Category Archives: markets

The Biden Oil Price Spike

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President Joe Biden (D) has killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, is blocking oil production from Federal lands, killed oil production in northern Alaska, is working to kill fracking altogether, is working to kill American oil (and natural gas) production, and has given the go ahead to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In sum, he’s actively working to kill American energy independence.

All of that is driving up American citizens’ energy costs, and that is reflected in the market’s anticipation of spiking oil costs. Here are a couple of graphs illustrating that. They illustrate the expectation that oil will soon cost $100/barrel, after several years of $50-$65/barrel. The first presents the spike since the start of the year in the number of West Texas Intermediate $100/barrel futures contracts against a current $70 price.

This graph reflects the price of a $100/barrel call option on WTI for delivery in December this year and next.

The expectation of actual market pricing of $100 is rising, also, sharply enough to drive up the price of the option.

This is what expert traders (some of whom are trading on the trends themselves and not on underlying oil prices, to be sure) are seeing as the future price of oil for our citizens. Even if oil settles out at its current price of $70 or just a little higher (and the anticipations turn out to be overstated), this current price represents a sharp increase over the last several years, when Government wasn’t moving so zealously to restrict our nation’s oil supply.

This is what Biden has wrought for our nation’s energy supply and cost of energy.

An Inappropriate Judicial Question

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The Apple-Epic trial has gone to the jury (in this case, the judge, the matter being a bench trial). This case centers on the level of commissions Apple charges app developers for marketing their apps in Apple’s App Store and whether those app developers can, under Apple’s rules, market their products/collect revenue for their products through other venues as well as the App Store—vis., in-app advertising.

In the course of the trial, the presiding judge—the “bench”—US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, has asked an inappropriate question.

…confronted Mr Cook [Apple CEO] with survey data that, she said, indicated that 39% of developers were either very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with Apple’s distribution services. “How is that acceptable?” she asked.

There is much to decry about Apple’s business practices, particularly with its App Store.

In particular, one would think those survey results to be unacceptable, to developers, users, even to Apple.

However.

The question is a business matter, solely among Apple, its customer/developers, and the market in general. It is not at all a judicial matter, and it is completely out of place and inappropriate for a judge to ask in a courtroom.

Maybes and Could Bes

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Illumina is a company that makes platforms that do genetic sequencing for the likes of Covid variants and fetal abnormalities. Grail is a company that has blood tests that can detect DNA from cancer cells before people show symptoms. At the outset, Illumina created Grail for that purpose then spun the company off so each could focus on what it does best.

Grail succeeded, strongly.

Now Illumina wants to (re)acquire Grail, and Grail wants to be (re)acquired. Illumina says its regulatory satisfaction expertise can greatly facilitate bringing Grail’s tests to market and to the benefit of countless folks at risk of any of the 50 cancers Grail’s tests can detect quickly and reliably, along with the 12 most deadly cancers with 60% accuracy. All with a simple blood draw.

Potential competitors petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to block the merger, and the FTC agreed and has sued to block the merger.

That’s a problem. The FTC’s case centers on two premises and a false underlying assumption. The merger would, according to the FTC,

lessen competition in the US multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test market by diminishing innovation and potentially increasing prices.

“Diminishing innovation”—not at all. Aside from the lack of actual evidence of such a diminution—this is just tacit speculation—this sort of development only spurs competition (my own, no more or less valid speculation).

“Potentially increasing prices”—again, not at all. That first word says it all: the plaint is just overt speculation. There are no increasing prices here, and there’s no evidence that increasing prices are per se anticompetitive (as opposed, for instance, due to too high demand for too little product. Never mind that neither demand nor product yet exist.)

The false underlying assumption is that a market for this sort of thing even exists. It does not, and that lack renders both of those speculations, individually and severally, wholly irrelevant.

Maybes and could bes in a nonexistent market—what a way to regulate.

A Compendium of Reasons

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Nike provides them, to do two things.

Here’s Nike’s ad regarding the WNBA. Especially beginning at 0:19, and most especially Nike’s closer, starting at 0:23.

The two things: continue not watching the WNBA, and not doing business with Nike (which company also does enthusiastic business with the genocide-committing People’s Republic of China, so here’s an additional reason for not doing business with Nike).

 

H/t Not the Bee

Wuhan Virus Vaccines and Intellectual Property

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President Joe Biden (D) is looking at “waiving” the patents held by American pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer and Moderna—that  developed the vaccines that have been so effective against the Peoples Republic of China-released Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside the uselessness of waiving these patent rights because the vaccines require to much, too varied, too complex equipment to be manufacturable just on the basis of the vaccines’ technologies being made freeware in the public arena.

Leave aside, too, that these companies—and others beyond American jurisdiction that have developed other Wuhan Virus vaccines—already are delivering doses virtually at cost to the poorer nations.

Biden’s proposal [is] to temporarily waive their patents, but that’s completely disingenuous. An intellectual property once lost is lost forever—there is nothing temporary about such a waiver except in the narrowest, most legalist, sense.

The larger problem is the: with that government-mandated loss will go any incentive a company might have to spend the billions of dollars it takes to develop future such things, especially vaccines, since a company can have no confidence Government might decide it “needs” to give the new patents away also.

There will be very little vaccine development in the United States after Biden goes through with this.

This will not be over quickly. We will not enjoy this.