Leadership Lessons: Sculpt Your Character: Be Better than You Are: Abraham Lincoln and the Presidency at Inc.com

Leadership is a skill and studies of great Presidents like Abraham Lincoln can reveal their most useful insights and secrets.

Hitendra Wadhwa -- our candidate for name of the year -- has the article you want to read at Inc.com in Lessons in Leadership: How Abraham Lincoln Became America's Greatest President, writing, inter alia:

"Do you have the discipline to sculpt your character?

Do you view yourself solely as who you are today—some good, some bad—or do you see the potential for gradually sculpting your character further, the way Lincoln did?"

That article hit me at just the right time as I was about to level half of academia and will now try to be more diplomatic and show more leadership.

Thank you!

The Banking Pea and Shell Game in the European Union Continues Successfully

Jack Ewing at The New York Times Global Business worries that Help in European Financial Crisis Could Spawn ‘Zombie Banks’, writing inter alia:

"In December, the European Central Bank invited banks to borrow money at the benchmark interest rate of 1 percent for three years, compared with a previous maximum maturity of one year. Banks could borrow as much as they wanted provided they posted collateral. They jumped at the opportunity: 523 banks borrowed 489 billion euros, or $647 billion.

The central bank will offer another round of three-year loans at the end of this month, and last Thursday it loosened its collateral rules to encourage smaller banks to join in. According to some predictions, banks may draw on the cheap credit even more enthusiastically than they did in December."

Read the whole thing here.

We continue to point out that the mainstream media continues to concentrate in their discussion of financial crises on the debtors, whereas the real question is the identity of the creditors to whom the debt monies are owed. Why should there be a crisis if credit is simply"re-funded" as is essentially being done.

It is all a pea and shell game, and, in the end, we all owe ourselves.

The ultimate question is always WHO has the money, i.e. its distribution viz. redistribution, not the question of not enough money. The money is always there.

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

IMF World Economic Outlook and Exports: North America, USA, EU, UK, Germany, France, Asia

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At  MarketWatch, David Marsh in Marsh on Monday asks: Why does Germany feel so good about itself?, as March writes, inter alia:

"The mood in Germany is a mirror image of sentiment in France. President Sarkozy said glumly on French TV earlier this month that France had only 100,000 exporting companies while Germany boasted 400,000."

Sarkozy and the French, or the Greeks, or the United Kingdom, or Italy, or Spain, should not wonder about not being able to keep up with the German economy and its export machine.

Germany is a land of engineers and inventors. There is no conscious urge here to dominate Europe economically, as far as we can tell, but while others may be sitting around complaining, the Germans are up at the crack of dawn or before -- voluntarily, mind you -- churning out products and inventions for export markets.

The United Kingdom is an undenied dominant force in financial services, but has been falling behind steadily worldwide as far as its total exports are concerned, as shown by IMF stats in a graphic via Oxford Economics:

The downward trend of development in North America and the UK is clear.

Every nation of course has its particular specialties, especially in the European Union and the Euro zone, where, e.g. France and Italy lead the world in fashion and design, just as an example.

In fact, the European Union and the Euro area in general comprise the world's largest exporter by far as shown by these stats from the April 2011 World Economic Outlook of the IMF, showing that the Euro area accounts for a massive 26.1% of world exports, compared to the USA with only 9.8%, barely more than Germany alone with 8%, and, the cause of Sarkozy's worries, France, tied with the United Kingdom, with only 3.5%:

Obviously, these stats point clearly to the modernity of Europe and its ability to create and manufacture products that are capable of holding their own on world markets, whereas the United States and the United Kingdom have been basking in past glories -- something mirrored in many U.S. political campaigns -- rather than moving forward.

Nevertheless, Europe's great reliance on exports is also a weakness, making it much more sensitive to world markets than nations having smaller export shares.

Hat tip to CaryGEE.