The Tour de France that finished on July 26 in Paris was an epic three-week drama! I am glad it is over. I was becoming addicted to watching the race on the Versus HD network.

Spain’s Alberto Contador, riding for Team Astana, won the race. Next came Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck, riding for Saxo Bank, followed by seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, who also rode for Team Astana.

Indulge me a second. Maybe this idea is biased and owes to the fact I am a sports nut--my father was a high school athletic director--but I think hard-fought sporting competitions provide excellent lessons in leadership. The Tour de France gave us many teachable moments:

--It Takes a Year to Win a Three-Week Race
Team Astana placed two riders in top three. They won the team trial and the overall championship. This was team director Johan Bruyneel’s ninth victory in the Tour de France. No other team director has come close. How does Bruyneel do it? Well, he recruits top riders, for sure. But more than that, he plans out the the entire biking season--training and racing--at the beginning of the year. He communicates specific daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals to each of the team’s nine riders. Bruyneel wins July’s Tour de France in January.

--You Must Be Willing To Suffer
The world’s best bike riders are cardiovascular marvels. They are so gifted they could take a year off, fall out of bed and whip off 50 miles at a pace that would leave most club riders gasping. But to be a champion, a Tour rider has to work harder and be willing to suffer more pain than his competition. Lance Armstrong has won seven Tours because of his almost unique willingness to suffer. Did Lance’s victory from cancer give him this edge? Probably. The equally gifted Greg LeMond, who won two Tours in the 1980s, ultimately found the suffering unbearable to sustain over years.

--Science and Technology Matter
French cycling fans are upset! No French rider has won the Tour since Bernard Hinault in 1985. How can that be? In this fascinating New York Times story, writer Juliet Macur fingers technology. She writes here:

“Bradley Wiggins, the Garmin-Slipstream rider who has ridden for French teams, said that the French were ‘stuck in the past’ regarding technology and nutrition. ‘In terms of the aerodynamics and the equipment, their mentality is, well, you should just get on with it because Bernard Hinault won the Tour like that and you should be grateful,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of attitude they have. They are really behind in the scientific side of the sport.’”

--Teamwork Will Prevail
Even as Team Astana put Contador and Armstrong on the podium and won the overall team victory, another team managed to dazzle fans around the world. That was the American team, Columbia HTC, whose sprinter, Englishman Mark Cavendish, won six stages. How did Cavendish do it? Teamwork. In every stage win, including the final Sunday dash along the Champs Elysees, Cavendish was paced by teammate George Hincapie, who would sprint to the lead with a kilometer to go and shield Cavendish from the wind. Then, with a few hundred meters to go, another teammate, Mark Renshaw (“the lead out man” ) would overtake the tiring Hincapie and let Cavendish ride in the slipstream. When Cavendish finally burst to the lead with scant meters to go, he was fresh. What I admired most about Cavendish was his lavish praise for Hincapie and Renshaw, the teammates who sacrificed themselves.

--Keep Your Eye on the Long Game
Contador won the Tour de France and proved himself the complete and superior rider over three weeks. But Contador also managed to alienate the other riders, including Armstrong, who is forming a new team (sans Contador) for next year’s Tour. The best-ever team director, Bruyneel, is likely to follow Armstrong. In other words, Contador, certainly the most talented rider, may land in a less-than-ideal team situation next year. The 26-year-old Contador has yet to learn the long game, and this may haunt his quest to equal Armstrong’s seven Tour wins.

Post your comments below.

I am totally convinced we are reliving the 1970s. Barack Obama is the new Jimmy Carter. Global warming is the new global cooling. "Sustainability" is the new Small Is Beautiful. Cycling is the new jogging. Two constants: The CIA is under assault. Dollar devaluation is coming.

More echoes: The Dow dropped 48% in 1973-74, in line with 2008-2009's crash of 55%. Stocks have climbed impressively off the March 9 bottom. Likewise, stocks rose 38% in 1975 (though Gerald Ford, not Carter, was president) and 24% in 1976.

