"If this is a rainy-day fund, they're saving for a millennial flood," Georgetown University's finance professor Lee Pinkowitz told The Wall Street Journal.
Apple's lucrative products help explain why the cash pile has burgeoned; so does the group's historic tendency to avoid big acquisitions as well as dividends or buybacks. Ninety per cent of the money is held overseas to avoid high US corporate taxes.
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"French productivity, measured by GDP per hour worked, is higher than in Britain to an almost embarrassing extent. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics this month showed that productivity in France is 29.4% higher I have always argued that this is because Britain is a higher-employment, lower-investment economy than France, where restrictive labour laws discourage employment and, where it is an alternative, encourage firms to invest. While a machine gets on with it, a French worker responds with a Gallic shrug. But that French worker has significantly more capital equipment than their British equivalent."
David Smith, The Sunday Times
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What would the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages say about gold today?Sponsored Italian mathematician Fibonacci is most famous for a curious sequence of numbers. Continuing his series on technical analysis, Dominic Frisby explains what these numbers are, and what they can tell us about gold’s next move.
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Believe it or not, this market is a “buy”Charts With the world in the state it’s in and the market so volatile, buying stocks right now might go against all your instincts. But that’s just what you should be doing, says Dominic Frisby. Here, he explains why.
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Chart of the week: avocados and bitcoin are in syncCharts An amusing new spurious correlation has been spotted between the price of bitcoin and Mexican Hass avocados. In reality, of course, they have nothing to do with each other beyond “superficial price action”.
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Chart of the week: Kuwait's stockmarket is ready for take-offCharts Kuwait's stockmarket is due to be promoted from “frontier” status to an emerging market by index provider MSCI next June. That should entice almost $10bn of global investors’ cash into the country.
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Chart of the week: US stocks outrun profitsCharts The US stockmarket has become totally detached from underlying profits of its constituent companies over the past three years.
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