Market Currents
Apple (AAPL) is set to hold a memorial service for Steve Jobs at Stanford University this...
-
Sunday, October 16, 2011, 9:09 AM ETApple (AAPL) is set to hold a memorial service for Steve Jobs at Stanford University this evening, the WSJ reports, with some of Silicon Valley's top names expected to attend. An event for Apple employees has been set for Wednesday.
Other date
TECH ETFs IN FOCUS
Latest Tech Articles
This news story has 24 comments:
I guess whatever it takes to bring that magical Isomething / Facebook / Twitter experience to the workers revolution on Wall street. Never mine that JPM employs five times what AAPL does. As the ultimate consumer society, we must have justice, we must have our factime, lol.
Steve Jobs was an icon. His vision created many jobs here and around the world and jump started (if not created) a whole new industry to lead us into this century.
Certainly no degradation should be attached to the simple fact that he "built a better mousetrap."
Whatever point you are trying to make would be more appropriately made in some other article rather than one that deals with the premature loss of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs liked chinese slave labor.....he didn't care one bit of Americans workers.....
Dr. Jonas Salk who brought the polio vaccine really helped millions. And he did NOT pushed for a patent.....
But fundamentally, Apple still makes most of their money by producing products and providing services that actually add value.
I wish I could say the same for the big investment banks like JPM, who add little value to society, yet achieve outlandish compensation for that minuscule value. In fact, frequently they /extract/ value from society by the damage they do, and they still get outrageous compensation for doing so.
Apple knows how to operate efficiently in the rigged system, but they're not the ones rigging it.
They also raised the prices on electronic books to consumers when they entered the electronic book business from under $10 to $14. And they channel billions of dollars to multimillionaire artists and studios that work non stop to ensure that they extract the most revenue out of each song/movie so they can fund their $10K a night vacations or their private jet to their private island.
Technology companies and entertainment companies employ very few people so their revenue per employee is astronomical as compared to JPM and other big banks. JPM does a lot more than just investment banking and alone employs over 240K people. Apple employs 46K and MSFT employs 90K.
Our tech industry and companies including Apple has used Wall Street to launch their companies and create what we have in the US with respect to technology leadership. Other countries without capital generating industries like Wall Street had bright people but could never get access to risk capital to really grow their business.
The OWS folks are just choosing their own brand to smoke because it seems cooler than MS.
A lot of people don't know what they are talking about.
Never mind that JPM exemplifies Karl Marx' dictum that capitalism generates the seeds of it's own destruction.
AAPL is capitalism at it's best. AAPL is the very antithesis of everything JPM stands for.
And that will be seen in the memorial service tonight.
Going to Karl Marx for wisdom is fruitless.
Put down the bong.
> Oracle and other tech companies.
Agreed, but I think it's safe to say that tech companies, generally speaking, have added more value and done less harm to society than have financial companies.
The middle class finally gets it. They're on the march.
History, whether you like it or not, is on the side of Marx.
Put down the Chivas.
> financial companies.
It's not about a "choice" -- I agree the tech industry needs the financial industry.
It's about the financial industry wreaking havoc with the entire economy with increasing frequency.
I'm just saying if you had to rank industries on how exploitative and damaging they have been to society over the last few decades, the financial industry would absolutely be at the top, and the tech industries would be near the bottom.
But, each to his own. :)
Marx's legacy is in the smoking ruins of communist China and the USSR along with India discarding his manifesto. History has already judged communism by over 2 Billion people who lived it and it has come up massively short.
FS does not exist in a parallel universe. It is in the fabric of how we get business done in America so the burden is on you to show a better way of moving this huge economy.
I have worked in both and like them both but choosing one over the other is not a choice.
Easy:
1) Naked CDS and ohter 'insurance'. No more insuring things you don't own.
2) HFT. Adds no value, increases volatility.
3) Dark pools. Detracts from transparency.
4) Prop trading backed by depositor money. This is an outright crime against common sense.
5) A few other things, but you get the idea: all the abuses.
The financial industry absolutely provides very essential services to the economic system, but it also uses (abuses) its position in that system for its own (often personal) gain -- generally at the expense of other parts of the system.
