The Federal Reserve has raised short-term interest rates at the fastest pace since the early 1980s in an attempt to curb the hottest inflation since the early 1980s. But in its zeal to tame inflation, the Fed has been seemingly indifferent to sudden sharp shifts in the economic winds.
Read moreThe Green New Deal is Just the Vague, Audacious Goal We Need
The unveiling of a Green New Deal last week provoked a mix of enthusiasm and derision. For each voice embracing the radical vision to decarbonize the American economy within a decade, there was another voice decrying the plan as economically unrealistic, technologically impossible, and politically untenable.
Read moreThe Case Against Elon Musk Will Chill Innovation
ELON MUSK HAS long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private.
Read moreElon Musk's Ire Reveals a Wall Street-Silicon Valley Divide
Wall Street and Silicon Valley have never been happy bedfellows, and that was on full display this week during Tesla’s quarterly earnings call. These calls are usually dull affairs, with CEOs or CFOs reading a prepared script summarizing the already-released financial results and articulating
Read moreThe Risks of Demonizing Silicon Valley
For years, the ascent of tech has broadly been viewed as positive, heralding an era of increased productivity and greater communication. But recently, the litany of corporate missteps and a general sense of power accreting to a few extraordinarily rich and powerful companies and the men–yes, largely men–who lead them has triggered a wave of criticisms of the once-Teflon culture of the Valley.
Read moreThe Everything Store Expands
News that Amazon intends to buy Whole Foods Market for more than $13 billion was greeted jubilantly by financial markets, with Amazon’s stock rising 2.5 percent, almost enough to cover the entire purchase. At the same time, the shares of other grocery retailers, ranging from Kroger’s to Walmart,
Read moreLook to Zuck’s F8, Not Trump’s 100 Days, to See the Shape of the Future
The Circle, a film adaptation of the best-selling novel by David Eggers about a mega-Silicon Valley company that has sinister plans to control the world, opened recently to tepid reviews and unimpressive box office. That shouldn’t obscure the fact that the issues it attempts to address—and which the novel brilliantly took on—are ones that need to be dealt with, urgently.
Read moreBeyond Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is often held up as the gold standard of revolution and transformation, but what if replicating the Valley isn’t the point? Other hives of innovation and growth buzz around the country and in almost every city around the world. Where will innovation happen, and how will what we build change as its venue changes?
Read moreTweeting Isn't a Bubble, It's a Bandwagon
Twitter’s initial public offering last week was everything that Facebook’s botched offering a year and a half ago was not: the stock was reasonably priced; management wooed investors; and the company neither promised the moon nor the stars, and was rewarded with a substantial amount of cash raised, a stock that went up more than 75 percent, and a valuation of $25 billion.
Read moreYahoo Aims to Achieve Turnaround Dream With Hire of Marissa Mayer
In the past year, several tech companies that once seem inviolable have fractured badly—Research in Motion and Nokia most notably. Yahoo, which yesterday announced a surprising and energetic choice of Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, is not in such dire straits, but only just. Its revenues have been on a multiyear secular decline, occasionally flowing, mostly ebbing; it lost the battle with Google as a search engine; and its content, while stellar, may be unable to support its current structure and identity. Mayer is a bold hire, and visions of another turnaround, that of Apple in the late 1990s, must surely be a dream. The question will be whether that dream has any chance of becoming real.
Read moreDon't De-Friend Facebook Yet: Its IPO Might Not Mean Trouble Ahead
Facebook’s epically hyped IPO debuted not with a bang but with a whimper. While the company sold $16 billion worth of initial shares, the stock ended the day largely where it began, at $38 a share, leaving the company with a market cap of about $100 billion. The offering was widely derided by the Wall Street community of traders, who viewed the stock's failure to soar on day one as a sign of troubled times ahead for Facebook.
Read moreWhat Market Panic? Halcyon Days for Silicon Valley
It’s no secret that the media world is disproportionately represented by denizens of the East Coast, which also overlaps with the corridors of politics and finance. For the past years, these circles have been focused on financial crises, the fate of the euro zone, high unemployment, government debt, unbridled political partisanship, nuclear proliferation, and successive waves of market panic.
Read moreOnetime Internet Darling Yahoo Now on a Deathwatch
The communications technologies of the past two decades are widely and rightly celebrated. The Internet, email, the proliferation of free or inexpensive software programs and apps that allow countless millions to access and organize their lives, and now the Androids and iPhones that are turning handheld devices into portable computers—all have captured attention, imagination, and sales.
Read moreSteve Jobs Legacy: Apple Must Expand, Offer More Great Products or Fail
Steve Jobs has rightly been lauded over the past day and a half as a visionary who transformed consumer technology over the past 30 years. And Apple has been extolled as a company that embodies the vision of Steve Jobs and is uniquely poised to maintain his legacy, not simply because of the expertise and experience of CEO Tim Cook but because of the stunning loyalty of tens of millions of customers around the globe and a corporate balance sheet flush with tens of billions of dollars in cash and an enviable product pipeline.
Read moreUnemployment Report: Why Jobs Won’t Be Coming Back Soon
So yesterday’s monthly employment report, which showed a net gain of merely 18,000 jobs, once again confounded the expectations of economists—and sorely disappointed those in Washington by showing precious little job creation in the United States.
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