Andy Kessler
Latest from Andy Kessler
The Incredible Bain Jobs Machine
Did Mitt Romney and Bain Capital help office-supply retailer Staples create 88,000 jobs? 43,000? 252? Actually, Staples probably destroyed 100,000 jobs while creating millions of new ones. Since 1986, Staples has opened 2,000 stores, eliminating the jobs of distributors and brokers who charged nasty markups for paper and office supplies. But it enabled hundreds of ...
Facebook Billions Powered By ‘Like’ – an emotional sensor is driving the company’s exorbitant valuation.
As bizarre as this sounds, one of the most valuable innovations in technology over the last several decades is Facebook’s “Like” button. That’s what has propelled the company to a galaxy-orbit valuation for its forthcoming initial public offering, filed Wednesday. This is not only because the word “like” is, like, the identifying word of an ...
In San Francisco, There Are Many Ways to Occupy Wall Street
I figured before heading out I would wait for the fog to lift to shine some light on the Occupy San Francisco annex of Occupy Wall Street. I’m not sure it ever did. What many refer to as the People’s Republic of San Francisco is socially liberal and economically neutered. The heaviest traffic is leaving ...
Five Ideas to Kick-Start Job Creation
Now that the debt-ceiling gyrations are over, the Obama administration is “pivoting” to its biggest problem—jobs. Unemployment ticked down to 9.1% in July, but the real unemployment rate, including discouraged workers, is still 16.1%. The stock market is not pleased. Why? Because the president’s calls for “patent reform” and an “infrastructure bank” won’t move the ...
Greek Debt Crisis: New Listing: The Greek Islands – Who Will Buy?
How much for the island of Mykonos? The Mexican standoff between European banks owning Greek debt and Greek taxpayers needs fresh thinking. I’m convinced that the only way out of Europe’s financial crisis is for Germany to essentially own Greece. How did we get here? Start with this: European accounting rules allowed Greek and other ...
Is Internet Cloud & Big Data Killing Stock Exchanges? The New Network Is Virtual
Who Cares Who Owns The New York Stock Exchange? Right now, the Germans want it. In February, Deutsche Börse bid $9.5 billion for NYSE Euronext, only to be topped on April 1 by a combined $11.3 billion bid by U.S. exchanges Nasdaq and ICE. And yet, twice now, the NYSE has politely declined the higher ...
How Videogames Are Changing the Economy
This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second. This is the shape of the world to come—but not in the way you might think. Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing ...
Time To Shut Down The FCC – Consumer Choice Is The Answer – FCC Internet Policy Debate
It’s time to close the Federal Communications Commission. This week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech outlining his push for net neutrality, the absurd notion that the Internet should be “open and free” when in fact it’s quite expensive to build. Net neutrality will straitjacket the U.S. economy’s single most important driver of productivity ...
What’s Really Behind Bernanke’s Easing?
My guess is that the Fed chairman knows that we still have too many banks overstuffed with toxic real estate loans and derivatives. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s $600 billion quantitative easing program has been roundly criticized in this country and around the world. So why is he doing it? Does he know something the ...