WASHINGTON, D.C. - The presence of bullish investment bankers in a particular business sector is no guarantee of its good health. It sometimes indicates just the opposite. In 2000, for example, bankers at San Francisco’s Robertson Stephens were prospering on dot-com and technology business. The bank folded two years later, victim of a tech market gone abruptly south.

These days, you’ll find plenty of bullishness at a boutique banking outfit with a unit catering to the homeland security industry. John Shaw, president of New York’s Legend Merchant Group, says he expects homeland security to experience “explosive” growth in the coming years. “Our pipeline is rather robust,” adds colleague Scott Greiper, a Legend Merchant principal and head of its homeland security practice, the Convergent Security Group (CSG).

In the investment context, we’ve been troubled on occasion by the possibility of terror bubbles. Here, however, we don’t interpret the happy talk from the i-bankers as a sign of impending bust. In fact, those interested in homeland security stocks and takeover plays should heed arguments from Greiper and his CSG colleagues.

Full story at Forbes.com

Venture capitalist Jonathan Silver doesn’t claim to be a political savant. Will Democrats gain the upper hand this November? “Whatever I tell you,” he says with a laugh, “go the other way.”

But Silver, managing director of Washington’s Core Capital Partners, isn’t so modest when it comes to making calls on the outlook for technology spending and Uncle Sam’s IT budgets.

Silver acknowledges the possibility of a slowdown for some government contracting but says spending levels won’t fall below where they were five years ago. “The federal government is going to spend considerable dollars on technology for a long, long time to come,” he says.

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – He may be an American, but Jerry Ungerman displays Israeli-style stoicism when it comes to the effects of war on his company, Check Point Software Technologies. The developer of computer security software has 600 employees in its hometown of Tel Aviv.

“It’s an unfortunate part of life,” says Ungerman, Check Point’s vice chairman, of Israel’s war with Hezbollah. “There’s been no impact on our operations.”

Indeed, he describes the effect of the call-up of Israeli army reservists from Check Point’s employee ranks as nearly indistinguishable from people taking their summer vacation. And the rocket attacks? For folks in Tel Aviv, he suggests, it’s like being in downtown San Francisco and hearing that a rocket has fallen on Lake Tahoe.

Tough talk? Maybe. But an ability to shrug off adversity is valuable in Check Point’s line of work. In recent months, the company has faced its share of proverbial rockets from Wall Street and Washington alike.

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – For the past several years, we’ve used data from the International Finance Corp., the private sector arm of the World Bank, as a starting point for an international stock search. We’ve had moderate success with the approach, so we’re giving it another go.

The data in question comes from the IFC’s annual “Doing Business” study, which measures how easy it is to do business in a particular country. Namely, the survey quantifies the time and costs involved in starting a business, dealing with licenses, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business.

This morning, the IFC releases “Doing Business in 2007: How to Reform,” which ranks 175 countries in those categories. The survey, for which the IFC surveyed 5,000 local experts, is a treasure trove of information for Beltway wonks, especially those interested in how red tape affects developing economies.

Full story at Forbes.com