World’s Richest Gain $15.2 Billion as Markets Rise

The richest people on the planet added $15.2 billion to their collective net worth this week as global markets rose on speculation that Europe will move to ease borrowing costs in Italy and Spain according to a report in Businessweek.

The week’s biggest gainer was Spanish retail tycoon Amancio Ortega, who added $3 billion to his fortune after Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer, announced plans to build a 753,000 square-foot logistics center in Spain’s Guadalajara province. Inditex shares were up 3.8 percent for the week.  Ortega’s gain came as Spain’s unemployment rate reached 24.6 percent, the highest on record. With a net worth of $43.5 billion, the 76-year-old is Europe’s richest man, and ranks fourth on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“At the beginning of the week we had a flood of bad news, starting with Greece and culminating with Spain credit at all- time wides,” said Nelson Saiers, CIO of Alphabet Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund with more than $500 million under management. “When Mario Draghi came out midweek and said the ECB would do whatever it takes to protect the euro, that hit the brakes on the bad news and the market ripped,” he said, referring to the European Central Bank president….

Read all about it at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-27/world-s-richest-gain-15-dot-2-billion-as-global-markets-rise#r=bloomberg

How much is Olympic gold worth?

According to CNBC contrary to what the name might suggest, there's actually not that much gold in a gold medal.  While the medal's design is different for every Olympics, it must adhere to guidelines set by the Olympic Charter.

One of those guidelines states that at least 6 grams of gold must be used in each gold medal.

This year's Olympic gold medal is comprised of 92.5 percent silver, just 1.34 percent gold, and the remainder 6.16 percent is made up of copper.   The gold and silver medals weigh 412 grams, while the bonze weighs 357 grams.  Each medal is 85mm in diameter, and 8-10mm thick.  These are the biggest and heaviest medals ever produced for the Summer Olympic Games….

Find out more at http://www.cnbc.com/id/48355256

Investigators Are Closing In On Two Other Banks Involved In LIBOR Rigging

From Reuters: New details from court documents and sources close to the Libor scandal investigation suggest that groups of traders working at three major European banks were heavily involved in rigging global benchmark interest rates. Some of those traders, including one who used to work at Barclays Plc in New York, still have senior positions on Wall Street trading desks.

Until now, most of the attention has involved traders at Barclays, which last month reached a $453 million settlement with U.S. and UK authorities for its role in the manipulation of rates. Now, it is becoming clear that traders from at least two other banks - UK-based Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Switzerland's UBS AG - played a central role. Between them, the three banks employed more than a dozen traders who sought to influence rates in either dollar, euro or yen rates.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/libor-barclays-ubs-rbs-2012-7s

Long-Term Investors Are Getting Screwed By High-Speed Traders

The WSJ reports: Some of the most heavily traded U.S. stocks might also be among the most expensive to trade, costing investors as much as $2.5 billion a year, according to a New York trading and research firm.

Stocks such as Bank of America Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., and Ford Motor Co. are so popular with high-frequency trading firms that long-term investors often have trouble quickly buying and selling the stocks, according to a report by Pragma Securities LLC.

Investors trying to trade cost-effectively often find themselves standing in line behind the fleet-footed traders and are forced to wait to execute…

Read all about it at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443931404577551633192136866.html

Layoff Watch 2012: Pentagon May Fire Thousands

According to Associated Press, tens of thousands of civilian employees in the Defense Department could receive warnings about potential layoffs four days before the November election if impending spending cuts aren’t averted, hitting presidential battleground states such as Virginia and Florida hard.

The alerts would come in addition to any that major defense contractors might send out at the same time to their workers under an often-overlooked law, a prospect that is unnerving the White House roughly three months before voters go to the polls.

Frederick Vollrath, a senior Pentagon official, outlined the timeline for notification of possibly 10 percent of the 800,000-strong civilian workforce in testimony Thursday before a House panel. He cautioned, however, that no decision has been made on job cuts as Washington grapples with the looming, $1.2 trillion automatic reductions in defense and domestic programs...

Wait…wait…there’s more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/pentagon-official-says-civilian-workforce-could-get-layoff-notices-4-days-before-election/2012/07/26/gJQAub3tBX_story.html

Weird’s Deep Thoughts (Friday Morning Edition): Innovation is Hard: Ballmer and The Real Story of Microsoft's Fall From Grace

Besides being a grade A schmuck there's a reason people in Ballmer's position tend to fail.  The basic issue facing Microsoft over the past ten years has been this—innovating is really hard.

The company reached a point where Office and Windows were so popular that wasn't much you could do to increase their popularity by improving the product. They continued to work on improving the product, and kept these divisions very healthy and profitable, but there simply wasn't an explosive growth opportunity left to be had because the previous successes had been so enormous. So you create a situation where the company as a whole is basically a venture capital firm. It has this huge stream of Office/Windows profits and needs to figure out how to invest those profits in exciting new products. But successful venture capitalists are really rare, and for all we know most of them are just getting lucky. The average financial returns from the venture capital sector as a whole are terrible. But Microsoft qua venture capitalist faces the additional burden that the top management of the company has to be good at running the giant existing Office/Windows businesses. It's as if you were trying to hire a tax attorney who could also perform open heart surgery.

One alternative strategy could have been to just give up. Pay huge dividends, keep focusing on incremental improvements to the core products, and basically don't worry if other firms dominate mobile and online services. But not only is that psychologically unappealing to managers, it'd be weirdly demoralizing to the staff. Windows and Office need to be able to hire talented engineers—the kind of people who are going to want to work for a company that aspires to be forever on the cutting edge, not a company that's resigned itself to operating as a boring dividend machine.

So what are you supposed to do?....

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/26/microsoft_s_fall_the_real_lesson_is_that_innovation_is_hard.html

Goldman’s Robinson gets her close-up

Hello, Mrs. Robinson!  The NY Post writes that Goldman Sachs Treasurer Elizabeth “Liz” Beshel Robinson — considered a rising star within the Wall Street firm and a candidate to succeed her boss, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar — just held her first audition for the job.

Robinson, who until now has mostly operated behind the scenes of the storied investment bank, took center stage yesterday during a conference call to discuss the firm’s fiscal health, prompted by recent bank downgrades, Europe’s debt crisis and sweeping regulatory reform.

During the 35-minute call that kicked off at noon, Robinson, who along with Viniar fielded questions from analysts and investors, said the bank has significantly bolstered its balance sheet since 2008, and boasted around $170 billion in liquid assets at the end of the second quarter.

“I was impressed with her when I met her,” said Brad Hintz, a veteran bank analyst at Sanford Bernstein. “What I think [Goldman] now is giving her is more limelight.”

Although Viniar hasn’t announced his intention to leave the bank, it’s been an open secret in the firm for a while that the 56-year-old is keen to exit and is just waiting for Wall Street’s unprecedented roller-coaster ride to abate…

Read more at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/goldman_robinson_gets_her_close_4ZQrOZpEewqI04O3NPLiXP#ixzz21f2nHjHD

.