Amazon.com is absolutely on fire. The company posted Q1 results that blew away estimates, with EPS of 41 cents a dime ahead of the Street, as both gross margins and operating margin expanded in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like financial economist David X. Li, who derived a now-widely used mathematical formula, might someday earn a Nobel Prize. Today, though, in the midst of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all.
When the economy goes south, one name invariably surfaces on the lips of pundits and economists: John Maynard Keynes. That is because the twentieth century’s greatest economist is generally associated with the idea that markets require government intervention in order to function properly. But Keynes’ ideas were not just a prescription for an ailing economy; they were a complete theory of capitalism.
It’s difficult to avoid the comparisons between the current sad state of financial affairs and the Great Depression. “This is not like 1987 or 1998 or 2001,” Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain said at a conference on Nov. 11.
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