The greatly renowned investor Warren Buffet recently commented on the current developments in the Euro Crisis, with Portugal’s fiscal problems at the forefront.  There he says that he might not be surprised if the shaken currency of the Euro-zone might seize to exist.  However, where many people would despair in a situation like this, Warren sees an opportunity to invest in Europe, as prices there fall sharply.  Just recently Berkshire Hathaway bought the retailing giant Tesco.

The investments in Europe are not however the only thing that Buffet has been up to, as just this week he went to the earthquake stricken Japan, near the Fukushima power plant and bought a 71,5% share in Tungaloy, a company that makes manufacturing tools for car production.  These investments show that Warren Buffet is not afraid of investing in a market, which has been shaken by natural disasters or a fiscal crisis, and gives an example of how to behave in the market.  Meaning that if you have money to spare, do not just sit on it while the economy slowly crumbles, use your money to invest and keep the market going and strong so it is able to overcome the crisis that it may find itself in.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been at large for several months now, but has recently become more violent as police forces in occupied cities move in on protesters, like recently shown in University of California at Davis.  Amidst all of this newfound violence, one might ask himself what is this all for?  Is there a common cause that all protesters rally behind, which makes all of this justifiable?  Nathan’s earlier blog post on the matter and the movements webpage both suggests that it is the political injustice and improper distribution of wealth in America that is the main issue of the movement.

However, recently I have stumbled upon videos and photos of people who have ridiculous demands, and are protesting only for the sake of protesting.  The video posted with this post shows one of these people demanding the “top 1%” to pay his collage tuition, which could not be further away from the proposed goals of the movement.  Now seeing this makes you wonder what is really being fought for in the streets of New York and so many other cities around North America.

Occupy Wall Street Protester Wants College Paid For Because That\’s What He Wants

Coca Cola Ltd announced recently that it was going to change iconic design of its cans, in order to show support for the cause of fighting polar bear extinction.  It has pledged to donate $2 million dollars to research programs designated to prevent polar bear extinction and then further million dollars to match public donations.  Like Selina Wang says in her blog post about the matter, it is a step towards social responsibility taken by Coca Cola.

However, what are Coca Cola’s true motives behind this?  It is fantastic that a multi-billion dollar company takes interests in such a noble cause, but personally I would look at this as a major promotion campaign.  Just the promise of saving polar bears appeals to consumers in an ever-increasing eco aware world, giving Coca Cola a distinct point of difference amongst rivals such as Pepsi.  Just to support the claim of this, is to look at Coca Cola’s finances, they made $12.689 billion in profit last year, and have an advertising budget of $2.44 billion a year.  This shows that the $2-3 million dollars promised to the cause is only a dent in the Coca Cola Empire, and will most likely be covered by the increased sales from the new cans.

Coca-Cola Canada 2011 Arctic Home commercial

Considering the four factors that define a entrepreneurship, Youtube can be considered as a very entrepreneurial venture.  It was a big risk taken on by the founders as they had $11.5 million investment start up fund from Sequoia Capital, which is a major risk as it was not guarentied any returns.  The idea behind Youtube is also very innovative as there was nothing close to what Youtube is now at the time, a site where anybody with internet access could post a video and voice their opinion, do something stupid or just share videos with friends and family in such an easy way.

There was also immense wealth created by this, as only a year later the company was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, which is a almost 14,000% growth for the start up of $11.5 million.  So the wealth was generated really fast, in one year, and the size of the wealth creation was huge.  Therefore in my opinion Youtube can be considered one of the best example of entrepreneurship in recent years.

Sources used:

Youtube About (in icelandic, because of my settings but at least you know where it is from)

Wikipedia

Iceland: A land a few years ago struck with one of the most devastating economic crisis faced by the country so far, indebt to countries overseas after an over-inflation of its banking system.  With a population just over 300,000 people and a very small industry it is hard to see how it is supposed to totally renew its car fleet into an electric one.  Referring back to Marcus Laube’s blog post on the electric car fleet of Iceland, I have a completely different perspective on this matter.  Yes, Iceland is immensely rich in its Geothermal and Hydroelectric energy, but that does not mean that it should have only electric cars.

For a country to do that it would require a huge investment, either from the government, or individual households to totally replace their cars with expensive electric ones just so they can enjoy the benefit of the cheep electricity.  In the current state that the Icelandic economy is in now, there are no such funds to go around, and even though it would drastically reduce the amount of petrol imported to the country, it would only mean that the price of electricity would go up, as increased demand will shit the price up-wards leaving the Icelandic households in worse shape than before.

Thus I think that even though it is a good idea to work towards in the future to have a greener car fleet, it is not the time right now to be thinking about this as the most important thing now for Iceland is to get out of its economic slump.