Business

With concerns over the state of the US consumer - especially the low- and middle-income shopper base - lingering, analysts were looking forward to today's Q4 results by America's largest retailer for some further clarity, and they were not disappointed with what they saw: WalMart reported non-GAAP Q4 EPS of $1.30, beating expectations of $1.29 by one cent. The adjusted number included 8 cents in non-GAAP addbacks to a GAAP number of $1.22.

As John Rubino eloquently puts it, "when the history of these times is written, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan will be one of the major villains, but also one of the greatest mysteries. This is so because he has, in effect, been three different people." Greenspan started his public life brilliantly, as a libertarian thinker who said some compelling and accurate things about gold and its role in the world. An example from 1966: "This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

Few business communities swing from boom to bust as reliably as Silicon Valley, but detecting shifts in this opaque world can be challenging. To help illuminate the field, Bloomberg created the U.S. Startups Barometer, a new weekly indicator that tracks the overall health of the business environment for private technology companies based in the U.S.

So how 'healthy' is the American Venture Capital business?

The short answer is - not very!

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

Back in 1776, Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the economy. Investopedia explains how the invisible hand works as, “In a free market economy, self-interested individuals operate through a system of mutual interdependence to promote the general benefit of society at large.”

The world’s most valuable brand is owned by a company that you likely interact with every day. In fact, you may have even gotten to this web page using it.

That brand is Google – and it dominates the internet with a 64% market share in search, while generating 41% of all digital advertising revenue globally. As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, according to Brand Finance’s most recent 2017 list, Google’s brand value has recently increased to $109.5 billion, which is just enough to supplant Apple’s $107.1 billion brand from the top of the list.