During the late 1970s, inflation roared back, finishing the decade at an annual rate of 13%. With crazily mounting deficits, we are likely to see something of a repeat, starting next year or in 2011. I say "something" of a repeat, because the actual CPI numbers might not go as high as the 1970 figures even though the underlying dollar devaluation could be worse. Much depends on unemployment, unused production capacity around the world and (maybe most importantly) government policy.

American government policy is the great unknown now. With Obama's signature issues hanging in the balance, market and economic predictions are very much clouded. One theory, which I expressed on Thursday's Kudlow Report, is that stocks have rallied of late because President Obama's signature issues, all of them anti-growth--union card check, cap and trade, and nationalized health care--are in trouble.

But ObamaCare isn't as dead as it looks to the pundits. Earlier this week, the man who on July 16 let it be known that the Emperor's New Health Care Plan would add a trillion dollars to the deficit over 10 years, was summoned to the White House for a little chat  with Rahm and the boys. Will Douglas Elmendorf bend to the Chicago-style pressure? We'll see. I wouldn't bet against it.

In fact, Intrade bettors  are giving ObamaCare a near 50-50 chance of passing this year. The betting trend over the last two weeks is surprisingly up for ObamaCare. The oddity is that bettors and opinion polls are moving in opposite directions. Bettors are warming to ObamaCare while polls are cooling. Maybe Intrade bettors know something about Chicago-style politics.

Switching subjects ... Earlier this week, I spent a night at the Cal Alumni Camp's Lair of the Bear, Camp Gold. My wife is a UC Davis grad. For the sake of our marriage, I agree to hold my nose and spend one night at this wretched place. (I bleed cardinal, if you don't get the joke.)

The guest lecturer on Sunday night was Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at UC Berkeley. I knew this lecture would be fun, and it was. For an hour, Professor Kammen swigged a Corona beer bottle and issued dire climate change warnings … "enjoy your camping now, people, because the Sierra forests will be burned up by 2050 ... the Greenland ice cap will be melted ... oceans will rise 21 feet ..." and so on.

Oh, and the politics. Like a drunk swerving down the road hitting mailboxes, Professor Kammen dented selfish Republicans and ignorant red-staters as often as he could. I counted a dozen disses. The professor is still hot about Ronald Reagan removing Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the White House roof. Even Canadians were torched by the professor's scorn. "Canadians must give up their tar sands and go back to making beer or whatever," he said.

As I said, it was terrific theater, and much fun. Al Gore now has a serious rival in the stand-up comedian game.

Post your comments below.

Wriston's Law is named after the late Walter Wriston, a giant of banking and finance. In his 1992 book, The Twilight of Sovereignty, he predicted the rise of electronic networks and their chief economic effects.

Wriston said capital (meaning both money and ideas), when freed to travel at the speed of light, "will go where it is wanted, stay where it is well-treated."

By applying Wriston's Law of capital and talent flow, you can predict the fortunes of companies (and countries). All predictions about future performance must start with this most basic question: Do companies (and countries) attract money and talent, or repel it?

America's success for most of its history owes to Wriston's Law. Ambitious people and investment capital have always wanted to come here. America was a place where merit and investment could be rewarded--not just economically, but socially too. The rise of the American meritocracy after World War II coincided with the decline of Northeastern WASPs in America's social hierarchies. In the early 1980s, writer Tom Wolfe predicted that Silicon Valley would usually beat Boston's Route 128 in technology showdowns because Silicon Valley culture elevated the engineer and entrepreneur to higher social status. Thus Silicon Valley was a better magnet of talent.

America beat Germany to the atomic bomb in the 1940s because America welcomed talented immigrants--many of them Central European Jews--and Germany repelled them. It is appalling to think what might have happened if Germany had developed the bomb in 1943. The thousand-year Reich lasted only 12 years because Hitler rejected atomic science as a figment of Jewish minds.

America beat the Soviet Union to the moon in 1969 and then 20 years later to the Cold War's victor's podium because America had the immigrant X-factor. The Soviets did not.

