Yesterday was an epic, game-changing day for Google (GOOG:NASDAQ). It alters the landscape in the smartphone industry. In one expensive move, Google made its first foray into proprietary hardware territory. The move was another kick in the head for top competitor Research In Motion (RIMM:NASDAQ). Google is now a hardware manufacturer. Never in […]
Stick With What You Know?
Do companies which try to do new things succeed and why? Phin Upham dicusses a seminal work on the topic In Diversification, Ricardian rents, and Tobin’s q, Cynthia A. Montgomery and Birger Wernerfelt present a study on the ability of a multimarket firm to diversify its resources (factors). Montgomery and Wernerfelt test whether a multimarket firm’s average rents […]
Deepwater Horizon Rig Disaster Threatens Drilling
BP Plc last September tapped into a new oilfield called Tiber, estimated to hold at least 3 billion barrels of crude, or six months’ worth of U.S. consumption. Discovered through seismic imaging and data crunched on a supercomputer, the field is almost six miles (9.6 kilometers) beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s floor, in a spot […]
Bernanke-speak: The Economy Is Recovering….But Whose?
This week there has been much play in the mainstream media and papers across the country regarding Ben Bernanke’s statements to a global audience of investment bankers and Federal Reserve affiliates in Wyoming that the "U.S. economy is strengthening." My question, whose economy is he speaking of? It must be the "greater good" world socialism […]
Toyota forecasts first operatingloss in 71 years
Toyota Motor Corp, the world’s second-largest automaker, forecast its first operating loss in 71 years on plummeting demand, prompting Moody’s Investors Service to consider downgrading the company’s top-rated credit. The carmaker will post a 150 billion yen ($1.7 billion) loss in the year through March, it said in a statement on Monday, scrapping a previous […]
Free trade puts millions of American jobs at risk
Despite its robust economy, the United States is poised to feel the labor crunch as manifested by the recent job cuts imposed by big corporations just to keep their sagging operations afloat in keeping with their remaining resources. Independent economists have predicted that the problem will be exacerbated further by the emergence of globalization which […]