MBA Olympics in a nutshell

As I don't have that much time to write on the blog even though there are so many things to say about the Olympics, I decided to write only the following picture of the tipical question you may hear during a 3-day sport event for MBA students. First Day: "Hey, does anybody have beers?" Day Two: "Hey, does anybody have cigarettes?" Last Day: "Hey, does anybody have cases for tomorrow?"

Shut the f**k up, beach!

Need to catch up.

I need to catch up a little with my blog. It's a while that i don't update it and it seems that i'm losing memory of what happened after the exams. Partly this is true because of the erasing effect of alchool on my brain but also because verba volant, scripta manent. So let's try to do a quick wrap up. If I were German i would have done it in a chronological order. Unfortunately I'm Italian, so i will use an absoooolutely messy approach.
Barca Won the Champions League
Ok ok, you might complain that you don't have to read here to know about it. But I've been there. I've been with Fernand drunk at the bar who switched from crying to be totally without control. I've been in the bar where at minute 42' the owners experienced a stockout in beer (even if they claimed they've been helped in the inventory planning by M. Sachon). I've been in placa catalunia where people was partying like animals with tons of alchool and home made fireworks. After 1 hour after the end of the match circulation in the center was almost impossible. Me and Huy with a moto had problmes in getting out of the traffic jam. Above you can find some analytical graph about what happened during those hours. GDP of Catalunia had a boost of 10%, but it was a nominal shock.. some shops where broken and goods stolen (real shock!). By the way, I also include a picture taken in placa catalunia.
Great speech from Pedro Videla
Pedro Videla, our global economics teacher, is the son of a former chilean comunict diplomats. Actually we still have the doubt that he is the son of a former chilean dictator.... Anyway, he always tells us nice stories among which i will try to deliver you this one. "When I was a kid, I was used to go to east Berlin with my parents. My father's intent was to show me how the ideal world should have been. In Berlin there is a high tower with a restaurant on top from which you can see the whole city. People had to make reservation 15 years in advance to be able to have dinner there. At the time we were listeing to that silly song.. Imagine (a world without money!?!?!). During these dinners my father was used to talk about politics with this friends and i spent time at 360 degree windows. I saw Berlin. West Berlin, full of lights, Coca Cola banners, life. East Berlin, deep in the dark, no life. So i asked my parents.. 'Are you sure this is the right side of the world?' and my mother replied 'Yes.. on the other side there is a corrupted world, they have prostitution!' and i thought 'That's good, that's individual initiative!'.
Giulietta in town
We had our midterms and finally we had a weekend off. Giulia, a friend of mine from Italy who lives in London, came to visit me with a friend. It was a good weekend. It was an amazing weekend with a wonderful weather. I just hanged around, went out until late in the morning and eat a lot. On saturday Madhur prepared for us a wonderful indian dinner. Unfortunately he forgot to buy paper towels but the indian wisdom provided a great substitute.. After that we went to Shoko, a very nice club at the beach. In this kind of clubs you can really feel the power of Barcelona. I love this city! I was even proud of my great parking skills, part of my italian inheritance. So proud that when i went out i couldn't belive that my car has been taken away by the local police! Jodeeeeeer! 40 minutes by foot to go to the police station and 200 euros to have my car back! But still a great weekend.

George the Cavemen!

Another step towards the end of the year! Yesss

Today we closed the last midterms of the year... I felt quite unprepared in almost every subject. But the lion king of ingonarce was for sure about Global Economics. I remember an exercise in which i entered a vicious cycle of prices going up and down that i wasn't able to control in the whole bunch of graphs on my scratch paper. At a certain point I even thought about writing "i don't know exaclty what is going to happen on prices, employment and interest rates when you open the borders to immigrants but for what i can see you are going to be in a deep amount of shit!".

I looked around to have some eye contact with a desperate like me but everybody seemed very concentrated on the exam... Fuck?! Am I the only one in trouble?
Then i started to think at something else and I tried to figure out how was life when to live you don't need to think about interest rates, economics, swaps and so on. The cavemen!
But then i thought that actually i dosen't seems to be so many caverns out there. Honestly, think about it? How many caves have you seen in your life? Is not that easy. First of all you need mountains. Rocky mountains. Then you need some geolocical even that creates the cavern. The scope is very narrow. So... where the fuck were the cavemen living?
The answer is "I don't know".. as usual. But at least i didn't have to spend so much time on a book to come to this silly conclusion.

Preparation & Diversification

I think these midterms are lived differently by the IESE community. Maybe it's the good wather, maybe is being close to the end of the first year, or maybe it's the nature of the courses... Well, whatever it is, I think students are less willing to spend days closed at home studying like hell. One thing that i learned in Corporate Finance is about the benefits of differentiation. Following this suggestion I immediately applied it to my weekend. In a normal context i would have studied 24 hours/day. This time my time portfolio included nightlife, dinners and lunches with friends, afternoon at the beach.. and so on. Regarding the beach time. There was a nice RedBull Flight Race on saturday. Lots of people. When everybody was with the nose pointing at the sky to see these stuntmen of the air, i pushed my diversification strategy even further and i took this cool picture on the upper corner of the post! By the way i'm not saying that i did't spend some time at home in my "nerd" clothes trying to understand economics. I leave you with a dilemma about the following picture.

Extreme outsourcing in India?...

or just me on skype with Rombo?

Milton Friedman

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"

But i'm sure the bakery down in via Augusta is putting a lot of effort too!

Preparing for the mid-term exams

Lamberto, Inigo and I were preparing Operations Strategy. In particular we were discussing the trade-off between service level and the incentives of each actor in the channel to keep inventories.
Inigo: "George, should we talk about transfer prices?"
Me: "Inigo, it's all about transfer prices"
Inigo: "Come on, I'm serious!"
Me: "Me too!"

Cool Video by Columbia

Leading Global Economics: ITALY!

The absolute multi award prize and whatever winner of global economics, a third term class, is ITALY. Whenever there is the necessity to give an example of GDP biased by underground economy, low level of indipendency between central bank and government and so on.. Italy is always mastering the charts! Listening to our professor it seems that even Bolivia, which experienced a money growth of 430%, is better then my lovely country.
Apparently in Section B the professor (Nuria Mas!) asked "yyyyyyeeeeee... what is the cause of inflation?" and from the back row "ITALY!"
The only thing is that nobody told these guys that Italy is the only place on earth where you can get good food, hot girls, awesome winter/summer/spring/fall resorts, good looking people and wonderful weather... and, listening to the people from the south, a lot of Free Lunches!

Sunny weekend

This long weekend was very relaxing. Yesterday we had a great BBQ on our terrace, from 3pm until 11! There was even time for a second round of meet over the grill. Today I joined the MTB club training in sight of the MBA Olympics and i discovered that: - i'm totally out of shape - going uphill is very painful - going down is even worst! A part from that, Barcelona reveals again itself to be the best city i ever lived in. In a sunny day like this you can either spend the afternoon at the beach or have "nature" experience in the hills like the one we had. Marco had to surrender to this steep slope! and these guys as well... ok maybe too late.. We conquered Tibabo... YEAH!