Andy Kessler: Wall Street Meat : My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder
My first book. Stories of working as a Wall Street analyst with Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Mary Meeker, and Henry Blodget
Andy Kessler: Running Money : Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets and My Hunt for the Big Score
New York Times Bestseller
Barron's Best Business Books 2004
Andy Kessler: How We Got Here : A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
Connect the dots from the Industrial Revolution to the Computer and Communications business of today.
Andy Kessler: The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor
Can we get medicine on the same ever-lowering price curves as technology. Funny stories of my quest to figure out where silicon will change medicine.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281340088197580.html
Apple is a juggernaut. Its stock touched $600 on Thursday, which represents $560 billion in market capitalization. Compare this to Exxon Mobil, with a market cap of $400 billion, IBM's $240 billion and Wal-Mart's $210 billion. Can Apple really be worth that much?
The easy answer is that the company is worth whatever the market says it's worth. Well, yes, the market is right every day—but it is right only for that day. What about tomorrow?
Smart investors look under every rock to estimate what's going to happen next. And some are breathlessly claiming the stock is cheap and headed for $1,000—a trillion-dollar market cap. Others invoke the Wall Street adage that no tree grows to the sky.
So which is it?
It's clear what Germany is up to. Let the rest of Europe wallow in their own red ink. Let riots in the streets cause regime change. Dangle as bailout bait a "fiscal union" with countries giving up sovereign control of their budgets in exchange for Germany guaranteeing debts. The ECB will do the dirty work but it's Germany alone that will save the day and end up owning Europe. But why?
The euro zone is a wasteland of "entitlementarians" while Germany is an industrial might. But this source of German wealth is sputtering. Germany's industrial icons—Mercedes, BMW, Siemens, ThyssenKrupp—are so '80s. Teutonic efficiency hasn't adapted well to modern-knowledge industries.
Germany doesn't have an Apple or a Google or a Cisco, let alone a LinkedIn or Zynga. SAP is Oracle's weak sister. There's no Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson. Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany's largest pharma company, doesn't crack the top 10 globally. MorphoSys, their largest biotech company, is 43rd globally. Their Neuer Markt (rival: NASDAQ) closed in 2003.
Demographics stink. Go to Germany and you basically see Germans. Entrepreneurial companies require the best, no matter nationality. Silicon Valley feasts on a smorgasbord of international scientists and coders. Same in the London. Germany's no melting pot.
The economic history of war is that when internal wealth creation runs out, you have to beggar thy neighbor. Obviously, there's no military option, but Angela Merkel is on an economic mission. Her goal is to take over Europe and coax out Teutonic efficiency from players in the knowledge economy. Germany needs to harness them and pump knowledge wealth as the Russians pump gas.
Start with French wine, Italian fashion, Spanish farming, and Greek tourism. They can all use huge management efficiencies. In France, bureaucrats control half of the economy. Just privatizing government stakes can set off a productivity bonfire.
Merkel may also have designs on turning East Europe into a startup-driven Silicon Valley. Estonia is critical. Skype, bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, was founded there. Silicon Valley startups are hooked on Estonian employees and contract out programming to a country with 22 percent taxes.
Done right, Germany's Europe can kickstart a knowledge economy. Merkel may have Germany on the cusp of lasting greatness by being, well, a little less German--while all the rest are a little more so.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203960804577244961842322348.html
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 took place over seven venues, with 10,000-20,000 attendees and no microphones. One candidate would speak for an hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal and then a half-hour response from the original speaker (which alternated debate to debate). This description alone is almost 280 characters—clearly we've come a long way from Honest Abe to the Twitter age. But should we believe the hype about social media's impact on the 2012 election?
Pew Research says no. "Cable leads the pack as campaign news source," it concludes in a recently released 35-page report. "Twitter, Facebook play very modest roles.”
Too bad that misses the point. New technologies have always altered campaigns and usually in mysterious ways. Party conventions were first televised in 1952 and soon lost their relevance, becoming scripted theater. Richard Nixon lost votes by sweating under harsh lighting during his televised debate with JFK. Bill Clinton bypassed the traditional news media, playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on his sax on Arsenio Hall's late-night show. MoveOn.org used the Internet to accumulate small donations and host a virtual primary won by Howard Dean, who in turn was brought down by a scream, which in turn went viral on the Web. YouTube was soon created and in 2008 hosted "Obama Girl" and other user-generated campaign ads.
Continue reading "WSJ: When Will Social Media Elect a President?" »
