U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet and Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Eduardo Medina Mora will discuss strengthening supply chains across two continents in a webinar for entrepreneurs and smalll businesses on September 30.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Contreras-Sweet was a successful entrepreneur and business executive before joining President Barack Obama’s cabinet in April 2014. In brief remarks, she will address the need for dynamic and competitive supply chains in North America, to be followed by a Davos-style conversation with Medina Mora.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of not only the U.S. economy, but also of the broader North American free-trade area. Canada and Mexico are the top two destinations for U.S. exports from SMEs, and small-business suppliers also feed inputs into larger companies and benefit with expanded exports of the final products. In the run-up to the next round of the U.S.-Mexico High-Level Economic Dialogue and the North American Leaders Summit, this on-the-record discussion will explore the importance of interlocking supply chains to the broader goal of North American competitiveness.

Speakers:

• Maria Contreras-Sweet, Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration
• Eduardo Medina Mora, Ambassador of Mexico to the U.S.
• Eric Farnsworth, Vice President, Americas Society/Council of the Americas (moderator)

To register: Please email us at as-coawashington@counciloftheamericas.org

Depending on who you talk to…prices went up easily by 50% and perhaps by 70% over the past five years since the bottom in early 2009; everyone appears to agree that they are back to where they were in January 2008. What happened between then and now is a subject of collective amnesia as are many of the statements made at the 2008 Cityscape…for example the spectacularly miss-timed pronouncement by one expert… “Investors say 2009 will be the best year for real estate investment in MENA, ever”.

Two things can happen once real estate prices start to “cool” after a period of energetic growth. If that 50% to 70% was a “bubble” the next thing will likely happen will be a “bust”…good time to panic. There again, according to our calculations, prices went up by 100% in the five years preceding 2008, so perhaps that cooling could simply be a “Soros-Dip”, signaling that a new bubble is brewing in the background…good time to buy. Our view is neither:

This is a model of Dubai’s residential property prices published in July 2009. It offered an explanation of what had just happened (the Bubble & Pop); with a prediction in hard numbers for what was going to happen next.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article12114.html

The historical line was based mainly on tracking asking prices of apartments in the Greens and Dubai Marina and weighting those back to a smaller data-base of actual transactions. It may not be representative of the market as a whole; compared to other indexes up to 2009 it agrees pretty well with Colliers and ASTECO, there is however a wide variation of opinions regards to the details amongst the experts. All the same, no one disagrees that there WAS a bubble up to late 2008 and there WAS a bust.

The thesis behind the prediction, i.e. the dotted-line, (explained in that article) is that in every market there is the “correct” price. But markets sometimes go into “disequilibrium”. When that happens, the amount of disequilibrium “UP” tends to be reflected in the amount of the subsequent disequilibrium “DOWN”.

From a practical standpoint, if you know what the “correct” price is; the theory says you can make reasonably accurate predictions about the gyrations in the immediate future, following the bust. Granted working out the “correct price” requires an understanding of valuation as in figuring out what International Valuation Standards calls “Other than Market Value”. Often the experts call that “Fair Value” although there is nothing “fair” about it. More confusing, different experts have different definitions about what “Fair Value” means, so it can mean just about anything, which is why real estate agents use the phase in the same breath as “sought-after”, pristine”…“prime”, whatever those words mean?

Semantics aside; if you know what the price “should” have been…if not for an episode of “disequilibrium” then after a bubble pop’s you can figure out

1. at what point the prices will likely bottom, and
2. where they will bounce back to, that’s the dotted line on the chart. You also get an idea about
3. timing, although that’s harder to predict because it depends mainly on how long it takes the banker-fall-guys to wake up from their jingle-mail-induced paralysis.

Netfix streaming will be available in Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg.

There are a couple of question marks however behind Netflix’ European push.  While Americans are used to shelling out big bucks for cable TV, Europeans, and Germans in particular, have proven hesitant to pay for TV content in the past. In Germany, where a reasonably large selection of public and private television stations is available for free (apart from a monthly fee mandatory to everyone owning a TV set), pay TV has long been a money-burning business.

Sky Deutschland, Germany’s only relevant pay TV provider, currently has 3.8 million subscribers and that number would likely be considerably lower if it weren’t for Sky’s extensive live sports coverage.

Another major problem for Netflix is one that the company shortsightedly created itself: having sold exclusive distribution rights for its hit series “House of Cards” to Sky Deutschland and Canal+ in Germany and France, respectively, Netflix will not be able to rely on the star power of Kevin Spacey to attract customers in the two most important markets it’s entering tomorrow.

Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng write:   Without large-scale infrastructure investment, especially in transport, the productivity gains that enabled America’s emergence as an industrial power would have been impossible. Though the process included significant creative destruction, rapid economic growth offset losses resulting from excess capacity.
Similarly, when viewed through the long lens of history, China’s ghost towns will prove to be potholes on the path to development. China’s massive infrastructure investment, funded largely through LGFVs, will most likely be remembered for its critical contribution to the country’s economic modernization.  China’s Infrastructure Expenditures

Jack Ma will ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange as Aibaba enters trading.  It is expected to be the largest IPO in US history.  Five Facts about Alibaba

Safra Catz, who was co-president and CFO of Oracle until Thursday, has just been promoted to co-CEO — alongside Mark Hurd — after its founder and longtime CEO Larry Ellison announced he’s stepping down to the Executive Chairman position.

Oracle said in a statement that Catz will be responsible for all manufacturing, finance, and legal decisions, while Hurd will be in charge of sales, service, and global business units. Ellison will continue to oversee all software and hardware engineering functions.

The move might come as a bit of a surprise, but Catz’s track record tells she was a natural choice for Oracle’s board.

Catz first joined Oracle in 1999 as senior VP. But she quickly rose through the ranks, becoming executive VP within seven months, and president of Oracle Corporation by 2004, a position she had kept for over a decade. She served as Oracle’s interim CFO from November 2005 to September 2008, only to return to the same role in 2011 as full-time CFO. She’s also been an Oracle board member since 2001.

A former banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, an investment bank that was later acquired by Credit Suisse, Catz has played a major role in Oracle’s M&A department, overseeing nearly 100 M&A deals worth billions of dollars for the company. Some of the biggest deals she’s led include the $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft and the $7.4 billion deal for Sun Microsystems. She’s a graduate of the Wharton School, but also holds a law degree from UPenn, which made her Ellison’s consigliere as well.

As remarkable as her resume is, Catz is perhaps better-known for regularly being named the highest-paid woman executive in the world. Last year, she made $44.3 million in total compensation, easily becoming the world’s top paid female exec and CFO. In 2013, she became the first female to hold the highest-paid CFO position, when she made approximately $43.6 million. That amount, in fact, was a drop from her 2012 compensation of $51.7 million.

“Safra and Mark are exceptional executives who have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to lead, manage and grow the company. The Directors are thrilled that the best senior executive team in the industry will continue to move the company forward into a bright future,” Oracle Board’s Presiding Director Michael Boskin said in a statement.