Apple's 3G-od-S

Conspira-treasury-orial…
Talk of the end of the US$ as the world’s reserve currency, and recent moves in Treasuries and volatility in currency markets in the absence of any real new policy announcements by Central Banks have dominated many financial pages over the last few weeks, but anyone else wondering what really lies beneath the “too-incredible-NOT-to-be-true” story of an attempt by two (allegedly) Japanese individuals caught smuggling close to $134bn in US-Treasuries across the Italian border into Switzerland?
The story first broke last week, but was quickly buried (only leading to conspiracy theorists out there looking for even more fire through the smoke) and has now resurfaced with a convenient full explanation that it was nothing more than a common ploy by the Mafia to duplicate and dupe Swiss private banks. Excuse me? A common ploy would be an attempt to garner a few million dollars in ill-gained funds, but a sum of $134billion is simply too large not to have some interesting element of truth behind it.
From some suggestions that it is an ongoing raising of much-needed liquidity by the Bank of Japan - who have traditionally held exceptionally large amounts of US Treasuries - and were looking to avoid public realisation and hence pressure on the US$, to assumptions that it is the laundering of Chinese savings, the most entertaining aspect of the entire saga would be the 40% “commission” the Italian government would have netted for discovering the crime if indeed the Treasuries had been declared genuine – a nice pay-out for the border guards would certainly have been in order.

Re-vamped & re-released = same old
We could focus on US triple-witching today, continued market volatility, negative outlooks for European markets, the dips in Asia, bond rates rising when governments really want them falling and a number of other economic indicators that continue to come through and depress any remaining positive sentiment ahead of the summer lull (not to mention Sheikh Mohammed riding in the Queen’s carriage at the opening day of Ascot), but since it’s Friday, and since markets will move any-way-they-like as human emotion overrides any rationale behind a conviction view, it would be the same-old story wearing a new set of clothes.

A far more important, but increasingly repetitive event, is taking place today - the launch of Apple’s “new” I-Pone: an incredible, not-so-little device that has done for the Smartphone what the I-Pod did for the portable-music-player. It goes on sale across stores in the US – still hanging in there as the main launch market for products to a disposable-income possessing consumer. Talk of new features and other wizardry abound, with “increased speeds, more memory and improved media interfaces” – all sounds amazing doesn’t it? Problem is, it’s the third so-called-launch of what is essentially the same product in half the number of years – the costs involved in having to upgrade each time must be astronomical.
How can they continue to pump the same product out, albeit tweaked here and there, to a gullible and adoring fan-base? Well, what Apple is a proud owner of that many other consumer electronics firms could never compete with, is an almost “God-like” figure in the guise of their (now rarely appearing) CEO and Founder – Steve Jobbs. He is a living-legend/myth in the world of technology, and commands a very spiritual-like following from the hordes of adoring fans that would (and indeed do) blindly purchase and then re-purchase any new product that his hands have touched. The latest I-Phone, originally titled the “3G S” will no doubt be snapped-up with total loyalty once again.

Jobbs for God-like employees…
Now let’s compare this with another God-like leader – one that commands the respect and blind devotion of a large swathe of a people within his own realm of expertise, a people that gladly, willingly and unquestionably follow and purchase into every new declaration, decision and development even if most are nothing more than dressed-up “upgrades” a la the “new” I-Phone. Iran’s Ayotallah Khamenei, it can be argued, is one of the religious world’s equivalents to the tech-world’s Jobbs.
The latest attempt at a product release, the re-election of a rather shoddy product in the form of Ahmadinejad, has come unstuck however. Where those that would normally buy-into most of the hubris surrounding changes to the latest “memory and storage” upgrade equivalents for the theocratic state, a new resistance to the mind-numbing repetition has grown from despair and humiliation. Where before every word uttered from the “God-on-earth” representative of the Iranian state would be dutifully acted upon and never questioned, there are now an apparent majority of the same people that will now not only question those very command-requests, but go so far as to defy them – with the respected (and very difficult) understanding that they have no other choice if they are to achieve their aim of a democratic election.
The US refusing to take sides is a good sign that this is an uprising that belongs to the people of Iran, and will be decided by the people of Iran. There will be no outside influence (directly visible) that can later be pointed at and accused of having influenced the demise of the incumbent rulers.

It seems that the allure of Apple’s technology and design improvements coupled with slick marketing and an “I-must-have-one” aura is outdoing the once revered and autocratic Iranian machine that has just possibly released its last ever revamped product – no Iran “S” this time around.