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2011
10/17/2011
No Financial Armageddon
Once more into the breach we go. After a strong week where markets regained some footing, Monday once again saw a sharp selloff of nearly 2 percent. These wildly volatile days have been the norm since mid-summer, and as any market maven will attest, such volatility usually means that there is more to come.
Markets may have jumped the rails, but they aren’t good barometers of the real world either. The global economy, let alone our national one, did not suddenly change from good to bad over the weekend, just as it did not suddenly shift from dire to OK two weeks ago when the markets reversed weeks of precipitous decline.
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10/07/2011
What Apple Must Do to Survive
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.
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10/28/2011
More Mania in the Markets
In yet another chapter in the manic saga of global markets, stocks soared Thursday around the world after European leaders announced yet another comprehensive plan to solve—once and for all?—the deepening sovereign-debt crisis. The outpouring of optimism was given an added boost by the release in the United States of third-quarter economic figures that indicated GDP increased 2.5 percent, and the icing on the proverbial cake was supplied by news that the Chinese government would potentially add some of its trillions in reserves to help shore up ailing European finances.
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10/12/2011
GOP's Irrational War on the Fed
Early in last night’s Republican primary debate, the ever-provocative, always-entertaining and occasionally astute Newt Gingrich launched a broadside against Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke: “Bernanke has in secret spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out one group and not bailing out another group. I don’t see anybody in the news media demanding the kind of transparency at the Fed that you would demand of every other aspect of the federal government. And I think it is corrupt and it is wrong for one man to have that kind of secret power.”
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