Earlier this year, two law professors at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law took issue with of all things Tobin’s Q. Though named for James Tobin, the idea had been introduced much earlier by several people. Tobin popularized one view of the concept. Robert Bartlett and Frank Partnoy objected to many of the contemporary uses. To judge firm [...]
When it comes to the stock market and the corporate cash flow condition, our attention is usually drawn to stock repurchases. With good reason. These controversial uses of scarce internal funds are traditionally argued along the lines of management teams identifying and correcting undervalued shares. History shows, conclusively, that hasn’t really been true. Last year’s tax reform law was meant [...]
We have ample enough evidence for the efficacy, or inefficacy really, of tax cuts as fiscal stimulus. They have been deployed numerous times all over the world the last ten years, and the results have been nearly identical in all. Most charitably, proponents have been left with some form of “jobs saved” to describe, counterfactually, how if they had not [...]
When Apple introduced the first iPhone in January 2007, the 8 gig model retailed for $599. The company cut the price to $399 that September in an alliance with AT&T. The 8 gig iPhone 3G that debuted in July 2008, just eighteen months later, was set at $199, and less than a year after that was suggested to retail at [...]
It is often very easy to fixate on the S&P 500 as if it were the only current proxy of the broad universe of stocks. Like the Dow Jones Industrial Average before it, the 500 has attained synonymy with stocks as it is the most widely publicized and recognized value. But just like the DJIA, the index has its own [...]
The nature of liquidity under the eurodollar standard is to essentially link “markets” that outwardly seem to have little or no relation. You can see the synchronized ups and downs quite clearly but miss the ultimate connection, especially under the orthodox assumption of the world’s economies and their “natural” finance as mostly closed systems with only tenuous associations. If that [...]
Quarterly results from IBM are watched because they serve as a proxy for business spending across the globe. Capex in the modern world often takes the form of technology/computer investments. In fact, productivity growth in the past three decades has been driven, at the margins, by corporate investments in digital technology. Ever since late last year, IBM has been keeping [...]
The fact that companies coming out of the Great Recession have been running lean in terms of labor costs cuts both ways. It is a negative factor for employment growth since businesses have been very reluctant to add to staff levels without sustained revenue growth (which never materialized outside of currency translations). However, it also meant that those lucky, official [...]
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