HP, Lenovo, and Required Returns

A big week in Silicon Valley.

Google buys Motorola Mobility for $12 Billion,  HP shut down its WebOS hardware operation (shortly after purchasing Palm) and looks to sell off its entire PC hardware division (after purchasing Compaq), while at the same time purchasing Autonomy for the (insane) price of $10 Billion. Autonomy sells structured data search services — its clients are large firms. Autonomy is in the high margin monopolistic “space”, whereas PCs are in the commodity space.

The cited reason for HP wanting to divest itself of its (profitable) consumer hardware division is falling margins.

Sticky Expectations, Stock Returns, and Minsky Processes

Let’s measure short run returns from holding equities.

Low MRP Workers?

The market failures have been in the capital markets, not the labor market.  The only thing wrong with wages is that we have allowed them to stagnate for so long.

At this rate, we would need to deliver 10% of GDP as corporate dividends before unemployment falls back to 5%.

Paul Krugman: Cognitive Capture

Krugman takes on MMT.

Hunting For Snipe

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Nick Rowe continues to wage his crusade. (See also here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here).

Arbitrage and Non-Arbitrage

There is  a lively discussion over at Warren Mosler’s modestly named blog  Center Of the Universe, revolving around Mosler’s plan for Greece. We’ve heard this story before, but this particular plan is a bit more tricky to dissect, so let’s get some background information on arbitrage first.

Musical Interlude and some philosophy