The 25-year economic boom of 1982 to 2007 was built at the intersection of capital and talent. Lower tax rates on capital gains and income caused a miraculous reverse alchemy. Capital emerged from the dead hand of tax shelters and precious metals and began flowing to talented entrepreneurs in high technology. The capital flow from past to future acted as a magnet for the most talented entrepreneurs in the world, who came to the U.S. for the opportunity to build companies and get rich.

The reason for bringing up Walter Wriston and the late, great 25-year boom of technology, entrepreneurship and investment that was built on Wriston's Law is--very sad to say--that America has reversed course.

On immigration, America has made it harder for educated and skilled foreigners to enter the country and become citizens. As immigration policy goes, it should be a no-brainer to hand out green cards to foreigners who get college degrees in the U.S.

As for capital, well, America's tax burden is rapidly catching up to Europe's. I like Europe as well as anyone--as a place to drink coffee and loaf. I really enjoy watching this year's Tour de France on the Versus HD network on my 60-inch flat panel TV. France is really lovely, isn't it? But France is not where global free agents go to build tomorrow's dynamic companies. France rejects Wriston's Law, and so it repels capital and talent.

Not so very long ago, America was the destination for capital and talent. Now America is just one country among many competing for these precious resources. Our relative advantage in the world is declining. Nothing I see coming out of Washington is helping matters. Quite the opposite. Capital and merit are under attack.

American policy is working against Wriston's Law. As long as this continues, the American recovery will remain weak.

Post your comments below.

Let us praise Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in New York’s housing projects and now presents herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee for certain confirmation to the Supreme Court. Republicans will look thuggish and foolish if they attack this inspiring woman in any way.

At the same time, Republicans have a golden opportunity to damage President Obama’s progressive agenda. They would be equally foolish if they squander it.

Let me explain my apparently contradictory thinking by way of history. Let us return to the 1970s. The 1980s Reagan Revolution, which produced 25 years of 3% average annual growth and unemployment that averaged around 5%--numbers that look wonderful now--planted its seeds in the 1970s.

Supply-side economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell did their ground-breaking work on taxes and incentives in the 1970s. Milton Friedman taught millions of Newsweek readers about free-market economics in the 1970s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke truth to the evils of the welfare state in the 1970s.

By the late 1970s, change was in the air. Not even a 61-seat Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate could stop the underlying shift. In 1978, Californians staged a property tax revolt called Proposition 13 over the objections of Governor Jerry Brown and the entire political class. In 1978, a little-known Congressman from Wisconsin, William Steiger, presented a bill to cut the federal tax rate on capital gains from 70% to 49%. The Steiger Amendment passed in 1979.

These green shoots of economic sanity were joined by a populist revolt over affirmative action. The hot- button issue in the 1970s that boiled into populist rage and revolt was the forced busing of schoolchildren. Only 4% of whites and 9% of blacks in America supported the idea that racial balance at public schools should be accomplished by busing kids out of their own district and into some other district, often across town. The lack of popular support didn’t matter. Progressives wanted busing, and since progressives ran all three branches of government in the 1970s, forced busing was what America got. Forced busing tore the city of Boston apart in the late 1970s. Busing pitted the city’s liberal elite--who sent their own kids to private schools--against the white working class, whose children suffered.

Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981 partly on the votes of so-called Reagan Democrats. Who were these Reagan Democrats? Many were of the white working class whose children had become laboratory experiments of progressive whims, busing especially.

Today, progressive whims dictate that any competency test producing uneven results by racial composition must be, on the face it, flawed. This is what led Sonia Sotomayor, as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to rule against Frank Ricci, the dyslexic white firefighter from New Haven who had apparently studied harder and invested more money in study aids than anyone else taking the test for promotion.

So my advice to Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee is: Make the Sotomayor hearings all about Ricci. Do not attack Sotomayor personally or go within 100 miles of it. But do--politely, sincerely and relentlessly raise the issue of Ricci--and all that it stands for.

