MarCom Professional

In good times, fortunes are made. In bad times, empires.

So goes the battle cry.

But this is the week where it all hit home. The next big thing is not growth. It’s rescue. It’s the grind of lists of who to pay. What to prioritize. Fast decisions. Bits falling off.

The stock market is pricing a long haul. Misery. It’s not a time to buy. There is still too much cheer about. This is going to be long and painful.

The value is not in buying cheap. It’s in vulture. Carrion. Corpses where you can snatch the body and find a pulse.

Messy. Dirty. Brutal. Scary. And priced as dead meat rather than living muscle. More...

We’ve had the bottom of the market called. Or is it a relief rally?

We have calls of ‘never again’.

But I’ve been searching for the next big thing for the past three months. And I’m convinced it’s The Same Old Thing.

I don’t want more government intervention. I do want free wheeling innovation and choice. I have been seduced by get rich schemes like buying a house to improve or starting a new business.

Capitalism is largely not about greed it is about progress and spreading a communal betterment. We don’t want that to stop.

The impending recession, downturn and depression ought not to be about gloom. More...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_stake_in_facebook_be.php

Sorry. Shameless rip from ReadWriteWeb… 

Interviewed in today’s FT about the financial turmoil, he said:

‘Are there concerns? Yes. Is there going to be a British banking collapse? No. Do I think there has been too much of the media scaring people? Yes I do. Aren’t we better off trying to creat some stability to get back on track?’

And:

‘What is the point in being negative? We have 40,000 people. If I let my head go down I have nowhere to go.’

Stern, stirring stuff. Good on ya, Sir Phil! Don’t let the weedy financial wibblers wreck the system! More...

eBay spent a socking $1.3billion on two recent acquisitions.

BillMeLater is an instant credit company to fit alongside Market leading PayPal and cost $945m

Denmark’s leading classified site DNA.dk and related sites cost $390m.

Skype is now diplomatically being sidelined from core strategy.

But job cuts suggest that eBay has a challenge and may have gone, as the analysts say, ex-growth. Hence job cuts of 10% of staff announced with quarterly numbers.

I love a jumble sale and can only think the Credit Crunch will be good for eBay. More...

We seem to be at the point of maximum fear. We have casualties aplenty. We have finger pointing. We have governments breaking ranks with each other. We have freakish optimism from vultures, which says that things aren’t hurting enough… when it feels like they are hurting like they never hurt before.

We have tremors, then major aftershocks.

And we have Anthony Bolton, President of Fidelity Fund Managers, saying in the FT Money section (things are so bad that people are reading the Money sections - see below!), that he’s not been more optimistic in years. See ‘We’ve seen the bottom of the abyss‘. More...

Yes. I have found the next big thing. 

 

It’s a bank.

 

Or, should I say, it’s something to replace trust that people have lost in all banks. Every single one.

So, what’s the brand that could launch a bank - where folk would trust that it hasn’t derivatived-up the whole thing? Thames Water or Tesco?

 

Yer, but, also… it’s gotta be in there with the whole internet thing. You trust YOUR community. Because you don’t leg over your mates… which brings banking, for me, back to its roots (or the

 

Building Society roots of mutual support)… with a new digital twist. More...

Art is big. Bling is big. The FT Yachts supplement today reports that the only decline in superyacht orders is coming from the sub-40metre size.

If the middle class globally is expanding at 60million per year, the super rich is expanding too as billionaires have covered their tracks and emerged to procure respectability.

What is the value of the toys of success, the baubles… Damien Hirst set records with his latest release of work direct to Sotheby’s. The hype surrounded a new model for auctions which appeared to cut out his traditional dealer network, but the Sunday Times highlighted this weekend that, far from hiding in fury, these dealers seemed to be deployed in the auction house to bid for the work - often becoming the second highest bidder (underbidder?), which presumes they were biding to support the escalation of price. More...

This is big and it ought to be much bigger… founded by some of the early Big Issue team

The Homeless World Cup - Dec 2008 in Melbourne.

Perhaps a few folk from Lehman will have time for the training this time!?

I see Kenneth Rogoff, prof of economics at Harvard, make a point about the financial hysteria which I questioned before.

The cost of bailing out Bear Stearns and AIG is roughly equivalent to the cost of another US year in Iraq.

Sure there’s a big fuss about both. But in a reverse of my line on Big Money Making Opportunities, there has got to be attention paid to big money saving opportunities.

Look out for cost cutting on the fields of war… Like major home improvements, modern battles by Western governments are for the height of the bubble not the crash! More...