welcome to ethiopia

BAKO, ETHIOPIA -- In recent months, the Ethiopian government began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.
Why Attractive?" reads one glossy poster with photos of green fields and a map outlining swaths of the country available at bargain-basement prices. "Vast, fertile, irrigable land at low rent. Abundant water resources. Cheap labor. Warmest hospitality."
This impoverished and chronically food-insecure Horn of Africa nation is rapidly becoming one of the world's leading destinations for the booming business of land leasing, by which relatively rich countries and investment firms are securing 40-to-99-year contracts to farm vast tracts of land.
Governments across Southeast Asia, Latin America and especially Africa are seizing the chance to attract this new breed of investors, wining and dining executives and creating land-leasing agencies and land catalogues to showcase their offerings of earth. In Africa alone, experts estimate that about 50 million acres -- roughly the size of Nebraska -- have been leased in the past two years.

€ target 1.60

Dollar forecasters predict the world’s reserve currency will continue sliding even when the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates, which policy makers say is an “extended period” away.Standard Chartered Plc, Aletti Gestielle SGR, HSBC Holdings Plc and Scotia Capital Inc. say the dollar will depreciate as much as 7.1 percent versus the euro. 1.4950 + 7.1% = 1.6011.
About $12 trillion of fiscal and monetary stimulus, the world’s lowest borrowing costs and a record $4 trillion of government bond sales between 2009 and 2010 will weigh on the currency, they said. So will the nation’s 10.2 percent unemployment rate and signs that the economic recovery may falter, they said. “History tells us the dollar shouldn’t start rising on a sustained basis until 12 months after the Fed starts to lift rates,” said Callum Henderson, the Singapore-based global head of foreign-exchange strategy for Standard Chartered.

1109

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Gary Moore in Faithful Finances 101: From the Poverty of Fear and Greed to the Riches of Spiritual Investing (Templeton Foundation Press): “It does a fool no good to spend money on an education, because he has no common sense.” Strive for wisdom not education.

Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
Ovid

Delegating authority to make decisions implies absolute confidence in those who get the power, says NBA great Bill Russell and co-author David Falkner in Russell Rules:

Entrepreneurs have a huge tolerance for failure because they see it as a process and not an event. Work as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond (Broadway) talks about Thomas Edison: "Edison tried thousands of combinations of materials before he was successful in inventing the light bulb. He didn't experience these disappointments as failures but as clues on the road to success."