P500 were all topping 10+% increases. That’s right: 10%! Everybody is exuberated like they’ve just came-out from a long nightmare and the happiness of getting back to normality is overwhelming. Which is true: both with the nightmare and the return to normality. For now, let’s enjoy this once again historical moments (after the huge drops in the indexes) and look forward optimistically to the future.

Then again, let’s also pay tribute to the the driving force behind it all, both fall and come-back. Here’s Mr. Douglas explaining it very eloquently over 20 years ago:

The global financial crisis (or credit crunch, or mortgage-backed securities crisis or..you know it by now:) is the most talked, blogged, wrote,  aired and so on, subject of the last few weeks (hence this post:) And it doesn’t show any signs that it’s going to be over soon. Among all the turmoil (great word, isn’t it?), many have tried to find both causes and solutions.

<<Let’s discuss the world. To answer the question, "is globalisation possible without God", the simple answer is "yes". Globalisation is after all itself a code word, a mask, for not using the C-word, capitalism. Globalisation is basically the latest phase of expanding capitalism. This not something which is neutral, this is a capitalism that has its rules: it has its economic rules, it has its political rules, it has its cultural rules and it has its military rules. It is a system. At the heart of this system is the United States of America, the world’s only existing empire today. The first time in the history of humanity that you have just had a single empire, so dominant, whose military budget is higher than the military budgets of the next 15 countries put together, and whose military-industrial complex itself is the eleventh largest economic entity in the world. This is the reality we live in, and this is the reality which confronts us in different ways.>> – quote by Tariq Ali

You probably know by now of the buy offer made by Microsoft to Yahoo! for $33/share. Today, Yahoo announced that it’s going to reject the offer, considering itself to be grossly undervalued. Anyway, quite foreseeable. I was searching today for more info on the subject and I landed on Yahoo!’s financial portal and also on Google Finance. Out of curiosity, I made a search for YHOO on both sites and I noticed an interesting thing. Even if both sites shown the same closing share price of $29.20 (as of Friday, Feb 8th) and the same number of shares outstanding of 1.34B, the market capitalization scored higher on Yahoo with more than $1.5 billion. It said $40.72B on Yahoo and $39.02B on Google. Well, that’s quite a difference: about 4%! Where did it all go? Might it be because of different methods of calculation? Or delay in updating?  Still, either Yahoo if very optimistic, either Google doesn’t know something

Here are the briefs:

Yahoo’s:

…and Google’s