//youtu.be/ag14Ao_xO4c Has Yellen seen the movie Margin Call, I wonder? In it, Jeremy Iron’s classic Wall Street boss (John Tuld) referred to 3 ways of making a living: be first, be smarter, or cheat. Of course in financial markets these are not mutually exclusive options where Governments habitually use their central banks to operate […]
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The world seems to be in love with JD.COM. After the concerns about the possible headwinds from a slowing Chinese economy that had been dragging down sentiment and shares in rival Alibaba, JD.COM’s results assuaged many of these fears. As well as reporting a +52% YoY increase in Q3 revenues and +72% rise in gross profit […]
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Having paid up for Kraft Foods, the newly merged Kraft Heinz will need to not only over-deliver on its $1.5bn of projected cost savings by 2017, but also to exploit a network effect (leveraging Kraft brands through Heinz’s stronger international footprint) to kick-start what has been lacklustre individual organic revenue performances for both groups. While […]
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Back in 2011 when the government announced switching from RPI to CPI for determining public sector pensions we all should have known that this was just another ruse to use an even more unrepresentative inflation measure to cut expenditures. With the government’s lead it was also inevitable that this strategy would also be adopted by […]
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A year ago last month, Norfolk Southern’s (NSC) CEO, Wick Moorman was facing a proposed merger of one of its principal rivals, CSX, with Canadian Pacific (CP). At that stage, Mr Moorman was quoted as saying that a large railroad merger would be “highly problematic” and would face “far too many regulatory hurdles”. Â While conceding […]
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What’s the next big thing for Apple should the stalling growth in Chinese demand for the iPhone mark the peak in this product’s life cycle? Improvements to the Mac may be invigorating that product line, but its contribution remains relatively modest to the overall group, while the weak health of the global laptop market does […]
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Pepsi’s reported organic revenue growth has been edging ahead all year and for Q3 it was up at +7.4%. For the purveyors of the black teeth rot, this was impressive, particularly since underlying sales volumes were up by only +1% globally. A quick look at the details however provided the answer with ‘organic’ revenues up […]
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UK supermarkets are a bit like the beer they used to sell; bland and too many of them. Tesco however is working on that one as it culls its less profitable sites and brands (including the #4 UK brand, Carlsberg) to restore its growth and margin metrics, even it means from a lower base of […]
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