Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

Now that Apple's (AAPL) stock has crashed more than 35% from its peak, most Wall Street analysts are frantically cutting their estimates and reducing their price targets.

Most of them still rate the stock a "buy" so it's not as though everyone has given up and thrown in the towel.

This herd-like analyst behavior often frustrates critics, who complain that Wall Street analysts usually miss big turning points like Apple's.

In the case of Apple, though, a couple of Wall Street analysts were out in front of the stock's collapse. One of them has now upgraded it again, arguing that investors have actually become too negative about the company.

Walter Piecyk of BTIG Research recently upgraded Apple from Neutral to Buy.

Piecyk argues that investors have gotten way too pessimistic about Apple, with some even suggesting that it's the next BlackBerry (BBRY).

To be clear: Piecyk's not sounding the "all clear."

Piecyk thinks Apple will have a lousy first quarter, and will then issue "guidance" for

There has been lots of action in the mobile industry this week.

First, Samsung is launching a much-anticipated new smartphone in New York this evening--a phone that many observers think will vault it ahead of Apple (AAPL) and the rest of the smartphone industry.

The existing version of this phone, the Galaxy S3, has already put Samsung on a par with Apple, with many phone buyers preferring the Galaxy's large screen to the smaller one on Apple's iPhone 5.

Samsung's new phone, the Galaxy S4, will be even bigger, and it is also expected to have several other new features that may make the iPhone look old and boring in comparison.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About The Samsung Galaxy 4S

Samsung, the Korean TV giant, has come out of nowhere over the last few years to become the world's largest smartphone seller. This rise has surprised both Wall Street and Apple. Apple's stock has tanked. And with Samsung now poised to leap past Apple, Apple executives are suddenly on the

Since the market low in 2009, every move upward has been greeted with confident assertions that another crash was just around the corner.

After all, the world is still beset by problems, from the Eurozone, to China, to the gridlock and debt problems here in the U.S.

At some point, market gurus have assured us, this sucker's rally will end, and stocks will plunge.

Well, a crash is always possible, but as time goes by, a return to the 2009 lows seems less and less likely.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) is up more than 110% from its 2009 lows. Despite some modest pullbacks along the way, this push higher has been steady and strong.

This year, the Dow is already up 10%, and it has set new all-time records in each of the past five days.

So, what's next?

Will the bull run continue?

Or will we finally get the crash that some investors have been waiting to use as an entry point for the past four years?

As ever, it's impossible to say.

Yahoo! Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli

The COO of Facebook (FB), Sheryl Sandberg, has published a new book called "Lean In."

The book offers career advice for women in a world that is still dominated by men.

Sandberg argues that women need to be more assertive in their careers, fighting against societal programming that conditions them to defer to men, scale back their ambitions, and essentially give up early.

This passivity, Sandberg argues, is the real reason there are so few women in positions of power.

In the context of this message, Sandberg notes that it is impossible to "have it all" as a woman--full career and full home life--if you're also expected to do all of the housework and child care at home.

Related: Mrs. Moneypenny's Career Advice for Ambitious Women

This is why a woman's most important career decision, Sandberg says, is who you marry.

(Sandberg also says the men who do more housework have more sex, an assertion that would be encouraging to those in "egalitarian" marriages in which men do their share of

In the old days, Wall Street's top hedge fund managers used to operate secretly and silently behind the scenes.

Not anymore.

These days, one popular hedge-fund strategy is to take a position and then publicly announce it--while also often explaining your investment thesis in detail. The goal in doing so is presumably to persuade others to make similar bets, thus driving the stock in the desired direction.

Of course, one drawback in revealing your position is that you invite others to take the opposite side of the trade.

And in one very public case--opposing bets on a stock called Herbalife--that's exactly what's happening.

A couple of months ago, a hedge-fund manager named Bill Ackman shorted Herbalife, saying the multi-level marketing company is just a Ponzi scheme. After taking his position, Ackman gave a 300-page presentation at an investment conference explaining his analysis.

Not surprisingly, Herbalife immediately denied the charge.

More surprisingly, two other hedge fund

Eighteen months ago, in September 2011, the Economic Cycle Research Institute made a startling call:

"The U.S. economy is... tipping into a recession. And there's nothing that policy makers can do to head it off."

This call garnered a great deal of attention, in part because ECRI had made another startling call the year before. The earlier call came in the midst of a consensus that the U.S. was indeed headed into a recession. And ECRI's call, which proved to be correct, was that the U.S. was NOT headed for recession and that the consensus was wrong.

The accuracy of the bold 2010 "no recession" call, combined with ECRI's insistence that its economic forecasts have never been wrong, focused a lot of attention on the 2011 recession call.

And when the recession that the U.S. was supposedly "tipping into" did not materialize, many market observers wanted ECRI to acknowledge its mistake and eat some crow.

But ECRI did not do that.

The firm simply adjusted the time horizon for its recession

It's hard to tell which Google project the world is more excited about--Google Glass(es) or Google's self-driving cars--but this frequent car-driver, anyway, can't wait for the latter.

(The Glasses sound cool, too, don't get me wrong.)

Google is making great progress with these cars: The cars have now been driven more than 300,000 miles, and there have been no accidents with a car under the computer's control. (There was a widely publicized fender-bender in 2011, when one of the Google cars crunched into the car ahead of it, but the human driver was driving.)

One of the insights that people often quickly have when they ride in these cars, according to people who have ridden in them, is that it's obvious the computer can be a vastly better driver than a human ever could be. With lasers and radar for eyes, the computer can monitor an extraordinary number of inputs and react much more quickly to surprises than a human ever could.

I have always assumed that there would be much excitement

The dreaded deadline for the federal "sequestration" spending cuts has now passed... and we're still here.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that the $85 billion hatchet-chop is now leading to indiscriminate furloughs, job losses, and spending reductions across almost the entire federal government, including in programs that most Americans love.

Related: The Sequester Jeopardizes the Recovery: Koutoulas

Why did it come to this? Why did we just enact a policy that almost everyone hates?

Because our government is too dysfunctional to do anything else.

David Walker, Founder and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative and the former Comptroller General of the United States, is appalled by the lack of leadership and cooperation in Washington.

"We are here because of failure of the president, a failure of the Senate and a failure of the House to reach a reasoned and reasonable to avoid the sequester," he says. "It is a global embarrassment."

He says it's time for Americans to come