So what if the capital's subway system is blocked by strikers. So what if the country's bonds trade at half their face value for fear of default. Europe's oldest country with fixed borders, Portugal, is keeping the barriers high.

Being touchy about your sovreignty is not only practiced by Greece against German attempts to oversee the Athens budget process. Portugal is taking on Os Estados Unidos. The US lost another appeal to extradite George Wright, 77, an escaped fugitive, turned down by the Supreme Court in Lisbon, near where he was captured. Portugal says Wright is now Portuguese and the statute of limitations for sending him to the US has expired.

Actually, I am pretty upbeat on Lusitania. The country has a great future in tourism, substituting for North African destinations with revolutions or terrorism scaring people off. It's finally cracking down on Madeira's regional autonomy; the island's spending is the main cause of Portugal's budget deficit. Lisbon's deficit totals a rather modest 103-111% of gross national product (depending on which statistician you listen to), well below the horror levels of other PIIGS countries. Moreover Portugal is cracking down on tax evasion, also often centered on its offshore islands like Madeira, or involving offshore companies in Gibraltar to own holiday homes.

Ao fim e ao cabo, there is no easy way to invest in Portugal. Its Banco ADRs and preferred shares have gone and the Portugal Fund has closed its doors.

The 3^rd breakdown in a couple of years of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange leads me to an unproven theory, that high-frequency trading not only cheats those trading more slowly. Hedge funds and operators 'front-run' fund managers, pension plans, and brokerage customers to prevent them from buying or selling at the prices they seek. They trade a fraction of a second faster than the real stock market because of physical proximity to the electronic trading floor, which they pay to get. They are set up to find big trades which may have been split between several market-makers to hide them.

HFT also stresses the stock markets by causing flash crashes and total breakdowns in the trading systems. Today 53% of all trading on stock markets is HFT.

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