Why make it about Ricci? The tactical answer is that the most Americans take Ricci’s side, just as most Americans opposed school busing in the 1970s. Making the confirmation hearings about Ricci is a way for Republicans to score points.

The strategic answer is that Ricci raises yet one more doubt about Obama’s gaspingly aggressive progressive agenda: the quasi-nationalization of banks, the $787 billion stimulus that isn’t, the multitrillion-dollar grab to control health care, cap-and-trade, union card check, expanding Title IX from sports quotas to engineering degree quotas, and so on.

School busing was the straw that broke the Great Society’s back in the 1970s.

Ricci could be the straw that breaks Obama’s progressive agenda for America. That’s why Republicans should praise Sotomayor, promise to confirm her, and then make the hearings all about Ricci.

Post your comments below.

America’s unemployment rate--the worst in 26 years--has stopped the stock market cold. It has moved the recovery goalposts down the field, maybe into next year.

Hope resides with America’s growth companies. But they sit at the epicenter of the credit meltdown and face funding hardships. Forbes.com has a plan to help promising growth companies get the funding they need. More on that in a minute.

The awful, jobless summer was forecast in April, when two conflicting sets of data emerged. One was positive--consumer confidence was soaring--and hinted at growth by summer. But other data was deeply discouraging: America’s large-company CEOs were paralyzed. I wrote about the disturbing anomaly here:

That’s what has happened. Understand that America’s soaring rate of joblessness is not due to mass layoffs. It is due to the fact that CEOs are simply not hiring. They are paralyzed by the fog of uncertainty coming out of Washington.

In past recessions, recovery and new jobs have emerged from start-ups and small growth companies. But during this recession, funding has been very difficult for the small fry.

Forbes.com has a plan. We have teamed with The Venture Alliance (TVA), a boutique investment adviser to early-stage companies, to identify America's most promising companies. Click here to learn more.

How do venture capitalists evaluate the potential of any growing company? The Venture Alliance has developed a scoring algorithm based on a vast range of variables that determine a company's potential--and, ultimately, its worth to investors--including: financial projections, current capitalization, market position, market opportunity, intellectual property, management team and others. TVA crunches that data (which it collects by surveying young companies) and reduces it to one "fundability score."

Companies that score well, theoretically, have a better shot at raising money than those that don't.

If you are a growth company seeking funding, click here to get your fundability score.

Post your comments below.

A couple we know got a rude interruption on Saturday night. The two had settled into their seats at the AMC Cupertino Square 16 theater and were enjoying The Taking of Pelham 123, a thriller remake starring John Travolta and Denzel Washington. But Pelham 123 never finished; the theater lost its electrical power. The cause was a rolling brownout, due to a California heat wave and excessive use of air conditioning.

Electricity is a good thing. It powers your computer, drives economic growth, transmits images from Tehran streets, keeps preemies alive in hospitals, prevents meat from rotting and enchants and cools you in movie theaters.

Yes, electricity is a good thing. Where does it come from?

In the U.S., electricity is produced from these sources. If you are reading this on a handheld and can't read Wikipedia's wonderful pie chart, here is the breakdown:

48.9% -- Coal
20% -- Natural Gas
19.3% -- Nuclear
 1.6% -- Petroleum

Got that? A tick over 88% of U.S. electricity comes from three sources: coal, gas and nuclear. Petroleum brings the contribution of so-called "evil" energy--that is, energy that is carbon- or uranium-based--to almost 90%.

The remaining sources of U.S. electricity, the renewables, are, by comparison, tiny players:

7.1% -- Hydroelectric
2.4% -- Other Renewables
0.7% -- Other

Hydroelectric accounts for 70% of renewable energy in America. But, of course, hydro is mostly tapped out. Almost every dam that could be built has been built. Ironically enough, political opposition to building more dams comes from the same crowd of tree huggers who oppose coal, gas and uranium.

Do you see where I'm going?

The Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House on Friday by a 219-212 margin will punitively tax energy sources that contribute 90% of current U.S. electricity (or 71% if you want to leave out nuclear). The taxes will be used to subsidize the 10% renewable contributors (but really just 3% after you leave out hydro).

