The year 2008 will obviously go down as one of the most eventful years in recent history.  It was the year that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.  It was the year that the Internet replaced print and TV as the driving force in a presidential election. It was the beginning of the end of 15 years of divisive cultural politics in America.

2008 was the year of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.  This collapse was the first one since the beginning of the new global economy and thus showed how humanity and all of …

We are coming to an end of the greatest financial age of sports in history.  The twelve years between 1996 and 2008 were years when the money around sports exploded beyond any precedent era.  This also means that, going forward, the economics around sports in general will decline, at least for the next 5-8 years if not longer.

The bookends for these 12 years of explosive financial growth are the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and the Beijing Olympics of 2008.  The Atlanta Olympics were the first post-cold war Olympics and, being held in the U.S. created a huge marketing platform.  The …

A global shift in consciousness has occurred during October.  Trust and confidence have given way to fear and uncertainty. Plans and expectations have been completely altered or dashed altogether.  Governments, entire industries, equity markets and the majority of the adult populations in the developed countries of the world are staring into a financial abyss that has no correlation to anything any of them have experienced (unless they are 80 years or older).

Governments separately, and then in consort struggle to stay ahead of a financial catastrophe they can’t quite fathom.  Hundreds of millions of people feel as thought they have been …

More than a year ago, I wrote a column about two damaged brands. One damaged brand was the “Made in China” brand and the other was the well respected financial brand of Wall Street.  At that time China was dealing with the fact that pet food produced in China was killing pets all over the world and that toys produced in China had extremely unsafe levels of lead.  Also at that time Wall Street was beginning to deal with the meltdown of the mortgage backed securities market.

This column immediately came to mind last week.  In the same week …