With all eyes on crude, following last night's mini flash crash which sent WTI lower by 3% from just above $45 to under $43 in under 10 minutes, equity markets, generally quiet overnight, have taken on a secondary importance ahead of today's key risk event, the April payrolls report (full preview here). In global equities, Asian and European stocks are lower, while S&P futures are little changed.
Nearly five years ago, when looking at the cash and cash equivalents of Apple, which at the time was a far more "modest" $121 billion in gross cash (and virtually no debt at the time), we noted that Tim Cook's company was "the world's biggest hedge fund you have never heard of." Five years later, with more details available about its balance sheet holdings, we can conclude that in addition to the world's largest publicly traded company, Apple has now also become the world's biggest bond fund.
Yesterday in an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said the tech giant would be devoting $1 billion to promote "advanced manufacturing" jobs in the United States.
"We're announcing it today. So you're the first person I'm telling," Cook told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on Wednesday. "Well, not the first person because we've talked to a company that we're going to invest in already," he said, adding that Apple will announce the first investment later in May. -CNBC
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Last week, I wrote a post titled, What Can an Overhyped Silicon Valley Juice Company Tell Us About the U.S. Economy. Here’s how I ended the piece:
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
The primary driver behind my decision to walk away from a lucrative Wall Street career was my coming to terms with the fact that our financial system is largely a rent-seeking scheme designed to enrich parasitical, unethical behavior at the expense of the nation as a whole. As soon as I recognized this, I could no longer feel proud of my work and certainly couldn’t justify my large paycheck for being a compliant, highly productive cog in this machine.