In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% or supply 10 million Americans with electricity. That's enough juice for the people in Waxman's Los Angeles County. Or, if you prefer, for Nancy Pelosi's metro San Francisco plus Markey's metro Boston.

Well, what about electricity for the other 295 million? You can't get there from here with Waxman-Markey. At very best, solar, wind and cellulosic ethanol will make 20% contributions by 2025. The smart money would bet on 10%.

Renewable dreamers, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, believe this magical 3% is somehow different than the 97%. Different in the way the silicon chip is different than the Eniac computer. In other words, they believe the 3% will see Moore's Law exponential gains that will grow mighty in a decade. That is precisely the bet being made by the giant venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins with its billion-dollar-plus green fund. The firm's alpha dog and green weeper, John Doerr, is convinced that solar and cellulosic ethanol will see Moore's Law gains if you assemble the world's best and brightest minds to work on it.

I see no evidence of that. Now, it is true that solar and maybe cellulosic ethanol have the potential of making bigger technological leaps than traditional sources. But not at the pace of Moore's Law, or even close.

Meanwhile, traditional sources of electricity that are progressing in the direction of cleaner and more efficient are being ignored (or dissed by Waxman-Markey). Here are two must reads--the first on clean coal by Gregg Easterbrook, the second on fission energy by Robert Metcalfe. Study them if you take electricity production seriously.

Bottom line: There is no way the U.S. economy can enjoy future prosperity without the big three electrical energy sources of clean coal, natural gas and nuclear.

Post your comments below.

The fall of Mark Sanford is disturbing on many levels and begs troubling questions, such as what ever happened to the old and even noble idea of resigning? Why don't these scandalized pols ever just quit? That would be the honorable thing to do after dishonoring a public office. But for the current crop of pols, simple resignation does not even occur to them. Diddle interns? Steal the public's cash and hide it in a freezer? Does any public official have the decency to resign anymore?

Something really foul has happened to American politics. In our media-soaked "gotcha" age, politics repels normal folks and appears to attract people of deep narcissistic tendencies. You may argue that politics has always had its share of rogues, and that would be true. But there is something creepy about this generation's crop. The sort of grasping needy weirdness that we associate with performance artists has bled into politics to an unthinkable degree. Politics is now Hollywood for ugly people.

Switching subjects to the market, here is why fear has returned.

Loyal readers of this blog know I'm an optimist--to a fault, no doubt. And true enough, I don't think stocks will crash below the March 9 low, when the S&P reached its satanic 666. Still, if this year's S&P earnings go as low as $40 to $45, as many think they will, it is easy to see stocks falling from current levels. How low? And for how long?

Trying to answer these questions brings us back to policy. Will ObamaCare and the Markey-Waxman version of cap-and-trade pass? Will we see more nationalization of major industries and more forced unionization? Will Israel, having lost faith in President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to defend it, decide to act on its own and take out Iranian nukes?

These questions weigh on stocks. As Warren Buffett says, stocks are cheap, but that doesn't mean they will rise soon.

Me, I'm holding to the stock portfolios I own but not adding to them. New cash is going toward kid education and angel investments where I can call up the entrepreneur and ask direct questions.

My June 22 blog post was called "Time To Invest In Yourself." Buy a Kindle 2 and load it with books to inspire you.

Here is an extremely good read and inspirational book I read on Tuesday flights to Portland and back: We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind Eight Tour de France Victories by Johan Bruyneel.

Now, I like cycling--heck, in this recession, cycling is the new flying, and a Trek Madone is the new Cirrus SR22--and I will read just about anything on Lance Armstrong. Still, I was completely unprepared for the lesson-richness in Bruyneel's book.

Bruyneel, the team director for all seven of Armstrong's Tour de France victories, was a mid-level overachieving pro cyclist himself in the 1980s and 1990s. With unexceptional talent, Bruyneel managed to stay at the sport's highest levels with a superior grasp of strategy, planning, tactics and psychology.

