Apple’s most undervalued asset

Hi, everyone. It's Shira. One of Apple Inc.'s underappreciated skills is its political savvy. The company has managed to (mostly) keep happy the two leaders on both sides of the U.S.-China trade war with personal diplomacy and alternating doses of hyperbole and calculated silence.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump toured what he had described as a new Apple manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. Apple also used the moment to repeat a 2018 self-congratulation for what the company says are millions of new jobs it has helped create in the U.S., and for contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.