The bruised U.S. economy limped through the first quarter, growing at just a 0.6% pace as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down. The statistic did not meet what economists consider the classic definition of a recession, which is a retraction of the economy. This means that although the economy is stuck in a rut, it is still managing to grow, even if modestly.

Consumers—whose spending is vital to the country’s economic health—turned much more cautious, also restraining overall economic growth in the first quarter. Their spending rose at just a 1% pace. To bolster the economy, the Federal Reserve is expected to lower a key interest rate by one-quarter percentage point to 2%.

Chinese intertwine business and personal affairs much more deeply. They do things for their partners even if they are personal affairs.

If you wander into any of China’s five floored bookstores, the first thing you notice right when you enter the store won’t be the newest hardcovered fictions. It’ll be management books written by successful American businessmen. On shelf after shelf, you could see copies of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” Jack Welch’s “Straight From the Gut,” Tom Peters’s “Re-Imagine!” and just about everything the late Peter Drucker ever wrote. One section you won’t find in Chinese bookstores is a section for management or human resources.

There’s a good reason for this. In the West (not to mention Japan and South Korea) management skills are a given. Graduate schools of management churn out M.B.A.’s, while instilling the basic processes and systems that virtually all multinational companies rely on. People who rise to the top of companies are the ones who have mastered the art of management. But there are also many first-rate managers who populate the middle ranks of companies. They are the lifeblood of most big companies.

That’s not the case in China. The shortage of managerial talent is huge. There just aren’t very many people here who have the range of skills you need in that position. Xiang Bing, dean of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, said: “We Chinese are so willing to work hard for money. We are intelligent. We have the drive and the passion. But we put too much attention on technology and not enough on institution-building. And our soft skills are a real weakness.”

One issue with management is that most Chinese entrepreneurs hire friends and family because they don’t trust people they don’t know. And if they don’t get help fast, they are going to lose control of their rapidlygrowing businesses. Rapid growth, though, is only one of the issues these entrepreneurs are facing. Every bit as difficult are ingrained mind-sets and attitudes that can make it difficult for Chinese executives to adapt professional management techniques.

Many Chinese entrepreneurs (even those who have graduated from the executive M.B.A. program) don’t want to hire M.B.A.’s because they bridle at having to pay professional management salaries. Another problem is that many Chinese executives believe that because it is a Chinese business, professional managers won’t fit in the system.

When dealing with each other, the Chinese, quite simply, do business differently than Western companies do business. For one thing, there is a lot of petty corruption that is an ingrained part of business, especially among the state-run companies. Purchasing managers favor one vendor over another because they get a kickback. A sales rep buys customer loyalty with under-the-table payments. And so on. People also tend to put their own interests over the interests of their company — not a huge surprise, given that everyone worked for the state just a generation ago.

Finally, there is the gnarliest issue of all: the importance placed on the deep, intertwining set of relationships known as guanxi. Unlike the West, you don’t just have a business relationship in China; you have a relationship that interchangeably mixes the personal with the professional.

If there’s really a huge excess of supply, it would restrain demand

The Federal Reserve is considering contingency plans to bolster its lending power, in case measures it has taken to rescue the troubled credit markets fail. One option being considered is to have the Treasury borrow more money than it needs to fund the government and keep the proceeds on deposit at the Federal Reserve.

Other options include issuing debt under the Federal Reserve’s name instead of the Treasury’s, and asking Congress for immediate authority for the Fed to pay interest on commercial bank reserves rather than waiting until a law enacted earlier allows it to in 2011.

If the Fed were to issue debt, it would be following the Bank of England and this could involve issuing short-dated paper in the two-to-five-year Treasuries area. Secondly, the market would not like the Fed to issue long paper which would hang for many years. Should the Treasury decide with Congressional approval to issue more bonds to fund the Fed, there should be good demand for extra paper due to the backdrop of weakening global economic growth, although this would depend on the ultimate size of the issuance.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the events leading up to the collapse of Bear Stearns, specifically a surge in options contracts betting that the investment bank’s share price would fall sharply. Citing people familiar with the matter, the paper reported the SEC probe focuses on a surge last week in “put” options that came days before the firm’s proposed sale to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for stock now valued at about $278.5 million, or $2.32 a share.

