Tag Archives: markets

Heads Up

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As the People’s Republic of China responds to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, motivated in part by the PRC’s cyber-theft of American technology and proprietary information and the PRC’s extortion of the same and its demand for backdoors into foreign business’ (including especially American) core software as a condition of doing business in the PRC, buckle up, indeed, as the article at the link above suggests.

The PRC will do far more than this, though, as it attempts to coerce the US in the pursuit of its Warring States strategy.

Beijing retaliated against planned US tariffs on Chinese goods by targeting high-value American exports—including farm products, cars, and crude oil—bringing the world’s two biggest economies closer to an all-out trade war.

That’s just the beginning.  If we don’t abjectly surrender, the PRC will expand their conflict with open cyber-warfare against us, with rapidly expanding attacks on our government and our infrastructure with denial of service attacks against our financial structure, our distribution grids, DoD, State, OMB (again), etc.  These attacks also will include planting false data wherever they can and with simple vandalism on our key databases.

The PRC also will open the economic spigots with northern Korea and actively facilitate its final acquisition of a capability to deliver its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The PRC will object and seek to prevent the Republic of China’s businesses from altering their supply chains, which currently involve PRC companies, and they will in the end openly attack—politically, economically, even militarily—the RoC.

Tariffs may or may not be the best way to fight the PRC’s war, but this is a struggle that we must win.  Lose, and we will find ourselves badly curtailed.  Recall that trillions of non-PRC-related trade sails to us through the South China Sea, which the PRC has claimed for itself and has been steadily militarizing.

What Hath Socialism Wrought

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This image, from a Deutsche Welle article on Venezuela’s inflation rate—which last month reached 24,571% year-on-year—says it all.

The word drawn on the 100 bolivar note (and yes, it’s a real note, and it’s actually that big) translates to “hungry.”  In the context, it means more broadly, “a widespread, intense, and prolonged shortage of staple foods that a population suffers.”

Hungry indeed, too.  A bit over two pounds of meat cost about 2 million bolivars (or did once, daily inflation is running at 2.4%), or €16.9 or $20, against a surgeon’s monthly salary of not even 6 million bolivars.  Meat, not steak in particular.  That’s some expensive hamburger or shank cut.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, that works out to a bit over three ounces of meat per day, with nothing left over for anything else: vegetables, rent, transportation, etc.  And that’s for a relatively well off man like the surgeon.  What about the middle class, or especially the poort.

This is reminiscent of what Joseph Stalin did to the Ukrainians and White Russians when he collectivized—socialized—the Soviet Union’s kulak farms.

Taxpayer Money

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This is how the citizens of Missouri are seeing their tax money being used, this time by the University of Missouri.  You remember the U of M, the place where a professor demanded students attack a student reporter because he was covering a student protest.  The place where little discipline was applied to the students who answered the professor’s call. The place where the president and chancellor were forced to resign because they weren’t coddling the snowflakes enough.

With those failures, it seems that the school’s enrollment is still greatly reduced, so it decided on a public relations campaign to “restore” its image.  $1.3 million worth.  And, at the recommendation of the branding company they hired for those $1.3 million, they spent an additional

$1.8 million on marketing tied to recruiting and enrolling for the fall—which amounts to about $230 per student.

This is a waste, and it’s the wrong approach.

Mizzou placed blame on the press for the negative perception.

Because, as is the norm with such institutions, it’s someone else’s fault.  Somebody ran a scam and conned their professor into doing what she did.  Somebody ran a scam and conned the school’s management into reacting as they did, instead of taking corrective action within their house to restore free speech and quality instruction to their campus.

The school is wasting taxpayer money on image, of all things, instead of committing its energies and resources to improving its academic programs and working on actual teaching—which would include free speech, balanced approaches to teaching philosophy and literature, teaching STEM subject, teaching entering children how to think objectively and logically so they can graduate as thinking adults.

Improve the quality of its performance, and the enrollment at the school will improve.  A lot.  Playing games with image won’t attract actual students, just game players.  Or PR hacks.

Gauntlet Thrown Down

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The members of the Group of Seven, just met in Canada last week, were invited to form a tariff-free trade zone by President Donald Trump.

no tariffs, no barriers…and no subsidies.

International trade doesn’t get much freer than that.

Will anyone in the G-7 have the courage to take Trump up on his offer—or to call his bluff, if that’s what they think it is?

Anyone?  Beuller?

Another Obamacare Episode

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The Justice Department has declined to defend Obamacare in the suit against it brought by a large number of States in the aftermath of Congress’ repeal of the Individual Mandate penalty tax.  Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote the law in 2012 to recreate the penalty as a tax in order to preserve the IM as constitutional, and thereby to preserve all of Obamacare as constitutional because of the inseverability of all parts of the law.

With the repeal of the IM’s…tax…that inseverability should doom the rest of Obamacare.

As a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision not to defend the law,

University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said three Justice Department attorneys withdrew their names from the brief [wherein DoJ advised the court of its position].

Three Justice Department attorneys also should withdraw their names from the Federal payroll.