Paul Krugman, who was once a serious economist specializing in trade theory, now favors imposing tariffs on China because they won’t adjust the value of their currency to suit US needs:
Urk. If China has an advantage due to low wages, then one way to raise those wages in dollar terms is, you know, to [...]
The name of our blog is Contrarian Musings for a reason. It isn’t easy but identifying the consensus and then going against the crowd is the very essence of investing. Here’s proof that being a contrarian is successful when actually practiced, from Brett Arends at the WSJ:
Everybody knows the last decade on Wall Street was [...]
If the goal of Ben Bernanke’s Jackson Hole speech and the recent FOMC statement was to weaken the dollar, well mission accomplished. Since Bernanke laid out the Fed’s options for creating more inflation on August 27th, the US dollar index has dropped 5% and all manner of risky assets have moved higher when measured in [...]
So Microsoft has decided to raise its dividend and that is certainly good news. How they intend to pay for it says a lot about US economic policy and it isn’t good (via Bloomberg):
Microsoft is planning to sell debt this year to pay for dividends and share repurchases because much of its cash is held [...]