  Assets under management, in billions, as of Dec. 31.

1. Bridgewater Associates
2. Farallon Capital Mgmt.
3. Och-Ziff Capital Mgmt. Group
4. D.E. Shaw Group
5. Goldman Sachs Asset Mgmt.
6. Renaissance Technologies
7. Paulson & Co.
8. Highbridge Capital Mgmt.
9. Barclays Global Investors
10. Citadel Investment Group

Boiler Room: An unflattering term used to describe a fraud scheme in which salespeople are hired to call unsuspecting individuals and push investment opportunities.

“Boiler rooms” that use high-pressure tactics to lure investors to buy stocks have become a worldwide problem, with operations identified in areas as far-flung as southeast Asia and Africa. Trying to close these operations, which commonly cold call potential investors and use fraudulent methods to push overpriced stocks, is a challenge because they can set up shop virtually anywhere and are hard to track.

Boiler rooms, a term that refers to the kind of makeshift offices these operations often use as their base, have been a focus of U.S. authorities for years. They involve brokers who refuse to say anything negative about the stocks they push and make baseless predictions about how much the shares are likely to jump.

One problem in monitoring the schemes is that the deceptive brokerages may hold themselves out as legitimate firms that are set up in one place but in fact are operating out of another locale. Southeast Asia and Africa are two regions where such activities have been identified, as well as in parts of Europe such as the UK and Spain.

International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), an umbrella organization for the world’s securities regulators, whose group promotes international cooperation among securities regulators, is pressing roughly half of its more than 100 member countries that have not yet signed a 2002 memorandum of understanding on sharing information. Most countries in the larger financial markets, including the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia, have signed the memorandum.

Bosses who never need to work any more, but go to the office anyway

While many billionaires do enjoy a blessedly unhurried existence, some embrace a very different approach: They hit the office every day. The most prominent working rich? The world’s wealthiest chief executives. These are people who don’t have to work another day in their lives. And yet they choose to devote untold amounts of time and energy to the arduous task of running a company and answering to shareholders.

Who are they? By perusing the ranks of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans from September and our annual billionaires’ list from last March, Forbes found the 10 richest CEOs around, some of whom founded their own companies, others who benefited from large inheritances and still others who built their fortunes through other means.

1. Warren Buffett Net worth: $52 billion

   Chairman and chief executive, Berkshire Hathaway

2. Lakshmi Mittal Net worth: $32 billion

   Chairman and chief executive, ArcelorMittal

3. Sheldon Adelson Net worth: $28 billion

   Chairman and chief executive, Las Vegas Sands

4. Bernard Arnault Net worth: $26 billion

   Chairman and chief executive of LVMH Group

5. Lawrence Ellison Net worth: $26 billion

   Chief executive of Oracle

6. Mukesh Ambani Net worth: $20.1 billion

   Chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries

7. Anil Ambani Net worth: $18.2 billion

   Chairman of Reliance ADA

8. Michael Dell Net worth: $17.2 billion

   Chairman and chief executive, Dell

9. Azim Premji Net worth: $17.1 billion

   Chairman, Wipro

10. Charles Koch Net worth: $17 billion

    Chairman and chief executive, Koch Industries

Warning To The Bulls

Managers of Government-run Chinese mutual funds keep coming up with the same can’t-miss moneymaking opportunity for Lin Rongshi–and for themselves. The messenger might be a low-level functionary or a trusted middleman. Lin, a private fund manager, said the message sometimes would be delivered in his high-rise office overlooking Shanghai’s financial district or, more discreetly, by mobile phone. “They notify us first, and they would buy a few days later [for the fund], then they would come back to us to split the profit I make from buying at a lower price,” says Lin.

This front-running scheme would net an almost guaranteed haul for Lin and for the state-sector employees. Some others, –insiders all, would profit, too. The only outsiders in the transaction would be the mutual funds’ customers, average Chinese investors who have little idea how routinely their money is abused on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. They come to this man to cheat a fortune from the stock market because he was once an expert at it.

