Good morning
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The headlines:
- Apple Share Price cruises past the $700 mark.
Link: iPhone 5 “shatters” sales record.
There were record first-day orders for the iPhone of around 200 million units. I’m lying. It was 2 million units. But it’s still more than double the orders for the iPhone 4S on the first day.
It’s because we’ve all been waiting so patiently for the new design. Which, if we’re honest, wasn’t really the grandest of transformations. It felt a bit like one of those “What Not To Wear” shows where the woman comes out at the end and everyone screams but deep down, we’re all thinking that she could have done with a little more surgery. But you know, sure, the hair looks better. And the teeth.
Honest opinion? The share price, which has increased SEVENTY THREE PERCENT this year, is well due for a shrewd and sneaky piece of short-selling. Mainly because 2 million phone orders on day 1 spell out a delivery disaster for Apple. And despite my love of the great fruit, they don’t exactly have the best track-record of glitch-less new models. Or tact*.
That’s my call:
supply shortage + some unforseen but crucial flaw + glibness = stock fail
Until early next period, when they fix the flaw and the supply shortage causes desperate hype to be the next person to ratchet up cool factor and the glibness becomes heroic brand power.
*Does anyone remember the iPhone 4 antennae debacle? And the “well, just hold the phone differently” official response?
- Pakistan and Bangladesh block Youtube.
Link: more of this anti-islamic film story.
I’ll be honest. I found this film** on Youtube and watched it. And while I’m being honest, I should point out that I only managed 2 minutes and 3 seconds before I stopped as a result of the sheer appallingness of the script, the acting, the setting, the blatant BLATANT lying by a new-internation-version-of-the-bible-worshipper.
Even I was enraged. More because I’d wasted bandwidth – but also just because something so so stupid has actually resulted in deaths across the Arabic world. Which is clearly the director’s intention.
The reason that this is featuring in a finance blog is because you cannot divorce the social from the economical. Wars are constantly sparked by extremist action: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; September 11; Hitler and his obsession with the Aryan race…
We shall see.
**It’s not actually the film. It’s a 14 minute trailor!
- The Euro Banking Crisis.
Link: to be continued.
While many people know about the Debt Crisis in Europe – this tends not to extend to the banking crisis. Which is partly that many banks built their capital base by investing in the higher yielding bonds of the fiscally weaker Euro nations. Like Greece and Italy, Spain and Ireland.
So the reluctance to allow Greece to restructure her debt wasn’t just a CDS crisis – it was also this fear that it would throw the already fragile French and German banks into disarray.
And at the same time, the bank “assets” were reaching new highs as the banks continued to lend out money. To, for example, the real estate developers of Ireland and Spain.
So last year, the European banks had pledged to cut $1.2 trillion of assets to help “weather the crisis”. Well they haven’t. Instead, their balance sheets have grown. Which is, you know, the opposite.
Not good.
- Mitt Romney loses the election.
Link: that awkward moment when it’s not even election day.
This is supposedly quite scandalous. But frankly, on this point, I’m on Mr Romney’s side. When you have half the population of a country filled with this sense of entitlement as to what the government owes them, you are dangerously close to no longer being a democracy.
More of a communist/socialist state. But hey – it’s what the people want, right?
How the times have changed!
That’s all for now.
Have a good day.
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