Tag Archives: markets

“Misunderstanding” of the Left

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A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.

Will the West Proceed?

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In the face of the Group of Seven Club’s moves to impose a price cap on Russian crude exports globally, Russian President Vladimir Putin now threatens

to curtail the export of grain from Ukraine and said Moscow was ready to extend its rationing of natural-gas exports and cut off oil and refined products if the West went ahead….

And

Mr Putin said Wednesday that Russia had contractual obligations on energy deliveries but would reconsider them if a price cap were imposed.
“We simply will not fulfill [our contracts]. In general, we will not deliver anything if it contradicts our interests,” he told an audience of officials and business leaders. “We will not deliver gas, nor oil, nor coal, nor heating fuel. We will not deliver anything.”

This would result in temporary near-term pain for the West, to be sure, with winter a few months away. But it would result in permanent and disastrous pain for Russia.

Near-term for the West: that winter (which so far looks to be relatively mild, but weather forecasts…), and tight supplies of natural gas being squirreled away, along with iffy potentials for bringing recently shut down nuclear power plants back on line and keeping others scheduled for closure on line.

Temporary: Europe can find other sources of natural gas, oil, and coal (including, regarding the first two, plussing up North Sea production and building additional pipelines) for their power production plants and move away from Russian sources altogether and permanently. Especially if the West can get President Joe Biden (D) out of the way of American oil and natural gas production and export.

Long-term pain for Putin: he needs a minimum of $70-$80 oil in order to pay for his war against Ukraine—replacing equipment combat losses, providing food, fuel, ammunition, and other consumables for his surviving forces—along with the rest of his economy, which is almost entirely extractive, which potentiates his long-term vulnerability.

Permanent: he’ll have lost permanently his Western markets, leaving him with selling into the People’s Republic of China—and President Xi Jining will be forcing his own purchase price on Putin, a price made the firmer by the PRC’s own current economic strait. Further, those sales will require PRC assistance to develop: new Siberian oil and natural gas wells and pipelines (presently nearly non-existent) to deliver well output to the PRC. All of which will exacerbate Russia’s subordination to the PRC.

Aside: it’s true that Putin has markets in India and Turkey, but with Turkey, drastic as that nation’s needs are, its economy is too small to take up much of Putin’s oil. India has too ready access to too many alternative markets to be taken for much of a ride by Putin.

The salient question is whether the West has the stomach for what it takes to achieve victory. The jury is still out on that. Especially given who’s the nominal leader of the West.

Plus Inflationary Effects

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Penn Wharton has updated its estimate of the cost to us average Americans of President Joe Biden’s (D) bailout of student loans, expanding its estimate to more than $1 trillion.

The largest potential cost-driver Penn Wharton identified is the Biden administration’s new income-driven repayment plan, which includes capping monthly student loan payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income and reforming the repayment guidelines to guarantee that no borrower who makes “about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage” will have to make monthly loan payments.

Others are touting the boon to our economy from all that freed-up spending those winners will be able to do, now that they don’t have to worry about paying debts.

In speaking from their Newspeak dictionary, though, the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their acolytes on the Left claim that that increased spending won’t add to the already burgeoning inflation our economy is afflicted with from supply disruptions and profligate spending (even for a Party administration) the Biden administration is throwing around.

Ignore what’s behind the curtain: the…intersection…of limited supply and increased spending that is inherently inflationary, especially in today’s economic environment, as anyone who’s had high school economics or who can understand a supply/demand graph knows.

Some on the Left piously intone that the bailed out students will use the opportunity to pay down the rest of their debts. Ignore what’s behind that other curtain, too, that the resulting increase in loanable funds held by financial institutions represents additional debt creation for the purchase of big-ticket items in the near- to intermediate-term supply-limited environment, which is inflationary in tomorrow’s and next week’s economic environment.

States Aim to be Zero-Emissions in their Cars by 2035

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California has decided to ban all ICE car sales in the State by 2035—in the name of only zero-emission cars being allowed to be sold.

Never mind that it’s an impossible task, or that California, Washington, and Massachusetts are deceiving all of us and themselves with their claim of and demand for zero-emissions in cars sold in those States. This is, to use the technical term, a crock. Zero-emission cars are an impossibility, and it will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future of human history.

Mining for the raw materials for the batteries for these cars, and mining for the metals and other minerals that go into making any car, is not zero-emission: it takes energy to do all of that, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Shipping those raw materials to processing plants takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Processing that raw material into the components—batteries, car parts, wiring for the cars—takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Shipping those finished components to the final assembly plants takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Delivering those finished cars to their dealers for sale takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

The energy for charging and recharging the batteries in those “zero-emission” cars takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Expanding the electric grid and building out a national network—or even just a city-wide network—of charging stations takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

And getting the raw materials, components, assembly, shipping along the way to get the components for the grid build-out and to get those recharging stations—see above.

And that’s just a high-level view of the energy requirements for producing electric cars. Electric cars are not at all zero-emission vehicles.

Logistics Matters…

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…far beyond the process of getting soldiers and consumables to a battlefield and to the battlers.

In the aftermath of Germany’s—and much of Europe’s—considered decision to make themselves dependent on Russian natural gas and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s equally considered decision to limit and cut off natural gas supplies to Europe to try to coerce behaviors acceptable to Putin, Germany, et al., are (re)discovering the need for better logistics and logistical execution.  The lessons are available to the US, too, if the government is willing to learn.

Europe’s energy crisis has unleashed a global battle over natural-gas tankers….

And [emphasis added]

European countries ramped up their purchases of liquefied natural gas from the US, Qatar, and other sources this year as Russia cut supplies to the continent. They are competing with peers in South Korea and Japan—where gas demand has surged during a heat wave—for a finite amount of supply ferried by a limited number of vessels.

LNG-capable tankers are long-lead items that take specialized equipment to keep the natural gas cooled and under pressure. They’re also expensive, hence the interest in only limited inventories of such ships—they’re expensive even simply to have, if they’re just sitting around in port unused.

It’s not just the complexity of the ships, though, that contribute to the present long-lead times.

Shipmakers in South Korea, the world’s biggest producer of LNG tankers, don’t have free capacity for new orders until 2027[.]

However, the wonders of Europe have known for some time that they needed more LNG tankers.

LNG and the tankers that carry the fuel were in high demand even before the conflict, as extreme weather curtailed hydropower, and many economies sought to ditch coal to reduce carbon emissions.

The complexity of these logistics is further illustrated by this little fillip: the price of steel is rapidly rising, an accelerated increase driven by demand from a broad reach of needs in addition to simply making boats.

The lessons for the US?

The need for more natural gas (and oil) production, more flexible production, better and expanded distribution grids to refiners, and in the present context, expansion of port facilities able to convert natural gas to liquid natural gas and then to transfer that LNG to LNG-capable tankers.

And maybe build some of our own LNG tankers. And get rid of the Jones Act.