Lin says he made his first $100,000 from a trade made on inside information ten years ago, at age 23. He clocked close to a million dollars by the time he was 25, on insider trading, front-running and stock manipulation in the last Chinese bull market, before losing it all and more in 2001 on his last and biggest play.

Rich shareholders, fund managers, even the top management of listed companies–all have approached Lin in the last year, he says. Chinese investors often suspect manipulation behind the sudden, sharp rises in share prices, but their typical reaction is not outrage. Few stock cheaters get caught, and those who do are rarely jailed. The regulator, the CSRC, China Securities Regulatory Commision, is lacking in staff to hunt down cheats, lacking in legal power to punish them severely and sometimes lacking in political clout to take on some of the well-connected state-owned companies it is supposed to watch. Lawsuits are even less effective. The Communist Party, wary of any organized group of malcontents, essentially does not permit class actions.

So, how do you short Chinese stocks when shorting the Chinese mainland market is not allowed? There are several work-arounds, but none are perfect:

• Go through one of China’s Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors. QFII’s—including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, HSBC, UBS and several dozen others—are allowed to buy A shares on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges, the playground of domestic Chinese investors. A QFII can offer investors short positions through derivatives. The downside: More middlemen means more transaction costs.
• Short-sell exchange-traded funds that are comprised of Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares. The WISE CSI 300 China Tracker and the iShares FTSE/Xinhua A50 China Tracker are both listed in Hong Kong. The downside: You can’t bet against individual stocks.
• Short-sell a QFII’s closed-end A share fund, like Morgan Stanley’s China A Share Fund. The downside: Even if the value of the fund’s assets falls, that doesn’t mean the fund’s share price also has to fall.
• Bet against Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong. Direxion offers a China Bear 2X Fund and ProFunds Group offers ProShares UltraShort FTSE Xinhua China 25, both betting against the same 25 Hong Kong-traded stocks. If you’re betting on an all-China slump, these funds will rise 2% for every 1% that the 25-company index falls. The downside: Valuations on the Hong Kong “H share” market are not as sky high as on the A share market.
• Wait until China opens its own futures market, which has been expected for some time. The downside: You might miss your chance while you’re waiting. China might not want people betting against their stocks until at least after the Beijing Olympics.

Doctors and Lawyers, Make Way For The Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms

As of 2006, nearly 60% of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale, and nearly 70% knew someone who already had. Make no mistake, law and medicine (the most elite of the traditional professions) have always been demanding. But they were also unquestionably prestigious. Sure, bankers made big money and professors held impressive degrees. But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars (outsize pay, long-term security, impressive schooling and authority over grave matters) doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all. Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” says author Richard Florida.  “But they’ve lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.” The pay is still good and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward (where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites) some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago. Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped a 6.7% between 2006 and 2005.  44% of lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they would not recommend the profession to a young person.)

Unquestionably, many doctors and lawyers still find the higher calling of their profession — helping people — as well as the prestige and money, worth the hard work. And the stars in either field are still that: commanding the handsome compensation and social cachet. But to others, the daily trudge serves as a constant reminder that the entrepreneur’s autonomy simply can’t be found in law or medicine.

Life for attornies is less like “Ally McBeal” and more like “The Practice,” where lawyers work like dogs in a thoroughly unglamorous setting. Doctors face similar pressure. Complaints about managed care crimping doctors’ income and authority over medical decisions are nothing new, but the problems are only getting worse, several doctors said. Increasing workloads and paperwork might be tolerable if the old feeling of authority were still the same, doctors said. But patients who once might have revered them for their knowledge and skill often arrive at the office armed with a sense of personal expertise, gleaned from a few hours on the internet, doctors said, not to mention a disdain for the medical system in general. And then there’s the money issue. Or rather, money envy. Associates at major New York firms often start at $150,000 to $180,000. Partners at the country’s biggest 100 firms took home an average of $1.2 million in 2006. Hardly small sums, but for many senior investment bankers, bonuses and salaries this year will average $2.25 million to $2.75 million. Doctors rarely approach such heights. While income varies widely, a typical physician might earn $150,00 to $300,000. A surgeon might make $250,000 to $400,000; hot-shot surgeons can earn $750,000 a year, and superstars over a million dollars.

