Joseph Belbruno Blog

  This Famous Method of Valuing Stocks Is Pointing Toward Some Rough Years Ahead Nov. 4, 2025 7:00 am  ET 📉  This is an online version of Spencer Jakab’s Markets A.M. newsletter. Get investing insights in your inbox each weekday by   signing up here —it’s free. 📧 “Uncharted territory” is a phrase investors hear a lot these days. There are, in fact, updated charts out there, and they point to some difficult times ahead. Consider what seems like one of the clearest comparisons of how much we pay for a piece of the world’s largest, most-rewarding stock index. As of last week, its multiple of sales was higher than at any point in history, including the peak of the tech-stock bubble. In part, though, that just reflects the U.S. economy’s transformation.  Microsoft  has an operating margin about five times as high as  Exxon Mobil  and 10 times that of retailer  Walmart . Asset-light companies make up a lot more of the index than they did in the p...

  US-China escalation is here to stay Sarah Beran The writer is former senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the US National Security Council · 4 Nov 2025 Markets celebrated the deal reached between President Trump and President Xi last week, and with good reason: stabilising the US-China relationship is good for the Indo-Pacific region and the west. But the agreement is far from a silver bullet. Both countries are agreeing to a détente that is tactical, not strategic, with a limited set of deliverables and an uncertain timeline. Structural competition between the US and China has opened a faultline that no summit or deal can easily mend. Both countries have sought to capitalise on their perceived advantages by weaponising their deep, complex interdependence. China’s vast rare earth export controls are the most recent escalation, and the latest truce only temporarily postpones the pain. With the export control framework now in place, future moves will be all the more dest...

  China intimidation halted human rights report Beijing pressure on university led it to decline publication of Xinjiang forced labour study AMY BORRETT, LAURA HUGHES AND DAVID SHEPPARD · 4 Nov 2025 Chinese officials carried out a campaign of intimidation against a UK university to prevent research into alleged human rights violations from being published. Internal emails, seen by the Financial Times, reveal that staff at Sheffield Hallam University raised concerns about publishing research into forced labour in Xinjiang after China blocked access to the university’s websites, limiting its ability to recruit students. Last year, Sheffield Hallam decided not to publish the final paper by Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery, but has since approved her latest research. The paper has instead been published by Global Rights Compliance. Murphy’s research connected forced labour in Xinjiang to the production of four critical minerals and traced the supply chai...

  Skip to main content Advertisement News Home All News ScienceInsider News Features Main content starts here Home News ScienceInsider Letters to scientific journals surge as ‘prolific debutante’ authors likely use AI ScienceInsider Scientific Community Letters to scientific journals surge as ‘prolific debutante’ authors likely use AI New study reinforces worries about “mass production of junk” by unscrupulous scholars aiming to pad their CVs 3 Nov 2025 1:25 PM ET By Jeffrey Brainard A. Mastin/ Science Share: Facebook Share on X Linked In Reddit Wechat Whatsapp Email Just 2 days after Carlos Chaccour and Matthew Rudd published a paper in  The New England Journal of Medicine  about controlling malaria, an editor of the journal shared with them a letter he had received raising “robust objections.” The letter was well written, thought Chaccour, a physician-scientist at the University of Navarra, and Rudd, a statistician at the University of the South. But something unsettled...