GEOPOLITICS & NEW BUSINESS RULES WARREN BUFFET, JEFF BEZOS, APPLE, CHINA REVOLUTION!

Warren Buffet says the insane cost of health care is like “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” and he wants to find the cure.

Buffet, the CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is joining up with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and JP-Morgan Chase CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon to try to create a health care system that costs less and gets better results.

Apple will slash its production target for the iPhone X in the three-month period from January by half from the more than 40 million units envisaged at the time of its release in November. The U.S. tech giant notified suppliers that it had decided to cut the first-quarter production target to around 20 million units, in light of slower-than-expected sales in the year-end holiday shopping season in key markets such as Europe, the U.S. and China.

The iPhone X, Apple’s first smartphone equipped with an organic light-emitting diode display, has failed to catch on globally — something many put down to its hefty price, which starts at $999 in the U.S. Looking forward, the lackluster sales could result in a delay to the company’s plans to introduce OLED screens in other iPhone models. Since 2017 began, no asset class has been more impressive than cryptocurrencies. The aggregate value of these virtual currencies has soared from $17.7 billion to well over $800 billion at one point nearly three weeks ago. Investors in these cryptocurrencies have been treated to annual gains that would otherwise have taken the stock market decades to deliver.

While there are numerous catalysts that could be pointed to as fueling these gains, including a weaker U.S. dollar and the absence of institutional investors in decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, it’s the rise of blockchain technology that probably deserves the most credit.