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Apple is now worth 1.5 trillion dollars:
[On Wednesday, June 10], Apple became the first US company to achieve a $1.5 trillion market capitalization. The stock surged even as investors began pulling back in many other areas of the economy.
Reasons given by investors for the optimism include anticipation of the launch of a 5G iPhone this fall, signs of strong App Store sales, and interest in the potential of ARM-driven Macs, based on a Bloomberg report yesterday that said Apple may announce an ARM transition at its annual developer conference later this month.
Yesterday and today, Apple's movement ran counter to most of the rest of the market, where investors' actions have reflected fear of a global coronavirus resurgence and anticipation of bad news from the US Federal Reserve in a report due out today.
Market capitalization essentially means the total number of shares of a company being traded multiplied by the current trading value of a share in that company, making it the best publicly available measure of the company's actual value.
AAPL was at $338.40 per share as of June 13 which gave it a total market capitalization of $1.47 trillion.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @09:33PM (5 children)
It's not about greed. People are getting more and more desperate - scraping by is the best the bottom 50‰ can hope for. It seems to me that Marx's theories about succession of economic systems are being validated in the US, where socialist institutions are sprouting on the corpse of capitalism and the people are screaming for more.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday June 14 2020, @11:41PM (4 children)
Why? Didn't someone just say that wages were merely stagnant? Where's the desperation coming from? I'll note that the developing world is becoming less and less desperate at this time. Maybe we ought to think about what works?
Sorry, Marx is just crazy. It's been a cluster every time someone implemented his theories.
And according to you, those same people are getting more and more desperate. What a coincidence. I think maybe if we dynamite these socialist institutions, revive that capitalism corpse, and do what works, then maybe we'll have less of these supposedly desperate people screaming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @12:36AM (1 child)
I dunno. China's hybrid systems seems to be going pretty well for them - with a little of everything. Not that its any good for the folks that values freedom and liberty over everything else, but their current structure allows them to make really quick and cohesive decision instead of the opinion fest and indecisiveness (and in-fighting) of a lot of the western democratic system.
Of course some of this also hinged upon Xi Jinping's ability to unify the party - they weren't immune to infighting and tribal warlords ruling supreme over their domain. It was really bad for the common folks when that was the case as the nepotism meant anyone with any connection to the warlords can pretty much run amok without much repercussion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @03:03AM
"Hybrid" here means abandoning Communism in all but name.
Which is great when those quick and cohesive decisions agree with what you want. When they don't, it sucks much worse than the indecisive Western democratic systems which mostly leave you alone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @01:14AM (1 child)
Marxism is definitely crazy in an unindustrialized nation that hasn't gone through the rapid development of capitalism - Marx's own theory supports that.
Feudalism lays a stable foundation by concentrating populations, building infrastructure, and developing an educated class.
Capitalism expands the educated classes, incentivises R & D, and inevitably brings about it's own destruction through unrelenting advance. Requirements for education and training in advanced capitalist societies bring socialist institutions like public schooling into the fold. Automation displaces unskilled workers, leading to welfare systems in order to quell unrest. Bureaucratic corruption leads to the failure of political systems, and eventually the capitalist society is subsumed by socialism.
Soviets tried to jump from feudalism straight to socialism - failure. Vietnam was the same, China as well until they figured out the mistake and corrected it. Cuba's problems lie mostly with being an island and pissing off their largest neighbor, rather than improper implementation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @01:00PM
There's always an excuse for why it doesn't work. The USSR for a glaring counterexample was quite industrialized in 1945. Now, the US is post-industrialized with the conditions of the 1850s no longer applying to it.
Pretty irrelevant since a lot happened in Europe between the development of feudalism, which started way back in the 4th century (!) during the decay of the Roman Empire, and the 1850s when Marx came up with his theories.
Which I should note, the "destruction through unrelenting advance" didn't happen - turns out all that unrelenting advance made labor more valuable, completely opposite of what was claimed would happen. Instead, we're seeing destruction of capitalism through the usual mechanisms of parasitism. For example, in the US a wealth transfer of roughly 3% of the US's GDP is going from young adults to the elderly, just because way-back-when someone didn't want granny eating cat food. A similar transfer of wealth happens through Medicare and government bonds too. Well, what a coincidence that we're hearing whining about Boomers who will be the last generation to (at least for the leading part) get more out of these programs than they put in.
Governments of the developed world, including those of the US, typically consume 30-50% of the respective country's GDP for stuff (like roads, emergency services, etc) that should cost a fraction of that. Another symptom is the complex and opaque bureaucracies that are funded with that money. And of course, the bribing of the public with those unsustainable levels of entitlements. That's not a flaw of capitalism, that's a flaw of any form of governance that goes on too long.
Marx tried to get around that by claiming that communism was some asymptotic process that would gradually eliminate the state. Sorry, that's yet another fairy tale. We haven't seen any withering of the state.