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  Tennis player Roger Federer's speech at Dartmouth College is useful advice - "its only one point" when you lose it, how to move on to the next one free of thought no negative energy, “When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to think, ‘OK, I double-faulted. It’s only a point.’ When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point and the next point after that, with intensity, clarity and focus.” And how often does this happen? Every second point almost. Because he says he won at Wimbledon and US Open with only 54% of the points. He lost about half of the points and still made it, and this message is real life, it matters to most of us. When we focus, when we concentrate on the task at hand it is one minute at a time.  Mikaela Shiffrin is the ultimate example of concentration skill going downhill fast between poles requires utmost concentration and she did this for the US in the Olympics after many disappointments in previous Olympics, none of it mattered to her, as she practices and focused. And that takes one to Federer's next point it wasn't effortless. It was repeated practice, it was girt with practice that made a difference. Only today this was evident as Sanju Samson talked about talking with Sachin Tendulkar last night before today's World Cup cricket game Final with New Zealand in which he hit 89 runs and the third time he has done it in the last 2 weeks, in Ahmedabad's Modi Stadium, to become the Player of the Match, watched by nearly 1 billion fans around the world. And Federer's last message is to do this by having some fun, enjoying the experience, learning something new, exploring, and getting to one's potential. ...

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Merrill takes 6.6 billion in writedowns related to mortgages and debt obligations to junk rated companies.

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How is it that GM would predict sales close to 16 million when no one else sees that happening. Is it just optimistic, even in the face of last years forecast which also stumbled badly with no improvement in the second half as expected. Instead GM closes the year 2007 with sales down 6% over 2006. And much worse numbers for Ford which saw 12% decline, and Chrysler a 3% decline. Chrysler continues to sell to rental fleets. Toyota's and Honda's sales grew by 3.1 and 2.8% respectively. But this year 2008 Toyota doesn't expect to do well with only a 1% increase. Nissan and Hyundai are in the same straits as the Big Three American makers in inventory of cars and sell to rental car fleets. In terms of inventory per point of market share Nissan has excess production capacity and more cars as inventory, about 39,000 per point of Nissan's market share similar to the Big Three. Toyota and Honda have 28,000 per point of their market share.

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China expands the trading range of the yuan to 1%. The yuan is set by the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, at 6.2879 yuan per U.S. dollar on March 14, 2012 or 15 to 16 U.S. cents to the yuan. The yuan rate is set daily by the PBOC, called the parity rate, and was previously allowed to trade in a 0.5% trading range.

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Friedman reviews Acemoglu and Robinson's new book, "Why Nations Fail." Acemoglu says that nations fail when wealth and opportunities are concentrated in the hands of few people, that a condition for societies to succeed is to create opportunities for more people. For this to happen it is important to create inclusive political and economic institutions. This is an important insight, but for Western society this is an insight as old as Adam Smith when he pointed out the importance of this aspect of western societies after the feudal period in his "Wealth of Nations." For Smith it was the failure to create inclusive societies that led to the gradual unravelling of societies in the river valleys of the Yangste and the Ganges, in China and India, of increasing poverty and the gradual disappearance of what constituted the middle class in India and China. Chapter 8 titled "Of Wages and Labor" in the "Wealth of Nations" makes specific reference to this.

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The effort to revive India-U.S. relations after the visa episode and the landslide win by Narendra Modi in India's 2014 parliamentary elections.

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It doesn't have to be all Navy- and it is OK to mix colors for men.

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Lego A/S CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstrop, talks to the WSJ's Jens Hansegard. Lego is based in a small town in central Denmark. Lego's sales revenue has tripled since 2007, and net profit increased by 35% to about $1 billion for 2012. The building block segment in the toy business is growing rapidly with growth of about 20% in the last year. The overall global toy business is stagnant, with declining prices, difficult economic conditions and competition from the consumer electronics products. Lego is not affected by this because it is able to price products for sets of bricks and figures at a premium, and stays ahead by coming up with innovative products. Lego has 85% share of the U.S. building-block market. Lego is a family owned company started in 1947 which faced difficulty in 2004 with a fall in sales. Under Knudstrop's direction it has recovered and shown strong sales growth, especially in the U.S. with 26% growth in 2012. His approach was to focus on nostalgia themes, Hollywood themes, and come up with innovative products for girls. This includes the Lego City, Lego Star Wars, Lego Friends themes. Lego invests heavily on R&D and plants. About 60% of revenue in 2012 was from launches of new products. The new Lego Friends theme for girls tripled sales to girls, creating a remarkable sales opportunity. Knudstrop's philosophy is to remain humble and aggressvely pursue new opportunities....