At age 34, Bruyneel retired from racing and took up Lance Armstrong's invitation to become team director for U.S. Postal. In 1998 U.S. Postal was a rag tag bunch whose best cyclist, Armstrong, was a cancer survivor and impatient hot dog who had yet to win a multi-stage race of any kind. Bruyneel brought a new style of organization to a sport forged in romance and tradition. He promptly bagged eight wins in the Tour de France, seven with Armstrong and one with Alberto Contador.

Once in a generation, a competitive sport is transformed by a visionary leader. Think of John Wooden in college basketball, Doc Councilman in swimming, Bill Bowerman in distance running, Bill Walsh in professional football. In every case it turns out that the transformative leader is just plain smarter than his peers but is also a person of great personal courage and conviction.

Bruyneel is that person. His book is a delight to read. You will be the richer for it.

Post your comments below.

March 9 was a propitious day to invest in stocks and commodities. I hope you went all in, buying on margin. You would have done nicely. But last week stocks dropped 3%, and today, as I write (Monday, 7:50 a.m. Pacific), they’re down again.

Pause that refreshes? Or the start of another sickening tumble ... maybe even down past the Satanic 666 S&P of March 9?

I think it’s a pause, and so does market-timer Jim Stack. Forget my opinions; Stack is worth listening to. Unlike the permabears and permabulls, Stack is one of the few people who has caught this market’s big moves, both down and up.

Switching subjects, you may want to avoid the market altogether and invest in yourself. This idea was sparked by a recently completed 20-day business trip during which I hosted the 15th Forbes Cruise for Investors and the Forbes European CEO Forum in Gleneagles, Scotland. I later attended sales meetings in Seattle, and  gave a speech in Kansas City. That came to more than 30 hours on airplanes, with matching downtime in airports, hotels and cabs. My loyal companion during this travel siege was the Amazon Kindle 2.

I’ve praised the Kindle 2’s features on this blog and in my Forbes magazine column. Amazon's second-generation e-reader is easy on the eyes, long on battery life, and so on. What I didn’t expect is how the Kindle 2 has changed my reading.

Before the Kindle 2, a long road trip forced me to make Noah’s Ark-like choices about which books to bring along, since space aboard the computer bag was limited. So I might typically bring one long thriller novel and one business book or biography. Sometimes I would luck out; my choices might be a fetching thriller by Vince Flynn or Michael Connelly, and my nonfiction book might be  Neal Gabler’s excellent bio of Walt Disney.

But other times--most times--the choices wouldn’t be as good.

Kindle 2 stores 1,000 or 2,000  books, depending on length. Although I don’t even have 50 books on my Kindle yet,  my little library is rich and varied enough that I don’t feel SOL for having chosen two lousy books to bring along on a trip.

But Kindle 2, as I have said, also changes the pattern of one’s reading. I am reading way more educational and self-improvement books (about raising teenagers, improving family communications, keeping up with technology and business trends, staying healthy, getting fit, etc.) than before.

Now, it is well known that most educational and self-improvement books are not worth the trees killed to produce them. Most such books are boring to read after 15 minutes or so. Even the genre’s better ones are typically 50 useful pages of information and 200 pages of pablum. In other words, they are not worth the weight of toting them around airports in a computer bag already weighed down by a laptop, workout gear, newspapers and meeting briefings.

The Kindle 2 solves this problem. I can now bring these kinds of books along. I am the better off for it.

So if you have $1,000 to invest, let me suggest that you invest in yourself. Buy a Kindle 2 for $359. Load it up with electronic books that will improve your mind, health, soul and relationships. Dip into these books, even the shallow ones, 15 minutes at a time.

You'll be better off, and the best thing is, Obama can’t tax your gains.

Post your comments below.

We just wrapped up a successful two-day conference at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Here are some information tidbits that caught my eye:

In a show of hands during my introductory remarks, two-thirds of the attending CEOs, mostly European, indicated they do not think the economic recovery has started.

