mike_galloway

Most, if not all governments want to seen to do something about (put your angst in here) but they don't want to be responsible for the inevitable failures and cost, so it's a "who can we pass the buck to" game.

Nobody wants to be responsible for anything.

MassiveAttack said:

Now, it is up to Tim Cook how he will respond and drive the stock up again.

Amazon is also facing headwinds, but the stock has recovered so far.
Walmart, too.
Jensen Huang responded immediately and the US government removed the chip restriction to sell to China.

If Tim Cook still has no answer, he needs to step down. 

Apple Investors must be frustrating now due to poor stock performance (downhill for 8 days in a row). 

Tim Cook.. If you are reading this, you are cooking Apple and if you have no idea how to navigate, step down. 

The elimination of the USA's massive trade imbalance with the rest of the world is a necessity. The USA has been living on borrowed money for a long time and using it for excessive consumption. Effectively, China and other countries lends the USA money to buy their goods.

It is likely that if Trumps sticks to his guns this rebalancing will be achieved but at the expense of the current generation of Americans, who will pay the price for previous the generations over consumption.

The rest of the world will not pay this debt but they will suffer as world trade will decrease without American over consumption.

On balance this probably has to happen but it would be better done with a more stable man at the wheel.

coolfactor said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

Ok, had to delete some incredibly off topic and rule breaking threads that are just useless screaming matches. Let's chill out.

And as a reminder: It isn't illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal (or at least heavily regulated globally) if a monopoly uses its power of a specific market to manipulate that market or others. The EU has a right to govern how it sees fit, even if some of its policy seems unfairly targeted towards Apple. It is up to Apple to work through the litigation and arrive at a happy medium. These things take time, and the world leaders having pissing matches won't help either.

Patience. This fine was a pittance for the affected companies. We'll see where it goes from here.

Avoid insulting each other, politically charged comments, or leaving the topic entirely to make some kind of random point. There's no need for that.

There also needs to be some safeguards where political regions can't just "change the rules" or implement new rules, and then claim companies are breaking those very same rules. It can take years, even decades, for a large company to build up their sales ecosystem, and then governments come along and just make new rules? One interpretation is that it's a convenient money-grab. Where does this fine money end up in the end? There should be some regulation over that, too.

Unfortunately voters (us) are continually demanding from politicians that "something must be done" about whatever grieves us at the moment and that we are "unfairly disadvantaged" so we sort of get what we deserve (continual knee jerk responses and badly thought out changes) and not what we need. 

Whilst the short term ups and downs of the stock market can be ignored, the bond markets and dollar depreciation cannot, unless the USA wants higher borrowing and imports costs (above the tariff increases) and a risk of loosing reserve currency status. 

Lowering interest rates and tax cuts would make this all far worse.