A new ceo at ford, what jim farley needs to do to get the stock out of the breakdown lane. And microsoft in talks to acquire tiktok. Why the videosharing app is so popular and what it means for microsoft investors. On the barrons roundtable, ben levisohn, carlton english and al rupe. Ben, before we get to the dollar and gold, i just want to ask you, were most of the way through earnings season right now. We knew it wasnt going to be pretty, but is we learn have we learned anything new about the health of Corporate America Going Forward . Its a lot better than people originally thought. 82. 3 of companies beat, which is a really amazing number. The last four quarters was about 71 . And historically, the average is around 64 , and they beat by 22 , so these are huge beats. But theres also worries that these numbers cant be sustained, that they were onetime factors that held to the fact that things were going to get tougher ahead. A lot of it is being explained away. Jack ben, you write i
Something timely literally this morning we heard about the hacking of twitter trump has gone to facebook to get his message out. Facebook has had a lot of criticism over the years i wrote a column recently on why Mark Zuckerberg has not fact check the president. Why it is this relationship between facebook and the white house and free speech . I will throw a big question to launch off. Thank you for doing this. Its good to connect with you again. Like a lot of things you cant just pull out one problem of facebook from its dna and origins and in the case of trum trump, obviously he was not a factor in the early days in the dorm room but by the time the Trump Campaign got rolling in 2015, this became an issue for facebook with the messy way it dealt with controversial content and the same way in 2015 when trump posted stuff that was anti muslim and it actually did violate the companys community standards. But facebook decided not to mess with that. Even though it may have violated the st
Means, what healthy competition means, julia, in this era that were in my take thus far is that theres been a difficulty applying kind of legacy, antitrust law to technology will new ground get broken here because congress, as we learned in elementary school, makes the laws absolutely. And theres been a lot of talk about the need for new, different types of laws. But jon and carl, what i think is really interesting here is the question of how much of todays hearing will really focus on the antitrust issues, which are the purported focus here, and how much will we hear other criticisms, other questions about the likes of hate speech, manipulation, voter manipulation and the spread of misinformation on these platforms such as, you know, youtube which is owned by google as well as on facebook so i think there are a lot of Different Things at play here. While antitrust will be at the center, carl, dont you think well see this veer off into other directions as well yeah. Thats sort of my qu
Fundamentally alter the National Priorities, now is the time whether fighting against systemic racism and Police Brutality and transforming the Energy System away from fossil fuel or ending a dysfunctional Health Care System to address the grotesque levels of inequality c our country, now is the time for change, real change it is incredible to me that the degreeon togr which Congress Continues to ignore the bloated 740 billion Defense Budget which has gone up by over 100 billion since trump has been in office. Year after year democrats and republicans to disagree on almost everything come together with minimal debate to support the exploding pentagon budget which is now higher than the next 11 countries combined and how higher than the next 11 countries combined which represents more than half of our discretionary spending. Incredibly after in just one adjusting for inflation we are now spending more on the military then we did during the height of the cold war when we faced a major ad
Fundamentally alter our national priorities, now is the time. Whether it is fighting against systemic racism and police brutality, transforming our Energy System away from fossil fuel, ending a cruel and dysfunctional Health Care System or addressing the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality in our country, now is the time for change, real change. And when we talk about real change, it is incredible to me the degree to which Congress Continues to ignore our bloated 740 billion Defense Budget which has gone up by over 100 billion since trump has been in office. Year after year, democrats and republicans who disagree on almost everything come together with minimal debate to support an exploding pentagon budget which is now higher than the next 11 countries combined, now higher than the next 11 countries combined and which represents more than half of our discretionary spending. Incredibly, after adjusting for inflation, we are now spending more on the military than we did duri