First, Carrier. Next: Single Payer Health Care?? “A little muscle judiciously applied can be a unifying thing.” –Peggy Noonan, “Trump’s Carrier Coup and a Lesson From JFK”; The Wall Street Journal (12/2/16). [Editor’s Note: The views expressed here are solely those of Ross Kaplan, and do not represent Edina Realty, Berkshire Hathaway, or any other...Read More
WSJ: “European Firms Borrow at Subzero Rates” “Capitalism, almost commonsensically, cannot function well at the zero bound or with a minus sign as a yield. $11 trillion of negative yielding bonds are not assets ” they are liabilities. Factor that, Ms. Yellen into your asset price objective. You and your contemporaries have flipped $11 trillion...Read More
From Flailing to Flourishing, With No Pain or Sacrifice “GE Capital Chief to Retire After Pivoting GE’s Finance Arm” –headline, The Wall Street Journal (8/30/2016) Once upon a time, corporations, sports teams, and election campaigns(!) that were flailing underperforming got restructured, overhauled, or otherwise remade (presumably, into something more focused, efficient, and — hopefully —...Read More
“Build It and They Will Come” Real Estate Development “Silicon Valley Spec House Seeks $42.8 Million.” –Headline, The Wall Street Journal (3/2/16) For the uninitiated, a “spec” or “speculative” house is a home that a developer first builds, then tries to sell. That’s opposed to a home that’s commissioned by/for an existing client, and built...Read More
Are Midwestern Homes Less “Seductive” Than Ones on the Coast? According to an analysis of roughly 1.6 million home listings by Realtor.com, lower-priced homes were most likely to have the word “love” in property descriptions, while homes priced in the millions of dollars were most likely to have “sexy” and “seductive” in the descriptions. —The...Read More
“Houston, Washington, We Have a Problem . . .” “If you are 20 or 30 you probably see capitalism in terms of two dramatic themes. The first was the crash of ’08, in which heedless, irresponsible operators in business and government kited the system and scrammed. The second is income inequality. Why are some people...Read More
