Category Archives: markets

BDS Comes to the White House

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Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions have come to the Biden-Harris Presidency.

The US has rejected a request from Israel to speed up the delivery of pre-ordered KC-46 refueling jets, amid escalating tensions between the country and neighboring Iran.

Those modern tankers would greatly extend the reach and endurance of Israel’s combat aircraft, a capability increasingly needed for Israel’s own defense as Iran progresses inexorably toward obtaining nuclear weapons.

The denial, though, is a measure of how desperate Biden-Harris is to get from the kiddie table to a nuclear weapons deal with Iran. He doesn’t want to risk offending Khamenei by facilitating Israel’s ability to defend itself.

Companies Tracking Customers

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It turns out this isn’t limited to cookies through browsers and overt tracking software.

There’s another software package that businesses use to track their users activities. Log4j

is used on computer servers to keep records of users’ activities so they can be reviewed later by security or software development teams.

Businesses are secretly tracking our activities as we interact with them digitally, not just quietly through cookies and tracking tools. Maybe not only those teams, either. It wouldn’t surprise me if marketing teams were using our data, and if other teams were putting together packages of our data to peddle to other companies.

It’s widespread, too.

The nonprofit Apache Software Foundation, a group that distributes the open-source tool at no cost, has said [Log4j] has been downloaded millions of times.

Nice.

And just to add a floatie to that puddle, Log4j has a serious security flaw.

The flaw is particularly dangerous given the widespread use of Log4j on corporate networks and the ease with which hackers could exploit the vulnerability, security experts say.

And

Attackers could use the bug to break into computer networks to steal sensitive data, prepare for ransomware attacks, or create backdoors that will allow them to maintain access to corporate systems even after the flawed software has been patched.

That exposure isn’t limited to personal information, either, or to the nefarious uses to which businesses put out personal information.  It ranges up to the technologies of businesses, including defense contractors.

Free Enterprise

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The politicians populating Vermont’s State government don’t like it; they’re taking an overt step to bring the State’s economy under centralized control. These politicians are using the State’s insurance industry—already an industry with limited freedom to operate in all States, not just in Vermont—as their tool to do this.

Vermont is now one of the first states to require health insurers to pay for the costs associated with at-home COVID-19 tests, Governor Phil Scott (R) announced.

Yes, this is a Republican governor. A weak Republican governor, with a Progressive-Democrat State House of Representatives and State Senate.

Never mind that, if consumers in a free market environment wanted the tests covered by their insurers, competition would lead the insurers to cover them. Never mind, either, that that same competition would drive the cost of that coverage to its lowest level.

Instead, with this Government-driven requirement, coverage costs will be elevated, propped up by the artificial, Government-created demand. And, notwithstanding the disingenuous claim of the State’s Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner, Michael Pieciak, that the tests will be free, they will not only cost all Vermonters in the form of elevated premiums and/or limited quality of coverage elsewhere in the policies, all Vermonters will be paying for the tests of the few.

Socialism in action. Vermont businesses—insurers are just the camel’s nose—are free to produce whatever goods and services they choose, so long as Government politicians approve.

Permanent Marks

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The WSJ editors cited Fed Chairman Jerome Powell as saying, on the matter of our current relatively high inflation rate,

…some people define transitory to mean “short-lived.” But at the Fed “we tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.”

This is misleading. It’s good that he’s not anticipating permanently higher inflation—if he’s right—but that’s unlikely in nearly any event—so far.

The permanent mark of importance here is the higher price levels that have already resulted from the present inflation level. Even when the inflation rate falls to a more normal level, those price levels will be unlikely to fall commensurately in nominal terms, and it’ll be a long while before productivity or wages or both rise enough to reduce those price levels, in real terms, to their prior level.

Dislocations of a Non-Competitive Market

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It turns out that when there’s no market competition, and when there’s no price signaling in any sort of market, some producers charge more than others, and consumers pay the price (to coin a phrase).

Some hospitals charge up to 10 times as much as others for standard medical scans, according to the latest analysis of previously secret market rates.
Median prices for taking images of the brain, legs, abdomen and chest differed across hospitals by thousands of dollars in some cases….

And

Hospitals and insurers have long set prices in confidential negotiations, which has frustrated employers seeking to curb costs by shopping for better deals under worker health-benefit insurance plans. The average premium for family insurance offered as a workplace benefit increased 4% this year….

Think how us consumers, feel.

There’s this, too:

Cost difference can’t explain the price spreads…. Other factors that determine prices, the researchers said, include negotiating skills or how much leverage hospitals have in contract talks with insurers.

All of which is strongly potentiated by the prices and pricing mechanisms being kept hidden from the market at large.

Ge Bai, a Professor in Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Health Policy and Management facility, is being polite:

This is very far away from a competitive market[.]

Go figure.