Tag Archives: markets

Reduced NBA Viewership

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The TV ratings of National Basketball Association games are down by 15% compared to last year.

Some folks ascribe this to fewer folks subscribing to television generally. Others blame it on geography:

Many of the league’s best teams are on the West Coast, meaning their games end after some viewers in the East have already gone to bed.

Yet others assign at least some of the blame to injuries, especially to marque players.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver blames in on a “broken” pay-TV system.

All of those would seem to be factors in the public’s decreasing interest in the doings of the NBA.

I have to wonder, though, how much of the drop is due to dismay over the NBA’s despicable behavior toward the Houston Rockets’ GM tweeting in support of Hong Kong protestors and to contempt for the league’s disgracefully obsequious kowtowing, from Silver, through team management, on down to players on the floor, to the People’s Republic of China government.

Data Transfer and Privacy

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The European Union’s Court of Justice had recommended to it by an adviser to the court in a particular case involving Facebook that

Companies, including US tech giants, should be blocked from transferring European users’ data in some cases if they can’t guarantee it will be handled in compliance with European Union privacy laws….

That would seem to include a large number of international companies besides ours. Yet several EU member nations are moving apace to bring Huawei into their communications networks….

Hmm….

Foolishness

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Russia and Ukraine have agreed a new natural gas transit arrangement to facilitate Russian natural gas through Ukraine to Europe.  The EU was in on the negotiations, and it’s pleased.  Maros Sefcovic, who was Vice-President of the European Commission for the Energy Union until last January and who then transitioned to Vice-President of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight, led the EU’s part of the negotiations.  He now says,

Russia remains a reliable supplier to European markets and Ukraine maintains its role as a strategic transit country.

Never mind that this reliable supplier has already used Ukrainian transit pipelines to blackmail both Ukraine (over unpaid bills) and the EU (over Russia’s demand that the EU do what Russia wants).  The same Russian government personnel who led those blackmails remain in place in the Russian government.

That Was The Point

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The subheadline on a Sunday Wall Street Journal article says it all.

European voters have viewed the process so negatively that even EU-skeptic parties have mostly dropped talk of leaving the bloc or the euro

That was the entire motive for Brussels’ extended bad faith pseudo-negotiations with Great Britain after those uppity citizens voted to go out from the European Union. To be sure, Brit politicians, who insisted they Knew Better than their subordinate citizens, contributed to the mess with their own combination of arrogance and incompetent negotiating, but they just played into Brussels’ hands, they did not create the chaos.

Brussels, with its antics, has successfully cowed other nations that were restive and contemplating leaving into sitting down and shutting up.

That could change if the UK secures a trade deal with the EU that gives it greater national sovereignty without hurting its economy and Brexit comes to be seen as a success for Britain.

What the new government in the UK needs to internalize and then keep uppermost in its collective mind, though, is that the nation doesn’t need much of a trade deal with the EU, especially if that deal does not acknowledge the national sovereignty of a newly freed Great Britain.

Great Britain is in a position to cut a good trade deal with the US and to cut another one with the member nations of its global Commonwealth—either bilaterally or with the group as a whole.  The success of those deals could well revive sentiment of those currently cowed EU-skeptic nations.

Negotiated Penalties

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I’m not going to pick on Boeing, but I am going to describe that company’s alleged wrong-doing in a particular case as a canonical example of a principle.

Boeing stands accused by the FAA of

install[ing] defective parts inside the wings of around 130 737NG aircraft and then knowingly vouch[ing that] they met all federal safety requirements.

In consequence, the FAA has proposed a $3.9 million penalty.  As if Boeing should have a say in the penalty it chooses to pay.  This is nonsense.

There should be no proposals, no entertainments of counterproposals from the accused, no time wasted on discussions.  If the FAA thinks it has a case it can make in court, it should make its case in court and apply the court’s penalty.  If the FAA doesn’t think it has a case it can make in court, it has no legitimate case at all, and it should walk away.

So it should be with SEC-“negotiated” penalties for alleged wrong-doings, for EPA “cases,” for any government agency with a beef to bring.

Some might argue that this is little different from a prosecutor offering a plea deal to an accused criminal. Those folks would be right—and it’s wrong there, too.

Others might argue that such affairs are efficient ways to correct bad corporate behavior, that matters can be settled faster this way than through court trials.  Not in the long run, though, and not broadly.  Such “settlements” are binding only on the agency and the company it has “penalized,” and the allegedly misbehaving company too often later repeats the assessed behavior or something similar.

Court outcomes, on the other hand, bind everyone in the court’s jurisdiction (nationally, in those cases that wind up at the Supreme Court).

Furthermore, too often in these business accusations and settlements, the settlement results in the company making no admission of wrong-doing.  In accepting such an outcome, the agency demonstrates that it had no case to bring in the first place; it merely browbeat some vig for the agency by using its vastly superior Government power and breadth of resources.

These “settlements” are conveniences to the government, to be sure, but Government’s convenience is no basis for obtaining justice.  All that’s obtained from such outcomes is…Government convenience.