Category Archives: markets

Maybe It’s Time

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On two fronts. First is the Eu’s nakedly bad faith and extortionist attempt to interfere in Great Britain’s internal affairs.

The European Union on Thursday demanded that the United Kingdom immediately rewrite a new Brexit bill that would change parts of a divorce agreement it signed with the EU last year—threatening legal action if the outgoing member does not comply.
European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic met with UK Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove for crisis talks after the UK government proposed a new Internal Market Bill, which would allow ministers to “disapply” certain rules related to Northern Ireland agreed to in last year’s Withdrawal Agreement.

And Sefcovic’s ultimatum:

…withdraw these measures from the draft Bill in the shortest time possible and in any case by the end of the month….

The European Union has no beef with the Brits over their domestic bill until an actual violation of “international law” actually occurs. Sefvovic knows that full well. His threat is a naked attempt at intimidation and an example of the way the EU will treat all nations with the effrontery to seek to leave the EU, or even merely to object EU governance.

The other front is this: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA)

[last] Wednesday warned the UK there would be “no chance” of a US-UK free trade deal if the UK undermined the Good Friday Agreement.

This is an arrogant and unconscionable intrusion by the Speaker into the Executive Branch’s Constitutional sphere: foreign policy. Pelosi also willfully ignores the additional Constitutional fact that the House has no say setting treaties of any sort: ratification of an international agreement into a treaty is the sole province of the Senate.

It’s time for Great Britain to stop wasting time and resources on trying to deal with the EU and to simply close out the “talks.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government should spend the remaining months until 2021 setting their nation up for the no-deal separation that the EU is forcing as the EU’s offered alternative of surrender.

Economic Evolution?

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In a Wall Street Journal Letters offering, one writer, in supporting the Chamber of Commerce’s change of position regarding massive government intervention into our private economy, wrote

The 2020 economy is far different than that of 1980, and so what is good for business now is necessarily different.

This is wrong on two counts. The first is that the reason the economy of 1980 seems different from that of 2020 is the explosion of government intervention and intrusive regulation over those 40 years. That’s not actually an economic difference, though; it’s a government behavior difference, with the economy changing in result, not from its own intrinsic evolution.

The other is that what’s good for business is a constant: a free market that’s competitive among businesses, a free market with government intervention and regulation limited to ensuring that business managers don’t lie in their contracts or their advertising and that those managers don’t abuse whatever monopoly power might come their way. Sound economic principles don’t change.

Let Them Pound Sand

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Here is the Marie Antoinette double standard of the Progressive-Democratic Party rubbed in our faces. In Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) San Francisco, yet.

Gyms within government buildings in San Francisco have been open for months, despite privately owned establishments being ordered to close due to the coronavirus.

Wow. The brazen chutzpah of Party.

You Bet

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British Prime Minister is hiring Tony Abbott, ex-Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, to be a senior adviser on trade for Johnson’s government.

Abbott, a Brit by birth and an Australian by citizenship, had some words for the Oxford Union’s debating society back in 2018, then regarding Brexit [emphasis added]:

This is the country that has seen off the Spanish Armada, the French emperor, and the German Kaiser, won against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, against William II, and then against Hitler. This country did not need Europe—it saved Europe. No country on earth should be more capable than Britain of standing on its own two feet.

Can I get an amen on that?  Abbott will be a good choice for the Brits.

They Shouldn’t Let the Door Hit Them

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…on the way out.

Norway’s largest private money manager, Storebrand Asset Management, excluded and divested itself of more than two dozen listed companies under its new climate change policy, citing concerns with lobbying, coal, and oil sands.

Virtue signaling climate justice is more important than making money for a company’s owners. Which money and associated investment profits are the only means of amassing the wealth necessary to do anything substantive about our environment (which is useful) or about our climate (which need is dubious at best).

Of course, the other alternative, which would be the end game if enough climate justice warriors succeeded en masse, is global impoverishment and the shutdown of modern economies. That, as the now known to be foolish lockdowns have shown, reduced pollution to a significant degree, even if they had little effect on climate.

Luv ya, Storebrand, mean it, buh bye.

Oh, and I won’t be investing my pennies in Storebrand.