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The Kristian Anderson memo to Dr. Fauci is the No. 1 story in the WSJ on June 5. This memo written on Jan 31, 2020 shows the initial reaction of the leader of five virologists to the coronavirus genome. Nicholas Wade writing in WSJ cites this memo as having missed the censors marker as the emails to Fauci were released under the Freedom of Information Act. The initial reaction is cited in the Anderson memo to Dr Fauci as seeing "unusual features" in the virus. These were in a small percentage of the genome, "so that one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered." Mr. Anderson goes on to note that he and his team of virologists 'all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." What does Anderson mean by this important phrase? Anything inconsistent with evolutionary origin has to be man-made is the conclusion drawn by many virologists including David Baltimore, cited here in the WSJ. Virologist later modified their stand saying it was evolutionary because of professional interest in not starting a what WSJ calls "storm of condemnation" over gain of function research, a exotic name for genetically enhancing the pathogenic power of viruses or increasing its transmissibility effect. Nicholas Wade is a Science writer who has worked for Nature, Science and The New York Times. ...

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A state wide ban on single use plastic bags goes into effect in New York state March 1, 2020. This is part of a global push to get rid of single use plastic bags that pollute the environment, end up in waterways, rivers, on trees and landfills. Some clues are offered here on why store owners still used plastic bags, and why large grocery chains still use plastic. The plastic bags cost much less than paper bags. Here one small store owner says 100,000 plastic bags cost him $2000, the same number of paper bags $15,000. New York state uses 23 million single use plastic bags a year. A public education campaign is underway. New York city requires stores to charge 5 cents per paper bag, with 3 cents going to an environmental fund and 2 cents to a the local government. Astonishingly for a large city in a developed country this report shows a Moroccan immigrant saying that it is already popular in her home country Morocco where the ban on single use plastic bags has reduced litter. Americans are not used to carrying reusable bags to the grocery store in the way Germans or people in other countries are. ...

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 Donald trumps economic plan would worsen the country's economy through extravagant borrowing and lower economic growth in the long run. Because it lowers taxes by 15 percent without any paired cuts Trump's plan would worsen the deficit, so that large debt would hurt the economy in the long run. Clinton's plan would increase taxes by 4  percent largely on high incomes so as not to hurt consumer spending, with paired spending to help lower income households. Because Trump's tax cuts benefits go disproportionately to higher incomes the benefits in terms of consumer spending are slight or insignificant. In the current state of weak income gains of the last ten years it would take some time for the middle and working class to recover. Clinton's plan carefully nudges that recovery forward without aggravating the debt, so that as incomes and net worth recovers across broad parts of the population, the U.S. is poised to go forward with strong growth as in the postwar years. Trump's plan frontloads tax benefits to higher incomes at the expense of worsening debt and enlarging future debt. In the process it worsens income disparities already aggravated by the 2008 financial crisis. Reducing the chances of a broad based recovery for all parts of the population, necessary for a strong recovery.                       ...

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This report in The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, gives insights into the Chinese position in trade war with the U.S.  China has its own internal groups which support China being able to take a leadership role in world affairs. Xi Jinping made giving China a prominent role in the world a feature of his presidency. China  has this internal audience and its own sense that China's resurgence was won with hard work and cooperation, plus dedication of the Chinese people. In the past Japan and South Korea also used state subsidized industries, and subsidies to gain leadership in key business sectors involving high technology. China would see this state subsidies model as its own model of development. From this standpoint the U.S. demands on subsidies as unfair competition could be seen as changing a key part of its economic model.  Asking China to put everything in writing and show tangible proof of enforcement as the U.S. insisted in talks, was too much for the Chinese side. China said trust us to do this, and lift the tariffs based on our verbal assurances. The U.S. having seen decades of no progress on this point, wanted tangible proof before tariffs were lifted. Added to the demands on subsidies were the demands for no more of what the U.S. calls stealing of U.S. technology through forced transfer of technology by U.S. firms as a condition to operate in Chinese markets. With the U.S. lagging in 5G technology and Huawei ahead the issue resonates on the U.S. side. Add to this Mr. Trump's key voter base includes the former Democratic party supporting workers who have shifted to him because of trade agreements and policies of Clinton and Obama that hurt American workers through seemingly endless closure of manufacturing plants from Chinese competition.   ...