How much longer they can continue to rely on the best sales force they never had to pay is open to question. One would think that IT departments would catch on that the priorities Microsoft has educated them to care about entail significant hidden costs. And if IT doesn’t get it on their own, one would think that their increasingly tech-savvy CEO’s would find someone who does.

Maybe, just maybe, the company that can’t manage to knock off a two-year old Motorola mobile phone design after reportedly spending hundreds of millions isn’t best equipped to understand what features are beneficial in a mobile tablet computer.

But it’s good to see Microsoft confident again. It seems like just yesterday they were predicting 80% market share in a couple of years in mobile phones. I wonder how that turned out?

Ouch. Not only did this traders’ drunken black-out purchase lose $9.7m and lead to a $7.6m loss for the year for his firm, it also moved the global price of oil $1.50 overnight.

Amazing. In other news, Steve Perkins was relieved of his job as a oil futures trader last year.

Count me with the neighbors who are “concerned about nuclear reactions taking place near their homes.”

The match has now past nine hours. The fifth set is longer than any other match played at Wimbledon this year. They’re in danger of being stopped for darkness for the second day in a row.

Even more remarkable? The Wimbledon Live Blog reports: “There have been no toilet breaks in this match, not one.”

This morning, this email was in my inbox:

Hi Matt! Thanks for your quick payment and I have already packed this, printed the label and it will be headed towards Michigan in the morning. Have a great week and you should get this in the next several days.

It’s a pretty simple email, but at the end of the two lines, I know exactly what’s happened and when I should expect to get the package. I’ve been thanked. And the author’s casual tone, greeting, use of “I”, and the concrete verbs leave me with both a sense of dealing with a real person, one who is both personable and professional.

You could certainly do worse. And most companies do.

The Finance Ministry is trying to bolster native demand for Japanese bonds. How would they do this? By targeting “the untapped market”, men of marrying age and convincing them that buying bonds will make them, wait for it, more attractive.

As Bloomberg explained:

“I want my future husband to be diligent about money,” a 27-year-old woman says in an ad being run in free magazines promoting a fixed-rate, three-year note that Japan started selling last week. “Playboys are no good.” She’s one of five women featured in the page, which says “Men who hold JGBs are popular with women!!”

The ministry commissioned the ads to appeal to citizens for money at a time when record government borrowing threatens to outstrip demand. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who took office yesterday, said he doesn’t have an instant fix to rein in the world’s largest public debt.

The government’s plan to attract marrying-age men comes after a campaign aimed at retirees started last August. …

“It strikes of desperation,” Christian Carrillo, a senior interest-rate strategist in Tokyo at Societe Generale SA said about the ad campaign. “I doubt this will be a successful strategy to attract retail investors.”

To make it even more worrying, they’re struggling to meet their obligations at a time when their three year bonds are yielding on a real basis (with inflation) negative 1% per year. (Women in Japan, apparently, aren’t looking for good investors.) What happens if their interest rate moves to just 2%, let alone 4% or 8%?

A nominal 1% return might be worthwhile when Japan experiences sharp deflation, but if that’s followed quickly by the debasing of their currency, it will be a disaster. What dominoes will fall globally? If the world’s financial system was brought to its knees by trouble in US subprime mortgages, and it took everything we had to avoid a depression, what is the remedy for a Japanese default? Surely the seizing up of the world’s largest bond market would have a catastrophic impact on the global economy and financial system. Right?

Which just goes to show how much more difficult it is to forecast rates and returns and to hedge risk in the current economic environment. This time isn’t different, but it sure doesn’t bear any resemblance to the world we’ve grown accustomed to over the last seventy years.

Stay tuned …

Location:44th St SE,Cascade,United States

No doubt one of the reasons they chose that goal and that timeframe was due to the trend in that direction supported by a weakening dollar and economies in Asia that are growing consumption faster than we are. There’s historical precedent too for this goal being achievable.

But even with a stiff wind at their backs, this goal may be difficult to achieve. After all, we’re not the only country committed to running a trade surplus to “export our way out of this recession.” Can you name a European or Asian country that isn’t trying mightily to run a trade surplus? Yeah, I can’t either.

The trouble is that the way accounting works, everyone can’t run a trade surplus at the same time. Trade worldwide balances on net. For every incremental dollar of trade surplus that shows up on the US books, an incremental dollar of trade deficit needs to be debited to some other countries current accounts.

And that’s not the only problem. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on other barriers to that objective. What barriers are these? US companies manufacturing abroad, undervalued Chinese currency, counterfeiters, already high penetration rates for large exporters, and more. Here’s a sample:

the shift by more U.S. companies toward producing goods overseas is one of the factors that makes doubling exports tougher. These firms have built more factories in fast-growing foreign countries to serve emerging markets, so they often supply the goods and services from an overseas arm—not by loading shipping containers in the U.S.

We’ll see if the US can actually meet its export targets. I just hope that we’re not spending today while counting on these gains tomorrow. Don’t hold your breath.

In preparation for the Pope’s September visit, staffers wrote a memo proposing activities his Holiness might like to do while in Country. The top ideas?

… [H]e might like to start a helpline for abused children, sack “dodgy” bishops, open an abortion ward, launch his own brand of condoms, preside at a civil partnership, perform forward rolls with children, apologise for the Spanish armada and sing a song with the Queen.

The lesson? While vile bigotry is a prerequisite for political service these days, don’t commit your slurs to a memo.

Update:

Not only should you not commit your bigotry to a memo, you shouldn’t express it to your aides when mic’d … even when you think the mic is turned off. You never know who could be listening. Maybe the news.

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, learned this less the hard way over the weekend when he complained about his staff putting him with a supporter who he deemed “just a sort of bigoted woman” (Daily Telegraph; YouTube). The description may be on the mark. When the woman was asked what she thought, she said she’d be voting for Brown anyway.