Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

The Biden Oil Price Spike

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President Joe Biden (D) has killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, is blocking oil production from Federal lands, killed oil production in northern Alaska, is working to kill fracking altogether, is working to kill American oil (and natural gas) production, and has given the go ahead to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In sum, he’s actively working to kill American energy independence.

All of that is driving up American citizens’ energy costs, and that is reflected in the market’s anticipation of spiking oil costs. Here are a couple of graphs illustrating that. They illustrate the expectation that oil will soon cost $100/barrel, after several years of $50-$65/barrel. The first presents the spike since the start of the year in the number of West Texas Intermediate $100/barrel futures contracts against a current $70 price.

This graph reflects the price of a $100/barrel call option on WTI for delivery in December this year and next.

The expectation of actual market pricing of $100 is rising, also, sharply enough to drive up the price of the option.

This is what expert traders (some of whom are trading on the trends themselves and not on underlying oil prices, to be sure) are seeing as the future price of oil for our citizens. Even if oil settles out at its current price of $70 or just a little higher (and the anticipations turn out to be overstated), this current price represents a sharp increase over the last several years, when Government wasn’t moving so zealously to restrict our nation’s oil supply.

This is what Biden has wrought for our nation’s energy supply and cost of energy.

An Inappropriate Judicial Question

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The Apple-Epic trial has gone to the jury (in this case, the judge, the matter being a bench trial). This case centers on the level of commissions Apple charges app developers for marketing their apps in Apple’s App Store and whether those app developers can, under Apple’s rules, market their products/collect revenue for their products through other venues as well as the App Store—vis., in-app advertising.

In the course of the trial, the presiding judge—the “bench”—US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, has asked an inappropriate question.

…confronted Mr Cook [Apple CEO] with survey data that, she said, indicated that 39% of developers were either very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with Apple’s distribution services. “How is that acceptable?” she asked.

There is much to decry about Apple’s business practices, particularly with its App Store.

In particular, one would think those survey results to be unacceptable, to developers, users, even to Apple.

However.

The question is a business matter, solely among Apple, its customer/developers, and the market in general. It is not at all a judicial matter, and it is completely out of place and inappropriate for a judge to ask in a courtroom.

The Desperation of Green Subsidies

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There’s this graph, via Power Line, that illustrates the impact of subsidies—here the production tax credit (PTC) for wind power in particular—and their expiration, on wind energy production facility investment and installation.

Those green bars (because Power Line has a sense of irony) represent the new wind-energy systems installed the year after the PTC was allowed to expire.

Wind power, among “green” energy production systems, just isn’t ready for market.

Unpleasant Signals

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Recall Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promise to send “unpleasant” signals to the US because President Joe Biden hasn’t yet kowtowed sufficiently to him—Washington was not showing a readiness to discuss all issues at a bilateral summit next month [now this month] is how The Jerusalem Post dryly put it at the end of May.

The comments by Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, came a day after US President Joe Biden said that he would press Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect human rights when the two leaders meet in June.

Having embarrassed Biden—and our nation—quietly with the Colonial Pipeline/Nord Stream 2 fiasco, Putin now is bent on embarrassing Biden—and us—more publicly.

JBS Meats was the recent target of a “ransomware” attack that caused JBS to shut down some servers and interrupt meat production in Australia and the US.

Now, a couple of Cox Media Group television stations, one in Florida, the other in Pennsylvania, have been hit by a cyber attack, forcing them both off the air. Cox expects to have them back on the air “soon.”

I expect more signaling in the coming days. And I worry, given what Biden gave away in the aftermath of Colonial, what he’ll give away in response to these signals behind closed doors in Geneva when he meets with Putin in a week.

Not Such an Obstacle

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The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Joe Biden’s (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats’ “infrastructure” bill can, indeed, be effected through reconciliation, if certain steps are taken in the process. The idea is that the bill can be passed as a modification of the existing reconciliation-passed Wuhan Virus “relief” bill passed earlier this year.

One of those steps is the Parliamentarian’s requirement that the infrastructure modification to that prior bill begin anew at the Budget Committee level. This would give the Republicans a chance to block the bill altogether by boycotting the committee, thereby denying Progressive-Democrats a quorum and a vote, thus preventing the bill from being passed out of Committee to the Senate as a whole.

R Street Institute Resident Senior Fellow for Governance James Wallner, though, says that there are workarounds (unidentified by Wallner or the Fox News cite at the link) to the Committee-level blockage.

The other step is forcing the Senate into a vote-a-rama on the bill, during which lots and lots of amendments can be proposed by any Senator and each amendment must be given a roll-call up-or-down vote. Chad Pergram has written—and he’s serious—that

A “vote-a-rama” is a lengthy, arduous process which sometimes consumes an entire calendar day or more.

Wow. A whole day. Worse (here, Pergram isn’t the only one claiming this is an impediment), the vote-a-rama votes would put Progressive-Democrats on the record as supporting this spendiforous bill. Never mind that they do support it, and they’re proud of their support.

What’s missed altogether in this hand-wringing about a vote-a-rama for this bill is the shenanigan the Progressive-Democrats pulled with the vote-a-rama run on that prior Wuhan Virus relief bill. The Senate Majority Leader gets to go last on the amendment proposing and voting-on process.

It didn’t matter how many of the Republicans’ amendments to that relief bill actually got voted up. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) amendment, the last of them all, was to withdraw all of those approved Republican amendments and restore the relief bill to its original, un-Republican-amended form. Of course, that amendment was voted up strictly unilaterally, along party lines—all those supposedly vulnerable Progressive-Democrat Senators proudly voting on the record with Schumer—with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie breaking vote.

Schumer and Harris will do that with this so-called infrastructure bill. The Parliamentarian’s ruling is no obstacle at all.