1. We know someone who's famous! Well almost...digging in the NYT archives looking for something for the boss, we ran across this great profile of a local North Texas company who has used ExIm Bank services to grow their exports. We were especially excited because Air Tractor has spoken to attendees at our training events and while it's nice to be in the local rag (Dallas Morning News), the New York Times is big time!

2. No sooner than we finished reading the article in #1, we get an email alert in our inbox about a conviction in the largest fraud case ever perpetrated on ExIm. What??? Apparently someone in Texas got $10M or so by having Mexican companies create fake bills of lading to get access to loans from ExIm, which were then used to buy Ferraris and mansions. Bet ExIm is wanting a do-over right about now too? And while the crimes involved Texas and Mexican companies..the criminals weren't one of our clients.

3. Every day we preaching about the hazards of breaking the rules of export and how you can go to jail, lose your rights to export...blah, blah blah. So we're puzzled at how there's never a dearth of people who think they can break the rules and get away with it when it comes to compliance issues. So eager to make a few mil or 2, these guys agreed to pay bribes to foreign govt officials (undercover FBI)  in order to make some illicit weapons deals. One guy even tried to do the deal after his company's legal dept said no...Welcome to Punk'd the FBI edition.

4. Lost in translation...so much of your export success goes beyond just language. Your product has to be culturally relevant as well. This WSJ article details how a compay had to spend $1.8M to revamp their product due to lack of consideration for how driving rules in other countries are different from those in the US.

5. Back in the day when we first started travelling internationally, we would smuggle fried fish sandwiches (it's a Southern thing!) in our backpack to make sure we had a taste of our mom's downhome cooking. So when we read about this lady smuggling her rice cooker on a trip to Italy...it brought back memories!