The Rt Hon Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, an economist by training and a banker before entering politics, opened Monday’s session. Salmond said all economic growth results from two factors: human capital, and mobilizing human capital to competitive advantage. First Minister Salmond pointed out that Scottish ideals still carry weight in the world. China’s president, Hu Jintao, carries a copy of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Salmond says Scotland has a competitive advantage in harnessing waves and tides to produce electrical power. Scotland has 40,000 kilometers of coastline, more than five times that of China’s.

Forbes Managing Editor Bruce Upbin had a useful of way of thinking about the world’s electricity needs. “Think of the earth as a 13-trillion-watt light bulb. It will be a 28-trillion-watt light bulb by 2050. Where will the electricity come from?"

Any future energy plan that leaves out nuclear power and clean coal will fail to get us to 28 trillion watts by 2050. Utterly so.

An interesting way to invest in China’s growth without overpaying for Chinese stocks--much of China’s stimulus money is going into the stock market--is to invest in Africa, which supplies natural resources to China.

China’s pollution problems and single-child demographic bubble are well known. Less known is China’s water shortage in the north. The desert north of Beijing is growing by thousands of square miles per year.

Don’t judge the business opportunities in a poor country by that country’s official gross domestic product and per-capital income figures, said Digicels’ CEO, Colm Delves. Digicel recently invested $247 million building out a cellphone infrastructure in Haiti, officially one of the poorest countries on earth. Haiti is indeed poor, but the disposable income is higher than the official figures suggest--high enough to support a large population that can afford cellphones. That’s because Haiti is largely a cash-based economy, which official figures fail to capture.

I interviewed the Scottish race car legend, Jackie Stewart, onstage on Tuesday. Sir Jackie began his athletic career as a champion skeet shooter. After narrowly missing to make the British Olympic team in 1960, he turned his attention to race cars. During his career he won 27 of 99 Formula One races and three times won the Formula One world championship. He was Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year in 1973, beating out O. J. Simpson and Secretariat. He retired at age 34 and parlayed his fame into a series of corporate sponsorships that has made Sir Jackie (knighted in 2001) a rich man (worth more than $200 million). Onstage, Sir Jackie shared his secrets of success, which boils down to three words: attention to detail. His favorite project these days is advocating for dyslexics. Sir Jackie himself is so dyslexic that reading remains difficult, and he says that he can’t remember the words for the Lord’s Prayer and God Save the Queen.

In the forum’s final session, I interviewed Steve Forbes about his new book, Power Ambition Glory: The Stunning Parallels Between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today … and the Lessons You Can Learn. You can buy Steve's book here.

Post your comments below.

Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO, calls our present-day post-crash recessionary doldrums “The Great Reset.” I like that term. It implies that much of the economic growth from 2003 to early 2007 was built on easy credit and leverage. Not all growth, but some growth. Maybe a quarter of it, maybe a third. Lefties like Paul Krugman and William Greider think that all 2003 to 2007 growth came from leverage legerdemain, but that's only because the Krugman crowd thinks supply side economics is phony, that real growth is impossible to achieve during Republican administrations, etc.

But let's say that one-quarter of global and economic growth 2003 to early 2007 came from cheap money and easy credit. The ensuing collapse in asset prices (stocks, 55% from peak to trough) and houses (30% from peak to trough) thus represent three events:

1. A normal drop typical of a recession
2. A further drop as asset values got “reset” to account for growth minus the leverage.
3. Panic after credit markets locked up on September when the Treasury Department incoherently let Lehman Brothers go after saving Bear Stearns. The Treasury Department signaled that it was utterly confused and making stuff up as it went along. That plus market-to-market accounting, no short uptick rule, and no ban on naked short-selling, led to the avalanche.

No. 3, panic, has left the building, leaving numbers 1 and 2 governing asset prices. Today's 8,730 Dow  and 940 S&P 500 is an artifact of both the recession and the reset. My guess is that stocks will climb back to August 2008 highs when the Dow was in the 11,000 range and the S&P was 1,200. That would be a fair value for stocks in a newly recovering economy but minus the 25% reset, which is gone until the next bubble.

