Tag Archives: markets

Not at all Baffling

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Last weekend, the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams played an NFL football game. With four seconds to go in the game, and the Rams in possession and down by ten, they went for—and made—a field goal. No time left, and the Rams lose by seven. Had they gone for a touchdown (not a pipe dream, the line of scrimmage was the 49ers’ 20 yard line) and made that, they would have lost by three (or two had they then chosen a two-point conversion). Fail on the touchdown try, and they’d have lost by those ten. Some folks thought the Rams’ decision was “baffling.”

But maybe losing by seven points was all they needed.

By game start, the betting spread on the game had settled at the 49ers winning by 7 points or 7.5 points, depending on the betting parlor. (Lots of parlors don’t like gambling ties, and that half-point in the spread eliminates those.) By losing by 7 instead of by 10, they beat the spread, and the field goal was a surer thing than going for the touchdown. The parlors paid holders of the correct side of the 7.5 point spread, and they refunded all bets on the 7 point spread (one reason parlors don’t like ties).

The Rams coach, Sean McVay, has a different take on his decision. Before the field goal’s prior play, he intended that prior play simply to get them into field goal range, and with time on the clock, hit the field goal, recover an ensuing onside kick, and go for the tie or win. In the realization, though, the down and in (in-cut) ran longer on the field and on the clock than expected so there wasn’t time left–those four seconds–to hit the field goal, get the onside kick, and…. At that point, he simply decided to stick with the field goal. He says he was unaware of the betting line [bowlegs in the original]:

Apparently, (Rams V.P. of communications) Artis (Twyman) told me there’s a lot of people in Vegas pissed off about that decision. I clearly was not aware of that stuff[.]

The first-linked article went on at some length about the spread and the field goal, but it missed the larger point: this is the impact of allowing gambling on professional sports, even if McVay, on the sidelines, wasn’t aware of the betting line. The mere discussion of the betting implications demonstrates the vulnerability.

Buying Battery-Operated Cars

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My then-new gasoline-powered 2022 Ford Escape and my wife’s new 2023 Ford Maverick hybrid, each one level down from Ford’s top tier, each cost in the low- to mid-$30 thousands. Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal‘s Senior Personal Technology Columnist, evaluated a number of battery-operated cars under $60,000 to see which one of those she liked best. The ones she looked into were the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Tesla Model Y, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Volkswagen ID.4.

The prices of these, as tested, were—oh, wait; she didn’t discuss equipage in any detail, nor did she name the price of those cars as tested. Accordingly, here are the prices I found after an arduous five minute Bing search. All prices, save Tesla, are via Edmunds; Tesla’s prices are per Tesla.

  • Mach-E: $42,500-$60,000, depending on how gussied up you want it
  • Model Y: $52,900-$66,000, depending….
  • Ioniq 5: $47,700-$59,400, depending….
  • EV6: $45,900-$60,200, depending….
  • 4: $40,300-$56,500, depending….

Assume, arguendo, that Stern’s evaluations are reasonable (noting that some of her criteria are matters of taste), and truncate the gussying to Stern’s $60,000 cap. This is the cost of transportation that the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration is trying to force us to pay in the name if its—and the Left’s—climate funding industry and related artificial hysteria.

This is just to get into the car, too; the comparison elides questions of range; the availability of charging stations outside the home garage; the long time to charge to the battery-operated cars’ 300-ish miles range (my Escape reaches 400+ miles on a tank of gas, and the tank fills in three minutes, or so); and of special importance to the Left (except when inconvenient to them); the environmental damage done by mining the raw materials and disposing of the spent batteries.

Drug Price…Foolishness

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President Joe Biden (D) and his associates over in Medicare have identified the drugs of which he’s willing to pretend to negotiate the price. The particular drugs aren’t important; what matters is the precedent being set regarding the Progressive-Democrat-run administration’s view of what constitutes negotiation in Party’s lexicon. Readers interested in which drugs are targeted for now can find the list at the end of the linked-to article.

What’s important here is this.

The naming of the 10 drugs subject to price negotiations kicks off a lengthy process. Drugmakers have until October 1 to say whether they will join in the negotiations.
If they don’t negotiate or accept the price resulting from it, companies face a tax of up to 95% on a medicine’s US sales, or they can pull all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

And this:

Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.

That’s not negotiation, that’s “Take our price, or pay even more through our usurious, if not confiscatory, taxes.” The outcome will be a stifling of medical (not just for medicinal) innovation in the US. Instead, innovation, such as might remain, will be pushed overseas, in large part to nations that don’t themselves innovate very much, having come to rely on American developments which they then heavily subsidize for their own citizens.

Some of those drugs, too, will be pulled from Medicare/Medicaid coverage, along with all of the other drugs a company makes available through those programs, which will price them out of reach of those most in need—those with the ailments being treated by those medicines and who lack the money to pay the full price.

That is, until Party takes the next obvious step and taxes those medicines’ sales revenues earned outside of Medicare/Medicaid, to be followed by Party’s diktat that those medicines must be offered through Medicare/Medicaid.

Which will result in those medicines no longer being manufactured in the US at all and no longer being sold at all in the US, regardless of their manufacture.

Increasing Choice

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor Phil Murphy’s Newspeak definition of increasing choice as he applies it to vehicles he will permit his subjects the citizens of New Jersey to buy goes like this:

“There’s a lot of misinformation about what this order does,” his climate director Catherine Klinger said in an interview with ROI-NJ that was published this week. “It requires that new vehicle sales in the state are zero emission by 2035. More than 50% of vehicles that are sold in the state are used. And there is absolutely no change to the used vehicle market.”
If you like your Jeep Cherokee, you’ll still be able to buy a used one….

While supplies last.

No, Murphy’s proclamation, made through his climate director, is nothing more than a cynical variation on Henry Ford’s marketing slogan of a century ago:

The customer can have any color they want as long as it’s black. A New Jersey citizen can have any vehicle he wants, as long as it’s electric. Never mind whether he can afford one.

SEIA’s Response to Bidenomic’s Tariffs

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly noted the internal—and intrinsic—contradictions in the Biden administration’s “renewable” energy demands and its trade policy. The administration is pushing ever harder to shift our economy, for good or ill (mostly ill IMNHO), to energy sourced to non-carbon-based, but renewable only—nuclear need not apply—producers. Then comes Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary, and her decision, backed by that same Joe Biden, to apply tariffs as high as 254% to solar power-related products imported from five People’s Republic of China enterprises, never minding that these companies are American domestic solar power producers’ primary sources of the needed articles.

But the Solar Energy Industries Association’s whine about the administration’s tariff policy leaped out at me.

It will take at least three to five years to ramp up domestic solar manufacturing capacity and the global supply chain will be vital in the short-term.

But would SEIA’s members actually ramp up domestic production without the tariffs, or would they simply continue buying from an enemy nation? SEIA is being disingenuous.

I’m not convinced that Commerce’s tariffs are the way to go—in general, they’re being applied as protectionist barriers rather than as foreign policy tools, and Commerce’s tariffs here are no exception—but SEIA’s plaints seem nothing more than excuse-making. After all, those members already have had those three to five years, and more, during which to ramp up domestic solar manufacturing capacity, and they’ve chosen not to do so.