Careers in more entrepreneurial industries like hedge funds and private equity firms follow the ’sky is the limit’ model of the entertainment industry, the Web or professional sports. Kevin J. Delaney, a sociology professor who has studied the culture of hedge funds and private equity firms, said executives there “love the idea of being responsible for their own fate.” They’re going to make a million or lose a million based on the trades they make.

This star-system mentality is particularly attractive to college students, many of whom were reared with the ’80s philosophy that every child was a potential superstar. And they want immediate rewards — not exactly the mentality that will fuel a student through years of medical school, a residency and additional training for a specialty.

Everyone plays up the notion that we are in huge amounts of debt. This is simply not true.

With Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in China this week to discuss a range of issues related to U.S.-Sino commerce, we thought it would be an opportune time to separate fact from fiction and highlight some key issues that presently define the economic ties between the United States and China:

1. U.S. Foreign Investment in China — Not As Much as You Think     Rarely does a day pass without the media reporting yet another American firm de-camping the United States for China. Reality is quite different. U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) to China has climbed over the past decade, but a little perspective is in order. The $15.5 billion the U.S. has sunk in China this decade equates to only 1.6% of the global total. U.S. FDI in Ireland and Germany was roughly triple the level of investment in China over the same period.

2. The U.S. Enjoys a Huge Lead over China in FDI     It is no secret that Chinese investors are quite interested in increasing their direct investment position in corporate America. Equally, it’s no secret that any planned purchase of a U.S. company by Chinese investors is subject to a great deal of scrutiny in Washington. Next to America’s massive trade deficit with the mainland, China’s foreign investment in the U.S. has emerged as a key tension point between the two parties. That said, it’s interesting to note that when it comes to foreign direct investment — or the corporate presence of the U.S. in China versus China’s presence in the U.S. — the U.S. enjoys an overwhelming advantage over the mainland. In 2006, for instance, U.S. foreign investment in China on a historic cost basis totaled $22.2 billion, a figure well in excess of China’s investment stakes in the U.S. In other words, U.S. firms have far better access to the Chinese market than their Chinese counterparts in the United States. This investment gap represents a strategic competitive advantage to corporate America.

3. What really attracts U.S. firms to China? Consumers     Contrary to popular opinion, access to the Chinese consumer remains the key motivation of U.S. firms entering China. Keep in mind that China is not a unified market of 1.2 billion people but a collection of markets with different dialects, varying levels of development, and disparate per capita incomes. These variables, along with many others (the brand-sensitivity of Chinese consumers coupled with intense foreign and local competition) dictate that American firms adapt to local tastes and operate on the ground. Customer proximity, in other words, is key in China.

4. “Made in China” — What It Really Means     The mainland has emerged as an exporting powerhouse, with “Made in China” the most ubiquitous signature in the world. Yet lost on many folks is this: A great deal of what China exports to the United States and the world are goods from so-called foreign-invested enterprises, or foreign subsidiaries of various global multinationals. “Made in China” is not what most people think. Thousands of low-cost Chinese firms are not flooding the U.S. market with goods, displacing U.S. workers in the process. Rather, foreign firms are increasingly leveraging low-cost China to their competitive advantage.

5. The U.S. Trade Deficit with China: A Dangerous Scorecard     Much has been made of China’s merchandise trade surplus with the United States, which topped $230 billion in 2006. That’s a large figure, to be sure, although the figure does not accurately reflect the true nature of bilateral commerce between the United States and China. Missing from this equation are local sales of goods and services of U.S. foreign affiliates operating in China. The latter totaled some $86.5 billion in 2005 (the latest available data. Missing from the trade debate is the following: The primary means by which U.S. firms deliver goods and services to China is via foreign affiliate sales, not exports. At the end of the day, China does sell more to the United States, but not by the lopsided margin some might suppose.

6. Capital — China’s Top export to the U.S.     China’s most important export to the United States is capital — or U.S. dollars to be more exact. Lost on many legislators in Washington that want to punish China for running such a large U.S. trade surplus is this simple yet critical fact: China not only provides U.S. consumers with cheap, high-quality goods, it also provides the capital to purchase such goods by recycling greenbacks earned from trade back into U.S. treasuries and other dollar-denominated assets.

