Pay Up, Friedman

My Third-World Cab Driver knows more than you.“There are many reasons Apple has not spent its cash hoard, but I’ll bet anything that one of them is the uncertain economic and tax environment in this country.” —The Mustache of Understanding, proudly displaying his utter ignorance of Apple’s history of recovering from a near-bankruptcy, high profit margins from skyrocketing gadget sales, and famous practice of not spending that mushrooming cash hoard unless there’s a damn good reason. Oh, and that American manufacturing plant they’re planning to open this year. [NYT]

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Yeah, remember all those decades when we had total certainty about the economic and tax environment out the yin yang.

So when will we mortals go ahead and promote Tom Friedman to World Economy Wizard? He sure seems to know what everybody else is doing wrong. I think it’s a miracle Apple scraped together their $137 billion in cash without Tom personally approving every move.

Saw a very interesting TED Talk posted this week titled Who Controls the World?. Kind of fun to see a diagram showing the ownership connections of the six hundred thousand multinationals and which very familiar corporations were at the core of the web.

Also just read another great Matt Tiabbi article (thanks BobCens) about the Justice Department’s punt on prosecutions for pretty much everything banks can think of to do. Laws? Regulations? Dr. Horrible laugh.

Today I saw Elizabeth Warren’s video in her first Banking Committee hearing. It’s bad enough to criticize the bankers, but she’s embarrassing their wholly owned regulators too. I hope she doesn’t meet with a tragic “accident”.

Money, and the lack thereof, can both be so depressing.

Now hold up here … seems we should give Mr. Friedman at least another six months to see if this prediction plays out.

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