Posted: June 30th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
China imported 33.5m bottles of Bordeaux wines worth $475m in 2010. No wonder the price of an average 2008 Grand Cru Classé at a small St Emilion merchant’s tasting outlet defies current European economic logic at an eye watering €49 a bottle. With the nouveau riche from India and Russia adding to the upward price pressure, Bordeaux can afford at least for the moment to ignore the complaints of budget-conscious developed-world wine buffs that claret is no longer affordable. The world still drinks 14 bottles of the stuff every second.
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Posted: June 22nd, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, News | No Comments »
When we received a request late last week from BTG GN member Zoltan Tenk at Noerr & Partner in Budapest for help in finding a lawyer to advise a Hungarian client about issues in Yemen, even my internationalist eyebrows were raised.
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Posted: June 21st, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Arriving in New York immediately after the stratospheric success of the public listing of LinkedIn Corp when the stock doubled in price on the first day’s trading, the temptation was to ask whether investors’ memories really are so short that the dot.com bust of 2001 has already become pre-history. A near repeat initial performance only days later in the Pandora Radio IPO made cynical observers recall the old cliché about boxes and their contents. Fortunately common sense prevailed and Pandora ended its first day up by only 9%.
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Posted: June 14th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, News | No Comments »
Despite the efforts of yet another Icelandic volcano to ruin the party for a second successive year, over thirty of our network friends from 16 different countries came together in Cyprus at the end of May to renew old friendships and make new ones.
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Posted: June 2nd, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
A strange co-incidence brought a group of international insolvency and restructuring experts to the same Limassol hotel this past weekend as a combined meeting of IMF and World Bank representatives from far and wide. It was a powerful reminder of events in nearby Greece, where the outcome of the sovereign debt crisis remains in the balance, not helped by the latest collapse of negotiations between rival political groupings aimed at creating consensus on much needed austerity measures.
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