7. The Mainland — An unlikely Source of U.S. Profits     The lopsided nature of U.S.-China trade gives the impression that all the benefits go to the Chinese. That is simply not true. One of the best kept secrets on Wall Street is this: U.S. firms are making tidy sums of money in the Middle Kingdom.

Data on foreign affiliate income from the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis corroborate these findings, with U.S. foreign affiliate income in China rising from $1.2 billion in 2000 to $4.7 billion last year. The bottom line: At a time when the U.S. is threatening to impose greater trade sanctions against China, U.S. firms with operations in China are posting record profits.

Here’s the rest of the list.

Watch out for a growing number of trust fund babies in Asia

The opportunities for private banks in Asia Pacific are big, and still growing. The region is home to more than a quarter of the world’s high net worth individuals (HNWIs) - the industry jargon for people with $1m of investable assets. Their wealth is growing by 8.5% a year. By 2011, their combined riches will total $12,700bn.

The difference between North America and Europe? The wealth management business in Asia is a lot more diverse than in Europe or north America - in terms of providers, legal jurisdictions and customers. Potential clients might be a Japanese aristocrat whose family has been rich for generations, or a Malaysian entrepreneur who grew up in a kampong (village) and now wants to invest the proceeds of an IPO according to Islamic shariah principles.

China continues to boom - there are estimated to be at least 300,000 Chinese HNWIs. Foreign private banks are setting up branches as quickly as they can. They are starting to move inland from the wealthy cities along the coast to service the growing number of entrepreneurs in China’s West. India is also showing enormous promise too. Asian HNWIs tend to be more mobile than their counterparts in Europe or north America. That diversity may mean opportunities in providing specialist tax services, for example.

Asian clients may have very different ideas about what private bankers should do for them. A western approach based solely on analysing risk tolerance in accordance with modern portfolio theory, and recommending appropriate products, may not sit well with a customer who is just looking for share tips. It takes time to build trust with such clients, and help them to understand that wealth preservation and growth is more complicated than betting on shares on China’s overheated stock market.

The need for private banking is likely to intensify as a big wave of wealth starts to flow down the generations. “In Asia people may not be as open with me as western clients about all of their investments, so I can’t always make appropriate recommendations,” says one private banker.  The “rags-to-riches” ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs of south-east Asia are beginning to die off. Many left home to seek their fortunes as manual workers in the tin mines of Malaya, or fled China when the communists took over, to start small businesses that grew into family conglomerates. Such patriarchs learned about business the hard way. Many may not have been educated past primary school. But their grandsons - and granddaughters - may well have been to top international business schools, and have very different ideas about how the family business should be run. They may even consider whether the business should be sold off, and the cash invested instead. Watch out for a growing number of trust fund babies in Asia.

Research suggests that many rich families in Asia are ill-prepared for generational change. Only half of the 33 families surveyed in Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Taiwan said they involved the next generation in managing the business. Many young graduates even felt that inheriting the family company would be a burden, as it constrained their career choices.

Asia, outside of Japan, and the Middle East would need 10,000 new private bankers by 2010. Private bankers need more than quantitative skills. They must watch the markets, in case the client asks their opinion. It also helps to speak a few languages, especially Chinese dialects. Such people are rare and no bank seems happy with the recruitment situation. Publicly, managers talk about providing staff with friendly environments and great career opportunities to win the battle for talent.  93% of customer relationship managers in private banks in Asia said they had been approached by rivals in the past year.  One in seven private banks risked losing a third of its staff or more. It is not unusual for entire teams to follow a talented manager and take their clients with them. 

The boom in private banking is sharpening traditional rivalries between the north and south-east Asian hubs of Hong Kong and Singapore. Both have trustworthy reputations as financial centres. Wealth managers have traditionally clustered in Hong Kong. But Singapore, which has the world’s fastest growing population of dollar millionaires, has been catching up.

How Could You NOT Judge This Guy? 10 Popular Myths About Wealth and Luxury

1. The Wealthy made their money easily and spend their money easily. Most wealthy individuals spend far more hours working, embrace far more risk, and create far more value for society than their mainstream counterparts. Even today, for most, it still takes years of immense sacrifice to achieve wealth. Wealthy consumers are therefore very value conscious and discerning when they buy luxury goods and services.

