Tag Archives: markets

Cowardice

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And yet another reason to not buy any Anheuser-Busch beer.

Anheuser-Busch…sent a letter to jittery distributors telling them it had cut ties with the firm responsible for the concept that has led to Bud Light sales cratering since Mulvaney last month posted a video on TikTok touting the best-selling beer in the country, multiple sources said.
The Belgian-based conglomerate said the beer can at the center of the firestorm, which features Mulvaney’s face, was not produced by Anheuser-Busch or in any of its facilities, several distributors told The [New York] Post.

To an extent, the Bud Light producer’s managers are right. John Skeffington, family-owned Skeff Distributing CEO:

The single can was produced by a third-party ad agency, not Anheuser-Busch.

However. Anheuser-Busch’s managers have final approval of its ad agencies’ advertisement campaigns, whether or not the campaigns then are produced in house or by third-parties. A-B’s managers already have placed “on leave” Bud Light’s Marketing VP, Alissa Heinerscheid, and A-B’s Group Vice President for Marketing, Daniel Blake, over their failure to exercise their control over advertising done in Bud Light’s name.

Even if the unidentified-by-A-B “third-party ad agency” had produced and released the advertising move without that prior approval, A-B’s managers had after the fact approval/disapproval, and those worthies chose not to speak up at all. If they actually disapproved of the ad, they would have blocked it in the first place, or immediately after the fact spoken against it.

Only in the aftermath of the hooraw that’s threatening company sales, are those managers, from A-B CEO Michel Doukeris on down, speaking at all, and they’re still refusing to acknowledge straightforwardly their mistake, and they’re still refusing to say what they’re going to do to not repeat their mistake in future. They’ve only issued weasel-worded remarks that don’t even pretend to address the matter in any serious way.

Their latest move, now, is to insist “twarn’t us” and blame an anonymous “third-party” agency and throw it under the bus.

They still won’t accept their own responsibility for the fiasco.

Their company’s products still are not worth our purchase money.

And They Accused Trump of Being Soft on Russia

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s Janet Yellen-run Treasury department has—once again—extended a waiver to a rule barring import of Russian oil and gas that was instituted ‘way back in March 2022. Even at the time of the rule’s institution, Treasury created a waiver to allow financial institutions to continue processing dollar-currencied payments for Russian energy in other countries.

The waiver was supposed to expire by that June, but Yellen extended it to early December. She said, through a Treasury spokeswoman,

This license [extension] will provide for an orderly transition to help our broad coalition of partners reduce their dependence on Russian energy as we work to restrict the Kremlin’s revenue sources[.]

After that she extended the waiver again, until the middle of this month.

Now Yellen is extending the waiver yet again, to November, and this time she’s not even pretending she has a reason:

Treasury didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday [5 May 23].

Biden and his cronies in Party and his supporters on the Left all zealously decried former President Donald Trump’s playing to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ego with all of Trump’s pretty words about Putin.

Here is Biden and his Treasury person actively propping Putin’s energy economy by not closing off payments for Russian energy. Any orderly transition has long since been effected, or should have been; there no longer is any reason for extending the thing beyond Biden’s concrete softness on Russia.

Anheuser-Busch’s Messaging

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A letter writer to Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section offered a solution to Anheuser-Busch’s marketing fiasco of recent weeks.

A-B should produce a series of cans and bottles featuring labels highlighting soldiers, athletes, teachers, construction workers, etc. I’d start buying again, and I am sure many others would do the same.

I’m not sure I would. A-B’s managers spoke from their heart the first time and said what their values are. This time around, they would only be putting out those subsequent cans in response to the hue and cry over the former. There’s no possibility of taking the change as sincerely done with the current managers in place.

And no, putting a couple of lead marketers on temporary leave doesn’t cut it. The CEO approved the marketing switch, too, if only by being the one in charge. And his subsequent statement, which was in the main a non sequitur, only demonstrated that he agreed with the prior marketing move.

Punishing Success

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You’ve earned your wages; husbanded them carefully; spent wisely, living within your means; paid your debts promptly and in full. As a result, you’ve gained an excellent credit rating.

Your reward? An artificially inflated mortgage cost, courtesy of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run Executive Branch, and redistribution of the fruits of your success, arbitrarily, to those who haven’t done those things.

A Biden administration rule is set to take effect that will force good-credit home buyers to pay more for their mortgages to subsidize loans to higher-risk borrowers.
Experts believe that borrowers with a credit score of about 680 would pay around $40 more per month on a $400,000 mortgage under rules from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that go into effect May 1, costs that will help subsidize people with lower credit ratings also looking for a mortgage, according to a Washington Times report Tuesday.

But. But, but, but. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Biden administration entity responsibility for this nonsense has long sought to give consumers more affordable housing options.

Under the new rules, consumers with lower credit ratings and less money for a down payment would qualify for better mortgage rates than they otherwise would have.

This is silly. The transfer of wealth from those who’ve earned good credit scores to those who have not will not make the latter better credit risks. It will increase the rate of default.

Here’s a thought: cut back on the regulations related to banking, lending, housing, landlording, construction, and utilities so as to bring down the cost of housing generally. See if that will give consumers more affordable housing options.

Stop punishing success; instead, encourage folks to work toward success.

Progressive Idiocy

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The New York City Council is striking again. These wonders are pushing their cutely named Choose 2 Reuse bill, which

aims to improve sustainability in the restaurant business, but would add some friction to a customer experience that is typically defined by its convenience. Consumers would be asked to later return their reusable food containers, knives, forks, and chopsticks either through delivery or logistics partners who come to pick them up or in person via receptacles at participating restaurants. The bill doesn’t require reusable beverage containers.

It’s interesting that the City Council excludes beverage containers. There was a time when beverage containers—soda bottles, for instance—could be returned for a return of a deposit paid when the (sodas) were sold, a practice that enabled more than a few boys and girls to earn a bit of extra money by collecting up the bottles and doing the return. And there never was a problem cleaning the then-glass bottles for reuse, nor was there a liability problem arising from the reuse of inadequately cleaned bottles.

That sort of thing fell into disfavor when tin, and later aluminum, cans proved easier and cheaper to manufacture (and wend their way through the bottling process)—and far from being one-use disposable, they could be recycled through a different chain.

Now NYC is bent on reverting to that greater cost—never minding that one-use food containers for takeout are easily manufactured for breakdown and return to the soil when disposed of in landfills. Or in many jurisdictions, converted to mulch for DIY gardeners. Or recycled for yet other non-food related uses.

Now, in addition to the added costs inflicted on restaurants and consumers alike, the Wonders of the Council also want to expose the city’s restaurants to liability through suits centered on real or imagined food poisoning from allegedly inadequately cleaned-for-reuse containers and utensils. Even stipulating that utensils would no longer be included (presumably by restaurant choice; nothing in the proposed bill suggests this)—requiring consumers to use their own—the containers would need to be made sturdy enough to survive the restaurant’s dishwashers—or to survive the consumers’ dishwashers, should they be offered a discount for doing the cleaning for the restaurant. And which the restaurant would have no guarantee that the consumer had cleaned the containers well enough to meet the government standards imposed on the restaurant.