Category Archives: markets

Kind of the Purpose

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The European Union’s antitrust bureaucrats demur from Apple’s seeming dominance in the no-contact payment market, and they may or may not have a case. They don’t, though, have one based on this sham argument from EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, who also serves at the EU’s Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age (because if the title is long enough the incumbent can be made to feel important enough):

Apple has built a closed ecosystem around its devices and its operating system. Apple controls the gates to this ecosystem, setting the rules of the game for anyone who wants to reach consumers using Apple devices.

That’s kind of the purpose of copyrights and patents—allowing the inventor or developer of the product to control its use. In addition to which, no one is required to use Apple products to do contactless paying—or even to make telephone calls.

Neither does Apple control the ecosystem of contactless paying—it only controls its own devices, which have a, not the, contactless paying capability.

What Did They Expect?

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Russia has cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria as Putin prosecutes his invasion of Ukraine.

European officials denounced the move, which threatens the continent’s energy supply, as blackmail by Russia.

This is war. What did these “European officials” expect when they made the conscious decision to create themselves dependents on the energy good offices of an enemy nation? And how could they not recognize Putin’s Russia as an enemy nation, given his years of rhetoric laying out his plans for and goal of restoring the Russian empire that was the Soviet Union—an empire that includes Eastern European nations, many of which are part of NATO, and one of which has been absorbed into a NATO member nation?

Other large European gas consumers like Germany and Italy haven’t been affected so far.

Of course not. Germany and Italy are much more compliant dependents. Germany in particular has been busily slow-walking, if not outright obstructing, weapons support for Ukraine. Never mind German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ talk about freeing up arms shipments to Ukraine. All he’s done, despite two such rounds of word-based commitments, is talk. No concrete movement, beyond an insultingly puny shipment of helmets, has followed his chit-chat.

Latvia’s Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš is much more clear-eyed on the matter.

This is part of the war; this is how the war affects us. The Ukrainians are paying with their lives, we are paying with higher energy prices.

But, then, Latvia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, well remember what it’s like to live under Russian jackboots. Central and Western Europe, safe and secure and rich and fat and soft three and four generations after WWII and with all those Eastern Europe nations as buffers for their comfort, have chosen to not remember.

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.

Insufficient

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People’s Republic of China government securities regulators are offering a change to PRC securities laws that would remove a requirement that

audit inspections of overseas-listed Chinese companies be done mainly by Chinese regulators.

Another part of the PRC regulators’ offer:

Under the draft rules, the burden of protecting state secrets now falls to private companies as well. They have to report to the financial watchdog and other authorities before cooperating with overseas regulators.

Far from being a serious offer, this is insulting.

PRC regulators of companies possessing PRC state secrets—or held to possess them by the PRC government—will have too easy a time using the secrets excuse to delay, obfuscate, or outright censor any effort at an audit.

Audits not being done “mainly” by PRC regulators are not the same as agreeing to let host nation auditors—American auditors in our case—have full, complete, open access to PRC company books immediately on request, including no-notice requests.

Anything less is too much interference with the audits of companies listed on our exchanges, whether foreign companies are PRC-domiciled or elsewhere.

The SEC must not take this move by the PRC seriously.

Idiocy

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David Cameron, once (and future?) British Prime Minister, thinks that if Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the upcoming G-20 meeting, everyone else should boycott the meeting.

Cameron griped, among other things that when Putin and then-President Barack Obama (D) attended the G-20 meetings in ’14 and ’15,

the conversations with Mr Putin were worse than pointless.

Then Cameron gave the game away, amusingly, without recognizing it.

What does or doesn’t happen at the G-20 won’t change the world.

Indeed. The G-20 is a coffee klatch wherein previously and behind the scenes decisions are announced. Otherwise, the gathering is just a see-and-be-scene show for the political glitterati of the developed world.

Conversations with Putin are, indeed, worse than pointless, but avoiding the G-20 because Putin shows up is the wrong answer.

Instead, boycott Putin, don’t waste time on conversations with him. Don’t interact with him at all. For those two seated next to him at dinners, they should turn their backs on him and converse with the dinner companions on the other side.

Boycotting the G-20 if he shows up would be just a toddler-ish face-spiting nose-cutting temper tantrum. Or a cowering away from the Big Bad Man.