2. The Wealthy are conspicuous consumption machines living in another reality. The minority of wealthy individuals who live ostentatious, opulent lifestyles are often portrayed as stereotypical wealthy consumers. In reality, most wealthy consumers are value creators, who seek quality and value, including authentic prestige, in luxury goods and services. Like many of us, some of their biggest concerns include taking care of aging parents and raising well-educated, generous children. When marketing to them, acknowledge their basic human values and show you understand them as the well rounded and balanced individuals they really are.

3. The Wealthy can’t really define luxury. Put a list of brands in front of the typical wealthy consumer and she, or he, will not only be able to articulate the attributes that constitute a luxury brand, but will also discern differences between brands better than any luxury marketer. The ability of wealthy consumers to define true luxury, individually, and as a group, is laser-accurate.

4. Luxury goods are a far larger industry than luxury services. Luxury goods such as couture fashion, watches and jewelry, get all the attention, yet, are dwarfed by the size of luxury services such as wealth management, travel and leisure, security, etc. Innovative services, including those as basic as nanny services, concierge services, and medical services, aimed at the wealthy, will grow faster and more profitably in the future. Many luxury goods firms are busy transforming themselves into services, or adding services to add value.

5. The Wealthy don’t participate in consumer satisfaction surveys. Wealthy consumers provide feedback and respond to surveys, sometimes more that the general population. Most wealthy consumers are highly educated businesspeople. They recognize the value of feedback and will provide theirs candidly to brands they trust. No metric is more highly correlated with financial success than customer satisfaction. Brands that fail to solicit and measure their customers’ feedback and continuously seek to improve customer satisfaction will become extinct.

6. The Wealthy don’t go online. A recent survey by the Luxury Institute found that the vast majority of wealthy consumers are regularly online. The wealthy work long hours, are more time-starved than the general population, and use the internet more heavily for researching luxury goods and services, and conducting transactions.

7. The Wealthy don’t use ratings and reviews to make purchasing decisions. A recent survey by the Luxury Institute found that over 80% of wealthy consumers use ratings and reviews sites to facilitate purchasing decisions. While the wealthiest may rely on a few trusted experts, many have middle class values and lead regular lives that include seeking information from ratings and reviews sites and publications. The difference is that these savvy consumers steer clear of biased websites and publications and “Best of” lists that pretend to provide non-conflicted advice.

8. Luxury marketers should be targeting only the wealthiest clients. Luxury brands that seek to serve only the $100 million plus net-worth consumer are usually small and often have fairly low profit margins. The truly under-served wealthy, in luxury goods, and, especially in luxury services, are households with a net worth from $ 1 million to $50 million. Their lives are busy, and often complex, and require many types of trusted advice. There are far more of these individuals globally, and growing in numbers.

9. Wealthy clients do not give referrals. Research with wealthy and ultra-wealthy consumers indicates that the vast majority are willing to refer trusted brands to friends and family. Yet, ask luxury goods and services CEOs what their client referral rates are, and the answer is usually well below 50%. This disconnect is due to the fact that most luxury goods and services firms rely on individual salespeople for referrals rather than creating a company-wide referral program. It is one of the greatest revenue opportunities in luxury today.

10. Wealthy consumers are not very loyal since they can go anywhere. The majority of wealthy consumers are among the most loyal customers. Their loyalty must be earned with great service. Ratings show that most luxury goods and services firms have yet to internalize what brands such as Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bessemer Trust inherently know: That the entire customer experience, from A to Z, must be at a level that makes customers happy to do business with the brand. This is the greatest, and easiest to implement, opportunity for luxury goods and services brands globally today.

It’s All About Goals. Don’t plan to fail by failing to plan.

Most people don’t have goals. They have dreams instead. Some 97% of people don’t take the first step, writing down goals. They just keep dreaming. Millionaires, on average, read their written goals daily. This cements them (the goals) into their minds. Billionaires use “the power of three.” Billionaires read their written goals an average of three times daily, three times more often than mere millionaires.

