Ever watched a trade show come apart? The big bash for watchmaking is Baselworld, where the top-line exhibitors spend around $50m to put together a booth so that jewelers can ooh and aah. Unfortunately for Baselworld, Basel has gotten a reputation of printing up special menus with inflated prices for when Baselworld is in town, the hotels all push their rates through the roof and the company that puts on the tradeshow just bought a $350m building and people were starting to get cranky. Whelp, Monday the Swatch Group pulled out. Richemont's been gone since 1990; they started an alternative tradeshow. The MCH Group, which runs the show, had their stock tank yesterday. Now the retailers are starting to demand boons. Gonna be interesting for a tiny segment of the world, but the contagion has spread to CNBC and Forbes. Talkin' a $28bln industry which, I think, is about 1/4th the amount of value Facebook lost last Thursday. See, talking about this means I don't have to talk about how much I hate LA.