Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

At the end of this year, when Apple's cheap iPhone comes out, it is going to be amusing to listen to all the Apple (AAPL) fans who consoled themselves about Apple's loss of market share by dismissing competitors' phones as "cheap plastic crap."

Because the new cheap iPhone is supposed to have a cheap plastic back.

(Presumably, Apple fans will regard Apple's cheap plastic back as having been designed perfectly, unlike the usual cheap plastic crap.)

But more importantly...

Apple's decision to finally launch a cheap iPhone is a great move by the company.

Related: Apple Has A Lot of "Tricks Up Its Sleeve" in 2013: David Kirkpatrick

It's a move that is at least a year late, unfortunately, which has helped Apple lose a lot of global market share to competitors like Samsung.

But it's still a great move.

Why?

Because the explosive growth in the smartphone market has now shifted to emerging markets like China and India, where there are few carrier subsidies and most people can't afford phones

With Tim Geithner set to resign, the U.S. is about to get a new Treasury Secretary.

So, who should it be?

According to some people, it should be Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist who is also a very popular (and controversial) columnist for the New York Times. There is a petition, started by actor Danny Glover, at Signop.org with nearly 225,ooo supporters as of Tuesday.

Unlike many economists who favor policies that conservatives like--austerity, reduced government spending, tight money--Krugman has been extremely outspoken in recent years about the need for more government spending to improve the economy. This stance has earned him the ire of Republicans, who believe that Krugman and his "liberal" ideas are part of the problem.

But unlike most conservative economists, Krugman has actually been right. The U.S. has not been consumed by hyper-inflation, the stimulus worked, the economy is growing, and unemployment is dropping, albeit slowly.

So it's not surprising

French actor Gerard Depardieu, who has had roles in about 180 movies including "Green Card" and "Cyrano de Bergerac," has renounced his citizenship in the country to protest France's high taxes.

France's new President, Francois Hollande, wants to raise France's income tax on those making more than a million euros a year to 75% from 41%.

That's apparently too much for the actor, who moved to Belgium in protest and has now renounced his French citizenship and been given a Russian passport.

(Russia has a flat tax of 13%, and Depardieu's defection has been a huge coup for the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, who publicly dined with the actor recently at Putin's house in Sochi.)

Depardieu's highly public departure follows the exodus of other wealthy people in France. But Depardieu is one of the few who has explicitly admitted that his move is about money.

The threat to renounce one's citizenship over taxes, obviously, isn't limited to France. Americans frequently threaten to do the same thing,

There has been a lot of talk about the death of the TV business over the past 10 years.

And the TV business is indeed beginning to change in ways that will change the status quo for TV companies, especially networks.

But those changes are happening slowly.

And in the meantime, it's business as usual in the TV industry, which means coining money at a rate that is almost unfathomable to anyone who works in the print or digital-media or even radio businesses.

Case in point?

A cable TV network that no one watched, Al Gore's Current TV, just sold for $500 million.

Okay, it's an exaggeration to say that no one watched Current, although that's exactly what the network's best-known host, Eliot Spitzer, recently told the New York Times' Brian Stelter, but it's not an exaggeration to say that Current's ratings were lousy.

The ratings were so lousy, in fact, that the network was at risk of getting dropped by Time Warner Cable (TWC).

Nor was the programming that Current TV produces attractive to

To listen to the moaning of some Republicans in the House of Representatives, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Republicans are losing the fiscal battle in Washington.

Actually, they're winning.

To see this, you just need to step back and look at the tax deal and the country's fiscal trends from a broader perspective.

Yesterday, the government voted to extend almost all of the Bush Tax Cuts permanently.

Not temporarily, as a stimulus measure.

Permanently.

Ever since the Bush Tax Cuts were first enacted in 2001, one goal of the Republican party has been to "make the Bush Tax Cuts permanent."

For most of the last decade, this goal has seemed like an extremist view: Making the Bush Tax Cuts permanent would drastically reduce the federal government's revenue. It would also increase inequality and balloon the national debt and deficit--so how could we possibly justify doing that?

And yet now, suddenly, almost all of the Bush Tax Cuts are permanent.

And the definition of "rich" in

Both sides have given up ground in the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations in Washington, but the surprise tactic of the Republicans to put forth a "Plan B" has suddenly thrown the whole deal into doubt.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner essentially stormed out of the negotiations a couple of days ago and put forth his own bill, which he refers to as "Plan B." This bill extends the Bush tax cuts for all Americans except those making $1 million or more. House members will vote Thursday night on the fiscal cliff deal proposed by Boehner. President Obama has said he would veto the plan.

Greg Valliere, the Chief Political Strategist at Potomac Research Group, says the Republican ploy is the "worst case scenario" for the negotiations.

Valliere now thinks it is likely that the "deal" will slip into next year and may not happen as early in January as many people expect.

So, what would finally galvanize Washington lawmakers and get them to do what American citizens elected them to do? (Lead.)

A

The horrific slaughter of 7 adults and 20 children with an assault weapon last week has once again focused attention on America's liberal gun laws.

The Sandy Hook massacre has also done something that other recent mass shootings have failed to do, which is to cause some investors and retailers to rethink their support of gun manufacturers.

The prevailing investment ethos in this country is that investors should be concerned with nothing but financial performance: As long as a company delivers compelling returns to its shareholders, those shareholders should not have to care about how the company does business or what sorts of products or services it sells.

Earlier this week, however, a private equity firm called Cerberus announced that it will sell its stake in "Freedom Group," a large gun manufacturer that makes the Bushmaster assault rifle used in the Connecticut killings.

Cerberus is run by an investor named Stephen Feinberg, whose father lives in Newtown, Connecticut, where the

Last summer, Apple (AAPL) was the hottest stock on earth.

Pretty much every analyst on Wall Street loved it.

And pretty much every analyst thought it was headed to $1,000 a share.

(And once the stock neared $700, you pretty much had to think that, or you wouldn't have wanted to buy it, because the return wouldn't have justified the risk.)

All this optimism came despite the fact that Apple increasingly faced several big questions and challenges:

• Pressure on its profit margin as competitors caught up with the iPhone and iPad
• The declining marginal improvement of each new generation of iPhone and iPad
• A change in the smartphone market in which the explosive growth moved to low-priced phones that Apple doesn't offer
• A product-launch vacuum, in which Apple was not likely to release any major products for at least the first six months of 2013
• The approach of the real post-Steve Jobs era

All of these issues were visible last summer. But Wall Street was so enthralled with the Apple story that