Business

Ahead of this week's AAPL earnings, investors were looking forward to more clues what the company with the quarter-trillion cash war chest would do with the funds that are now greater than the GDP of Greece, and aside from the token increase in shareholder distributions, they got little else, which has once again prompted speculation who Apple will acquire once the company decides to shift away from corporate bond holdings (recall that as of this quarter Apple now has more corporate debt on its books than the biggest bond mutual fund) to acquisitions.

Former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, one of the most outspoken and critical members of the Fed's extended family by far, lashed out at the prevailing groupthink that has permeated the Federal Reserve in a speech delivered moments ago at the Hoover Fed Conference titled "The Battle of Ideas", in which among other things he explained that the Fed has no real strategy on policy normalization, asked "what could possibly go wrong" and, unlike all his former colleagues, provided an honest answer.

Here are some select excerpts from his speech:

Moments from now Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will deliver a speech at Brown University as part of the "125 Years of Women at Brown Conference." While the purpose of the conference is to "celebrate the role of women at Brown over the last 125 years"....

Women who have played a critical role in shaping Brown on and off campus will be celebrated early May. The 125 Years of Women at Brown Conference will bring around 700 alums back to campus May 5 and 6 for a series of lectures, panels and events.

 

Authored by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,

The Guessers Convocation

On Wednesday the socialist central planning agency that has bedeviled the market economy for more than a century held one of its regular meetings.  Thereafter it informed us about its reading of the bird entrails via statement (one could call this a verbose form of groping in the dark).

Modern economic forecasting rituals.

Well, the Fed said the recent disappointing economic data would be "transitory" and based on the just released jobs report, it may have been somewhat right, because after growing only by a revised 79,000 jobs in March, payrolls rebounded in April, rising by more than the expected 190K to 211K, in line with the optimistic whisper estimates. The not so great news: March payrolls were revised materially lower, and denying expectations of a solid upward revision, March payrolls were said to rise by only 79K, below the 98K initially reported.