Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

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

All of November and half of December have now gone by, and our government still hasn't reached a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff."

This "cliff," you will recall, will cause sharp tax increases and spending cuts to take place starting Jan. 1.

While the U.S. certainly needs to raise taxes and cut spending to begin to work its way out of its monstrous deficit problem, doing it sharply will threaten a fragile economic recovery. Many economists, in fact, believe the cliff will cause the economy to plunge back into recession.

Related: Let's Take the Fiscal Cliff Plunge: Bruce Bartlett

Our government appears to understand the risks and undesirability of this happening.

But, at least externally, both parties are clinging fast to their respective demands.

The biggest sticking point remains income tax rates on the highest earning Americans. Democrats want these tax rates to rise (which they will anyway, sharply, if no deal is reached). Republicans want them to stay put. And neither side is

A few months ago, Facebook's IPO was an unequivocal disaster.

Priced at $38 in May, the stock (FB) had fallen more than 50% to the high teens, and many pundits were predicting that it would fall all the way to $10.

That was then.

Now, Facebook is in the high $20s again, driven by renewed enthusiasm for Facebook's long-term growth opportunity.

Specifically, investors are excited about three things:

1. Facebook's new mobile advertising units, "Sponsored Stories," appear to be doing well. Many anecdotes suggest that Facebook's users are "engaging" with the ads and that Facebook will be able to build a huge business out of mobile.

2. Facebook's new ad network, which allows the company to target ads within Facebook based on a user's behavior outside Facebook's walls, is also doing well. Early advertisers are seeing excellent returns on their spending using this new targeting system, and Wall Street believes this could be another big growth engine.

3. The insider "lockup releases" that

Another few days have gone by, and the U.S. government still hasn't reached a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff"--the combination of spending cuts and tax hikes that are due to go into effect on Jan. 1.

These changes are more like a "squeeze" than a "cliff," but they are expected to slow U.S. growth and perhaps throw the economy back into a recession.

So lawmakers are eager to reach some sort of compromise that will reduce the changes and lessen the blow.

In the past few days, the country has been treated to TV appearances by both sides, in which they pronounce each other's position as ridiculous and refuse to even come to the bargaining table. But Wall Street and Washington insiders still expect that we'll get a deal.

Heidi Moore, the Finance and Economics Editor for The Guardian, agrees.

Moore recently "translated" a letter that the Republicans in Congress sent to President Obama that outlined their opening budget counteroffer. The original letter, Moore says, was "huffy" and