Monthly Archives: December 2014

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Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP is making the news…for all the right reasons.  Bill believes that trust is the ULTIMATE career weapon, and unlike most of his colleagues Bill is willing to talk about it. I recently wrote two articles, the first called CEOs “Suck” at Trust and the second, Trust, Governance & Howard Schultz….

Identiv Goes On The Record With Disney Infinity Toys

On Thursday December 11th,  Identiv (INVE) revealed that it is indeed supplying NFC technology for Disney’s (DIS) Infinity line of toys. We have mentioned this several times in the past, but the company’s CFO, Brian Nelson, admitted this fact on December 11.  We have provided his audio presentation here in its entirety accompanied by the investor slide show….

Producer Price Index: Inflation Remains Tame

Today’s release of the November Producer Price Index (PPI) for Final Demand came in at -0.2% month-over-month seasonally adjusted. That’s down from the previous month’s 0.2% increase. Core Final Demand (less food and energy) was unchanged from last month. The year-over-year change in Final Demand is up 1.4%, the lowest since 1.2% in February. Here…

EC Grandma Got

Forbes had a very short article titled High Yield Grandma which offers a brief profile of a woman who has overcome a few setbacks and has a very substantial investment portfolio worth $3 million. As the clever title implies she focuses on dividend stocks. Based on the above paragraph there is nothing too unusual about her strategy….

Great Graphic: Euro And Brent

This Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, shows how well the euro (white line) appears to have tracked the price of the front-month Brent futures contract. One of the reasons this week proved so challenging for foreign exchange traders is that this apparent relationship broke down.  Oil prices fell around 10% while the euro actually advanced against the…

November 2014 Producer Price Inflation Continues To Be Moderate

The Producer Price Index inflation continued to be slight. In all events, the intermediate processing continues to show a moderation of inflation in the supply chain. The PPI represents inflation pressure (or lack thereof) that migrates into consumer price. The BLS reported that the headline Producer Price Index (PPI) finished goods prices (now called final demand prices) year-over-year inflation…