Here’s how millionaires differ from middle class people, according to author Keith Cameron Smith, in his book “Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires And The Middle Class:”

1. Millionaires think long term, middle class people think short term.

2. Millionaires talk about ideas, middle class people talk about things and people.

3. Millionaires embrace change, middle class people are threatened by change.

4. Millionaires take calculated risks, middle class people are afraid of risks.

5. Millionaires continue to learn and grow, middle class people stop learning after they’re finished with school.

6. Millionaires work for profit, middle class people work for wages.

7. Millionaires believe in being generous, middle class people believe they’re unable to be generous.

8. Millionaires have multiple sources of income, middle class people have one or two income sources.

9. Millionaires focus on increasing net worth, middle class people focus on increasing their paychecks.

10. Millionaires ask questions that empower, middle class people ask questions that disempower.

By all means, even if you’re broke, the first thing to do is to get rid of your middle class mindset, which confines you to a life term in your own mental prison of self-limiting beliefs and the low expectations paupers accept passively. Whether you succeed or not, whether you are financially blessed or dirt poor, it’s up to you (not an employer and certainly not the government) to make yourself financially successful. If you’re poor, don’t blame God. Look in the mirror instead. Then get to work.

Brett Steenbarger’s Top Ten Reasons Traders Lose Their Discipline

10 ) Environmental distractions and boredom cause a lack of focus;

9 ) Fatigue and mental overload create a loss of concentration;

8 ) Overconfidence follows a string of successes;

7 ) Unwillingness to accept losses, leading to alterations of trade plans after the trade has gone into the red;

6 ) Loss of confidence in one’s trading plan/strategy because it has not been adequately tested and battle-tested;

5 ) Personality traits that lead to impulsivity and low frustration tolerance in stressful situations;

4 ) Situational performance pressures, such as trading slumps and increased personal expenses, that change how traders trade (putting P/L ahead of making good trades);

3 ) Trading positions that are excessive for the account size, created exaggerated P/L swings and emotional reactions;

2 ) Not having a clearly defined trading plan/strategy in the first place;

1 ) Trading a time frame, style, or market that does not match your talents, skills, risk tolerance, and personality.

7 Countries Saying Bye Bye To The US Dollars

1. Saudi Arabia:  Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates along with the US Federal Reserve. This is seen as a signal that a break from the dollar currency peg is imminent.
2. South Korea:  In 2005, Korea announced its intention to shift its investments to currencies of countries other than the US. There are whispers that the Bank of Korea is planning on selling $1 billion US bonds in the near future, after a $100 million sale this past August.
3.  China:  China is threatening a “nuclear option” of huge dollar liquidation in response to possible trade sanctions intended to force a yuan revaluation.
4. Venezuela:  In September, Chavez instructed Venezuela’s state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA to change its dollar investments to euros and other currencies in order to mitigate risk.
5. Sudan:   Sudan is, once again, planning to convert its dollar holdings to the euro and other currencies. Additionally, they’ve recommended to commercial banks, government departments, and private businesses to do the same.
6. Iran:  Iran is perhaps the most likely candidate for an imminent abandonment of the dollar. Recently, Iran requested that its shipments to Japan be traded for yen instead of dollars.
7. Russia:  They’ve discussed pricing oil in euros, a move that could provide a large shift away from the dollar and towards the euro, as Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter.

Why The Weak Dollar?  First, there’s the difference between the interest rate in the United States (the one the Federal Reserve just dropped) and the interest rates of other central banks around the world. When the United States dropped its rate, other banks did not follow. Now the spread between the interest rate at the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve is smaller than it has traditionally been, and that has weakened the value of the dollar against the euro.

Second, central banks around the world have been diversifying their holdings away from dollars to euros, British pounds and so on. That means there are more dollars out there in currency markets available to purchase. More dollars floating around means diminished value.

What’s This All Mean?   Many of them want to protect their financial interests, and a number of them want to end the US oversight that comes with using the dollar. Although it’s not clear how many of these countries will actually follow through on an abandonment of the dollar, it is clear that its status as a world currency is in trouble. The dollar’s status as a cheaply-produced US export is a vital part of our economy. Losing this status could rock the financial lives of both Americans and the worldwide economy.