On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
There are plenty of Apply rumors on the web. But when a major news site says something we stop to listen. The Financial Times begins to speculate people start to listen. It is being reported that Apple has rented a stage in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January. Where Apple is expected to make a major announcement. Stories about this mythical touch screen device better than a iPhone and cooler than a Netbook could be actually launched. Yes after all the speculation that Apple has explored making of the Tablet device for years it might become a reality. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster today speculated that an event was imminent. “We believe there is a 75 per cent likelihood that Apple will have an event in January and a 50 per cent chance that it will be held to launch the Apple Tablet,” he wrote in a new research note. “If Apple announced the Tablet in January, it would likely ship later in the March quarter.” An original post by Socio...