The cover line on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires is: The 1,125 richest people on Earth, and why less of them are American.

Actually, I think that should be “fewer” not “less”, but the underlying point stands. It is indeed remarkable that, of the top 20 richest people in the world at the moment, only four are American. As Forbes notes, half of the top 20 were American two years ago.

The biggest reason for that shift is clearly the commodities boom - the rising prices of oil, petrochemicals, nickel, aluminium etc have propelled figures such as Mukesh Ambani, Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, and Vladimir Potanin into the top 25. At some point, although who knows when, the cycle will turn.

This also raises the ratio of people who got rich by owning assets rather than through enterprise. Those such as Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate, built global businesses but Russian oligarchs are not the same as Larry Ellison of Oracle or Igvar Kamprad of Ikea

But even when you take all this into account, there is a noticeable shift away from the past era when only the US was a big enough market to mint billionaires. It is now almost as likely that billionaires will come from Asia or Europe, even if they have US operations.

That is why Karl Albrecht of Aldi, Liliane Bettencourt of L’Oreal, and Bernard Arnault of LVMH are all on the list. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who still top it, have been there a long time. It feels as if the action is elsewhere than the US at the moment.

For my Financial Times column this week, I have returned to the topic of Guy Hands’ views of A&R men and taken in Time Warner’s move to fold New Line into its Warner Brothers studio.

I argue that creative executives such as A&R people and film producers must get used to more financial discipline and lower pay because media companies can no longer afford to indulge them.

You can read the column here. Comments are welcome below.

The battle between Microsoft and Google over the former’s lucrative and powerful Office suite of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other software is fascinating.

It is difficult to see how Google, which is putting a lot of money and effort into its Google Apps suite, can lose since it is starting from zero while its competitor is trying to defend a giant franchise. In fact, I would bet that Google will do very well.

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The other day, I described my scepticism about advertising networks on the internet and whether technology would replace the traditional interaction between ad sales forces and media buyers.

John Hagel, whose thoughts on business are always worth reading, has chimed in on the topic with a long post. He states the problem facing advertisers intriguingly:

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply:  The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers.

While I focused on the difficulties of collecting valuable online inventory, John frames the challenge more broadly: the diminishing returns that online advertising is beginning to experience. We may even be seeing signs of that in search advertising, given Google’s travails.

It makes me wonder whether advertising is not simply going to transfer online but will be cannibalised in the manner of other media industries. That has already happened for classifieds; might it spread to display advertising as well? 

The Guardian asked various UK media luminaries yesterday what Peter Fincham, the new director of television for ITV, should do with the ITV1 channel. I was particularly struck by the reply given by Daisy Goodwin, an independent producer:

Peter has to decide how far to take ITV1 upmarket and whether he can take the audience with him. So far the changes have been risky, the wrong kind of risk because they haven’t worked.

Um, the wrong kind of risk because they haven’t worked? If all risks were judged on that criterion, then none would ever be taken because it would only be worth investing in certainties.

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Robert Peston, my former colleague, points out that, with gold now getting close to $1,000 an ounce, Gordon Brown’s sale of 395 tonnes of the British government’s reserves between 1999 and 2002 is looking more badly-timed by the day.

Rob estimates that the gold that was sold for $3.5bn would now be worth $12.5bn. Mr Brown is clearly a better politician than hedge fund manager, although his record as prime minister is a bit patchy as well.

Of what does the above picture remind you?

No prizes for this one: it looks like a Scrabble board. It is, however, actually a screen print of Scrabulous, the online game popularised on Facebook and created by two brothers in Calcutta. Clearly this is no coincidence but Hasbro and Mattel, the owners of the game, make nothing from Scrabulous because it is not licensed from Scrabble.

As ever in cases of online piracy, which this plainly is, those who favour it claim that they are really doing the brand good because they are providing viral marketing to a younger audience that would not pay for the original.

This argument is one of those cited by Chris Anderson in his forthcoming book (previewed in Wired magazine) which proselytises in favour of companies giving away products - or at least relying on advertising rather than subscriptions.

Personally, I find the argument specious. It may well be that companies should find ways to spread their brands online, and there is a role for free online versions, but the idea that others are justified in co-opting their brands if they do not act rapidly is self-serving and lame.

Warren Buffett also has some harsh words in his annual letter (see below) about the creditworthiness of state governments in the US. Perhaps he is simply talking up his latest business venture in insuring municipal bonds, but he does not, as Floyd Norris notes, mention that.

Whatever his motives, the New York Times has a piece this morning on how state governments, including California, are starting to agitate for their bond ratings to be raised because they think they are not being given adequate credit, so to speak, by ratings agencies.

It is certainly a change to find an argument that ratings agencies have been too strict, rather than too lax, in their assessments of borrowers. Yves Smith, however, points out that there is a conflict of interest for agencies because they get paid twice when governments have to get insurance to fix their ratings.

(Correction: I am told by Standard & Poor’s that it only gets paid once and that it adjusts the rating without charge if an issuer gets its bonds insured.)

So who is right, California or Mr Buffett?

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Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway is, of course, always worth reading. This year’s does not contain too many surprises but there are plenty of valuable insights and good jokes.

I particularly like his comparison (at the top of page 9) of corporate acquisitions that go wrong to the line in a song by Bobby Bare (politically incorrect though it is):

I’ve never been to bed with an ugly woman but I’ve sure woke up with a few.

A friend once told me a story about a friend of his who was facing some tough decisions in his life. He was seeing an analyst and, at one of their sessions, he explained that he felt under pressure.

The analyst listened to the various choices he was facing and how hard it was to make up his mind. Then he paused and asked: “Well, have you considered doing nothing?”

I thought of that story, which always seemed to me to have relevance for a lot of us - including corporate executives - when I read in the New York Times on Saturday about a study of goalkeepers and how they react to penalty kicks.

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