There is only one question to ask on this manic Monday: Is the global market turmoil that has now spread to Wall Street a summer squall—a painful but ultimately transitory surge in volatility—or is it the first crack in a shaky global edifice that is about to crumble?
Read moreThe “Made in China” Fallacy
very month, we are greeted with trade figures released by the Census Bureau. Over the past decade in particular, those figures have taken on added weight, largely because of the reported trade deficit with China. Month after month, that figure has grown, with barely a pause. In January, the reported deficit with China was a bit under $28 billion.
Read moreWall Street’s Irrational Negative Reaction to Apple’s Earnings Report
A large multinational company announces that its business has grown significantly from a year earlier, that its earnings are up more than 20 percent and its sales up nearly 25 percent. Its products continued to see strong demand around the world, with the only negative being that some people apparently held off buying because they wanted to wait for the newest version.
Read moreYahoo Aims to Achieve Turnaround Dream With Hire of Marissa Mayer
In the past year, several tech companies that once seem inviolable have fractured badly—Research in Motion and Nokia most notably. Yahoo, which yesterday announced a surprising and energetic choice of Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, is not in such dire straits, but only just. Its revenues have been on a multiyear secular decline, occasionally flowing, mostly ebbing; it lost the battle with Google as a search engine; and its content, while stellar, may be unable to support its current structure and identity. Mayer is a bold hire, and visions of another turnaround, that of Apple in the late 1990s, must surely be a dream. The question will be whether that dream has any chance of becoming real.
Read moreSteve Jobs Legacy: Apple Must Expand, Offer More Great Products or Fail
Steve Jobs has rightly been lauded over the past day and a half as a visionary who transformed consumer technology over the past 30 years. And Apple has been extolled as a company that embodies the vision of Steve Jobs and is uniquely poised to maintain his legacy, not simply because of the expertise and experience of CEO Tim Cook but because of the stunning loyalty of tens of millions of customers around the globe and a corporate balance sheet flush with tens of billions of dollars in cash and an enviable product pipeline.
Read moreApple After Steve Jobs’s Resignation: Is the Company Doomed?
Let it be acknowledged that Apple, from which Steve Jobs has finally resigned as CEO after years of battling pancreatic cancer, is no ordinary company. It is the most powerful, successful, and innovative consumer technology company of our age.
Read moreThings Are Bad Unless You’re Amazon, Starbucks or Expedia
Apple Does it Again: Why Companies Win While Economies Lose
As Washington continues to skate perilously close to the economic abyss, 3,000 miles away in Cupertino, California, this week Apple released its results for the second quarter. To no one’s surprise but to almost universal amazement, Apple managed to sell more iPads (9.3 million) and iPhones (20.3 million) than ever before. Quarterly revenues of $28 billion were up more than 80% from last year, and profits were up 125%.
Read moreMessage to Businesses: Uncertainty is Here to Stay
The jobs report was bad enough. But it’s hardly the only indication of continuing trouble for the U.S. economy. Released at the end of June, U.S. Bancorp’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 small businesses confirmed what many people already know: the recession that began in 2008 never ended for vast swaths of the U.S.
Read moreThe World’s Dirtiest — and Best — Economic Crystal Ball? Iron Ore. Yes, Iron Ore.
Headlines were replete this week with talk of an imminent slowdown of the global economy. Combined with the pallid recovery of the United States and continued waves of debt crises in Europe, a lull in activity from Brazil to India to China would be trouble indeed.
Read moreThe Myth of the Stock-Economy Connection
Last week, I wrote a column in Time about the unfortunate tendency of investors, pundits, economists et al to view stock markets as barometers for the economy and economic data as indicators of the markets. This tendency is pronounced in the media in general and the financial media above all, which looks daily for a story about why markets move up or down.
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