Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

News stories published over the past couple of days have revealed just how much information the U.S. National Security Agency collects about the communications of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The Guardian, for example, reported that Verizon has been sending the U.S. government "metadata" about all of its telephone records so the government can analyze who is talking to who, when, and where.

The Washington Post followed up with an even more shocking story, which said that the government "directly [taps] into the central servers" of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), Facebook (FB), and other leading tech companies and monitors communications in real time." One of the Post's sources on that story, described as a "career intelligence officer," was said to be so horrified by the power of this surveillance program that the officer voluntarily exposed it.

Other news organizations have since confirmed the existence of this surveillance program, called PRISM,

When Facebook (FB) went public a year ago, it was billed as "the next Google."

Excitement around the IPO was so intense that amateurs who knew little about the company and less about investing were elbowing each other out of the way to get stock.

And then the company finally went public... and the stock flopped.

A year later, Facebook's stock is down 40% from its IPO price, and few people seem excited about the company anymore.

So, what gives?

What happened?

From a broad perspective, Facebook is going through the same maturation process that many rapidly growing tech companies have gone through. It is transitioning from hyper-growth to steadier growth, and the stock "multiple"--the price that investors are willing to pay for the shares relative to the company's earnings--is dropping accordingly.

Importantly, this is nothing new: Google (GOOG) went through the same process from 2007 to 2012. Amazon (AMZN) went through the same process from 1999 to 2005 or so. As the growth of these

The French resort operator Club Med has received a buyout offer from, among others, the Chinese conglomerate Fosun International. Fosun wants to help expand Club Med to China, where the company already operates two resorts.

This news highlights the growing importance of Chinese tourists in the global economy.

Only a short while ago, American tourists were the world's most important tourists. They were also among the world's most reviled tourists, with the stereotype of the loud, obnoxious, ostentatious, and rude "ugly American" becoming known throughout the world.

But now it's Chinese tourists who are spending big, appalling locals, and embarrassing their country.

Last week, a 15-year old tourist from Nanjing scrawled his name on a 3,500 year-old carving in Egypt's Luxor Temple. Another Chinese tourist took a picture of the graffiti and posted it to a Chinese social media site, triggering a massive backlash and parental apology.

This was not the only Chinese tourism incident that has

Corporate America is in the midst of an obsession with "shareholder value."

This narrow measure of company performance holds that what's good for a company's stock price is also what's good for the company and its customers and employees. So, for better and worse, many of today's CEOs are judged primarily by their stock prices.

Capitalizing on this theme, Bloomberg has put together a list of CEO "underachievers"--big company CEOs whose stocks have done the worst relative to the broader market since the beginning of each CEO's tenure.

Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) sits atop the list, with HP's stock having underperformed by a startling 30 percentage points since she took the job.

James Gorman of Morgan Stanley (MS) and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America (BAC) hold the 5th and 6th slots, with both banks having struggled in the past couple of years.

And, not surprisingly, the staggeringly well-compensated CEO of Occidental Petroleum (OXY), Stephen Chazen, owns a place in the top

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook is going to get raked over the coals by Congress for the company's spectacular tax-dodging techniques.

No one is suggesting that any of these techniques are illegal.

No one is suggesting that Apple is doing anything that any number of other massive multi-national companies aren't doing.

And no one is suggesting that companies should voluntarily pay more taxes than they absolutely have to pay. According to tax expert David Cay Johnston, the Supreme Court "says a company or an individual has an absolute right to pay the minimum in tax the law requires." (But just because you can doesn't mean that it's proper, he adds).

But boy are Apple's tax-dodging techniques effective.

And, boy, do they make clear that the United States (and, ideally, other world governments) have to get together to simplify corporate tax policies. Or else this highly sophisticated tax-dodging will continue to become a bigger and bigger source of corporate profitability.

In preparation for

Yahoo! (YHOO) announced this morning that it is buying social blogging company Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash.

Tumblr is a six-year old company based in New York. It is run by a charismatic 26 year-old entrepreneur named David Karp, who will pocket hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal and has therefore become an object of fascination for the New York tabloids.

Related: High School Dropout to Tech Titan

Tumblr allows users to create simple blogs and share words, pictures, and video. It is one of a handful of massive social publishing platforms created in the past decade, a group that also includes companies like Facebook (FB), Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Tumblr's audience is massive. The company's blogs receive 300 million unique visitors per month, and a staggering 120,000 new blogs are created every day (not blog posts--blogs). This mind-blowing traffic has made Tumblr one of the largest digital media companies in the world.

The Tumblr deal will vastly increase