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During the show on Sunday, Feb. 26, a headline popped up on CNBC: “Can’t Figure Out This Economy? Walmart, Home Depot Are Having Trouble, Too’ – and talk about truth in headlining. (One of my earliest editors, at Houston Chronicle, would have disliked the ‘question head’ but enjoyed the Oxford comma, but I digress.)
Inflation is slowing, but not as quickly as Wall Street hoped to see. (If you had transitory on your weekly Macroeconomic Bingo Card, good on you!) The labor market is still strong, with more openings than applicants, and wages running hot in order to entice new hires through the doors.
We also had Bankrate.com’s Senior Economic Analyst Mark Hamrick on our air to talk about new data that spells out our emergency savings and our credit card debt, nationally speaking. (Pro tip: spend less, save more and pay off those credit card balances as quick-as-can.)
For our consumer tech story, we gawked at an original iPhone that sold at auction for $63,000. More importantly, at least for most investors, Apple seems to have a hammerlock on Gen Z consumers. That means Apple has a generational ‘moat’ of recurring revenue for, apparently, years to come. The downside could be societal, in that having a ‘blue thread’ for texting can lead to peer pressure and/or bullying. The blue threads mean they are Apple-encrypted communications. A green thread occurs when a non-Apple smartphone joins the text thread.
Other mentions include:
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