| After the Deluge
At year end the consensus estimate was approaching $105. A more likely expectation is $90 to $95 for 2008. When fourth-quarter results come out, we'll look to see whether companies have used what wiggle room they have to keep the '07 numbers as low as possible. It may be a good tactic to push up reserves or defer good news because '08 comparisons will matter more than fourth-quarter results. Felix, how do things look to you? Zulauf: The world economy is slowing, and the U.S. has the biggest problem. You have underestimated in the U.S. how much asset-price changes impact gross domestic product. It is underestimated on the upside as well as the downside. Home values probably are five to six times the size of GDP, and if home prices rise by 10%, that creates new assets and borrowing power equal to 50% of GDP.
Banks cashing in on border crossers
The big banks must be loving the recent surge in cross-border shopping.Almost every time you buy something in the United States, your bank makes a few bucks in fees of one sort or another. Expect to pay far more in fees than if you bought something here at home. While the Canadian dollar had a bad day yesterday, it's high enough compared to the U.S. dollar that people are pouring across the border to shop. .
The Intel switch pays off
Maybe Jobs' time there has run its course… Does the Intel news make anyone else sick to their stomachs? Obviously, there was a fair amount of knee-jerk negativity going on, which any amateur psychiatrist can tell you is typical whenever people are faced with change. And I think at the root of that ambivalence toward the Intel transition was a single underlying concern: Just how does this move benefit me? A little more than a year later, Apple provided the definitive answer to that question with the unveiling of the Mac Pro, the desktop that completes the company's migration to Intel processors. The processing specs of the Mac Pro are impressive enough—two dual-core Xeon processors that run at clock speeds ranging from 2GHz to 3GHz for reported performance gains of anywhere from 1.4 to 1.8 times that of a PowerPC G5, depending on what application you're talking about.
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