The system works when compensation is earned in proportion to the amount of value added -- not leeched without adding any value.
The point you made - compensation should be tied to creation of value - is the key item.
Too often financial services finds a way to disown the risk and dump it where it has NO PLACE being: depositor money, pension funds, municipalities. Then with no skin in the game can take very risky investments and rely on the government to bail them out.
Moving money back and forth between two invisible piles and then skimming the top creates absolutely ZERO value to society. I don't give a crap about the usual market-making and creation of liquidity, it's just apologetic nonsense.
Pretty funny how that works, capitalism (which isn't really capitalism, it's actually preying on the weak) makes bad bets and then relies on government to bail it out.
Will you thank Marx for those bailouts Tomas?
By the way the US has never been a pure capitalist society, we have always had capitalism tempered by regulations and socialism. It is a check and balance system similar to the way the branches of government are supposed to work.
And what people fail to see is that banks are running a balance sheet with huge long positions on various loans and business commitments. In a sense they do prop trading every day when they make a loan. Taking offsetting positions to derisk the long position may make sense.
CDS need transparency on all parties or they are not worth having around. Who wrote them and who bought them needs to be on some kind of exchange and in all financial statements.
I am not a fan of HFT but also not a fan of regulation based on emotion. And what is HFT? How does one write a regulation on something so hard to define? And why is it illegal if I want to buy and sell securities every few seconds?
Your view that the FS industry abused its position is just fantasy. Buyers have almost 8,000 banks to choose from and another 8,000 CU's. Knock yourself out.
And compensation is definitely added when people drive revenue that in turn drives profits and more capital.
Frankly our biggest financial problem in the past 50 years has been a massive housing problem and our government has been involved in that market for decades pushing capital into the industry and distorting supply and demand. The banks did not lead that debacle.
The government bailed themselves out as they owned the majority of the mortgages. They just did not want them all their books directly and running all of the banks at the same time in the process. The US has never had a pure capitalist society and we have paid dearly at times like in our housing industry. How is that working out?
Intelligent regulations are fine but we always take it to excess and give up growth and investment. Socialism and capitalism is a bad marriage that creates more problems than good. It also distorts markets and causes capital flight.
In your words, "nobody put a gun to their head..."
And the argument that the government bailed themselves out it baloney and you know it, government did not sanction risk-free garbage like Mortgage Backed Securities, nor did they sponsor the outright fraud that Goldman Sachs did by lumping in garbage, low-rated "tranches," that they knew were absolute junk, with AAA rated (which weren't even REALLY AAA) securities, and then knowingly take the other side of the bet against their OWN customer.
This is again the financial system taking advantage of the situation by lumping in stuff that isn't supposed to be traded (like government sponsored mortgages), and finding a way to manipulate it to make money and dump the risk on SOMEONE ELSE.
All this blame the government is just a smoke-screen for the idiots that did that damage. Government makes tons of mistakes but let's get real.
These became so complicated and so many securitized derivatives based on them they hardly resembled the backed mortgages that Freddie and Fannie were sponsoring.
You want to talk Frankenstein, there you have it.
There is all kinds of nuance that can be thrown out pro and con but at the end of the day our USG decided they should run housing.
But he was in many ways not a terribly attractive person. He killed Apples corporate philanthropy program, denied paternity of his first daughter, and ridiculed and bullied those around him.
Did he change the world? I don't own any apple products, and I guess the price I pay for this is that its slightly less convenient for me to listen to music or share photos than it is for those who do. But somehow I get by.
My nomination for someone who really changed the world is Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal, who invented a low cost method for screening for and treating cervical cancer. This method, described in a recent NYTimes article, is now being adopted throughout the third world, and will save between tens and hundreds of thousands of lives over the next decade.
But the iPad is nice too.
Steve Jobs smackdown:
http://wapo.st/oh2kld
I was sorry that he passed at such an early age, but am grateful he left the company with a team of developers who share his vision for what can be done by a single company.
I am long AAPL and can't wait to see Apple's quarterly numbers.