Let me switch subjects and share some investment tips recommended by our all-star panelists during the 15th Forbes Cruise for Investors.

Charles Maxwell
Senior Energy Analyst
Weeden & Co. LP

Charley Maxwell entered the oil industry in 1957 and has been Institutional Investors' top oil analyst many times. He's seen it all, and he's convinced that global oil production will peak in the next year or two. Maxwell likes these four Canadian stocks for the long run:

Suncor (SU)
Encana (ECA)
Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ)
Nexen (NXY)

Maxwell also recommended these Russian and Brazilian stocks:

Lukoil (LOCUY)
Petrobas (PETR3.SA))

Brian Wesbury
Chief Economist
First Trust Advisors

Wesbury thinks the current stock market resembles 1975 to 1976, when stocks rose 38% and 24%, respectively, after the 1973-74 crash. Though worried about post-2010 inflation and Obama's anti-growth policies and rhetoric, Wesbury likes stocks for now and recommended these:

Oracle (ORCL)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
Boeing (BA)
Apache (APA)
Chevron (CVX)
Parker Hannafin (PH)
Research In Motion (RIM.TO)

David Dreman
Chairman, Founder and CIO
Dreman Value Management

The contrarian investor and long-time Forbes magazine columnist called the 2008 panic a “hundred-year event” and likened it to the Panic of 1907. Dreman recommended these stocks:

Apache (APA)
Anadarko Petroleum (APC)
Chesapeake Energy (CHK)
Devin Energy (DVN)
BHP Billiton (BHP)
Eaton Corporation (ETN)
3M (MMM)

Dreman likes bank and financial stocks but thinks the best way to exploit the bargain opportunity is through exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

LXF
KBE

Ken Fisher
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Fisher Investments

Fisher says he is not merely bullish on stocks, but “wacko bullish.” He called today's depressed valuations a “reverse bubble.” Fisher recommended a broad global index ETF like Morgan Stanley's MSCI. If you want to challenge Morgan Stanley's weighting of the MSCI Index, Fisher says technology, energy and industrials will outperform defensive stocks like utilities in the bull market ahead.

For specific stocks, Fisher advised reading his recent Forbes columns on Forbes.com.

Carl Delfeld
Managing Director, Chartwell Partners
Editor, ChartwellETF.com
Columnist, Forbes Asia

Delfeld made the case for Asian and other emerging markets. Morgan Stanley's emerging markets ETF, EEM, is up 75% since the beginning of 2003, despite the collapse of late 2008 and early 2009. Meanwhile the American benchmark index, the S&P 500 (the SPY ETF), is still under water.

Delfeld said emerging market returns tend to rotate by country and by year. He likes countries with low price-to-earnings ratios, which today would include:

Turkey (TUR)
Singapore (EWS)
Russia (RSX)
Brazil (EWZ)

Mary Anne Aden
Pamela Aden
Publishers and Co-editors
The Aden Forecast

The Aden sisters say the two most important investment guidelines of our time are the U.S. federal budget deficits and the massive money creation by the U.S. Federal Reserve. This will lead to an acceleration of the already slipping U.S. dollar and inflation.

The Adens predict severe inflation in two to three years. They recommend these ETFs in gold and silver:

SLV (iShares Silver Trust)
GLD (SPDR Gold Shares)

They recommend the following currencies:

Australian dollar
Canadian dollar
Euro
Japanese yen

Finally, the Adens liked these stocks:

BHP Billiton (BHP)
Suncor (SU)
Transocean (RIG)
Cameco (CCO)

In sum, the Forbes all-star asset pickers on the 15th Forbes Cruise for Investors ranged from wild bulls (Fisher), moderate bulls (Wesbury, Dreman) to bearish bargain hunters (the Aden sisters).

If one theme emerged, it was energy stocks. Yes, they have been rising. They will continue to rise for three reasons: global recovery, likely inflation down the road, and the no energy growth policies of the Obama administration. (If you doubt the latter, read this column by Fred Barnes:

Please join us on future Forbes investment cruises.

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