Category Archives: markets

Apparently Bureaucrats Don’t Have Enough Control Already

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The European Commission is considering unilaterally expanding the scope of its authorities.

The European Union’s antitrust authority on Friday said it was considering changes to its merger review rules to include a wider swath of technology and pharmaceutical deals that normally wouldn’t fall within its purview but could possibly harm the bloc’s internal market.

…the European Commission said it was fielding opinions from the public on whether the regulator should also probe mergers involving companies with smaller revenues.

Because instructing the big companies on the business decisions the Commission would permit them to take doesn’t have enough juice for them anymore.

Such a move would be especially significant for the digital and pharmaceutical sectors, the EU said, where an acquired company might generate little turnover but holds commercially valuable data or owns products under development that haven’t yet been marketed.

That’s an area of regulatory vacuum, and we can’t have that, now can we?  Besides those data and nascent products represent action on which the EU wants its vig.

Government Needs to just Butt Out

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A bipartisan group of senators is pushing to include municipal bonds in bank-safety rules, the latest wrinkle in a continuing fight over how safe—and salable—the debt of states and localities would be in another financial crisis.

The proposed regulation would “allow” banks to include municipal bonds on their balance sheets in the category—mandated by existing rules requiring banks to have sufficient (government’s definition) cash to fund operations for 30 days in the next “financial crisis.”  The proposed regulation also specifies the safety rating for those munis: the banking rules’ “high quality liquid assets” category, albeit at the lowest level of “high quality.”

So Chicago’s bonds should be on a par with Dallas’.

No.  These are decisions—every single one of them, the definition of “sufficient,” of “crisis,” whether to include munis as high quality assets, even whether to count munis as assets at all—are best made by banks and by businesses generally in a free market, not made by Government from the center of a government-managed economy.

Obamacare Fail

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The headline of this Wall Street Journal piece pretty much says it all: Average Cost of Employer Health Coverage Tops $18,000 for Family in 2016.

The sub-head, with careful reading, adds clarity: Pace of cost increase slowed by accelerating shift into high-deductible plans, new survey shows.

That cost of employer coverage, buy the way, refers to the premiums employees must pay: $18,142 for a 2016 typical employer-offered family plan, and employees have to pay 30% of that, typically, up from 29%.  Like a sergeant I once worked with liked to say, sort of, “Holy cats.”

Is that cost increase rate actually slowing, though, where it matters to the individual—the employee?  Not in the deductibles.  Shifting into high-deductible plans means the policy holder—the employee—has to pay lots more out of his own pocket just to get to the point where the coverage plan begins to pay its 50%, or 60%, or maybe as high as 80% of the medical costs.  For that year.  Then the deductible has to be paid anew.

Notice another part of that sub-head: accelerating shift into high-deductible plans.  That means that in that next year, the erstwhile high-deductible plan may not be available: the employee may be stuck with purchasing a different plan, perhaps with an even higher deductible, perhaps with higher yet premiums, perhaps with coverage not as useful to the employee.

This is what Obamacare, not the employers, has wrought.  This is what needs to be tossed in its entirety into the medical waste disposal and replaced with a more honest environment within which actual insurance can be had, and competitively so.

Of Course They Are

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President Obama and his Democratic allies are seizing on the exodus of private insurers from ObamaCare markets to renew their push for a so-called “public option[.]”

Never mind that the revival of this push is a direct result of the broad, expensive failure that is those same Know Betters’ Obamacare.  No, when government fails as miserably as it has done with Obamacare, the only right answer is the Progressive answer: more government.  A bigger hammer.

We can’t have competition and private enterprise do this.  We gotta have Know Betters in Government do this; us mere citizens can’t be trusted with such weighty matters.

The Progressive Socialist Goal Made Manifest

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In the context of Aetna’s decision to sharply curtail its participation in ObamaMart—because such participation was costing Aetna millions of dollars—Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said openly

The provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

Because making money—the engine of economic growth and the economic welfare of all Americans—is inappropriate when it’s done outside Government control.  American businesses and Americans can’t be allowed to earn more than Government deems fit.  President Barack Obama (D) has held this before Sanders became a public fixture:

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrat Obama considered it to be Government’s role to determine the goodness of that product or service, not the private citizens choosing to buy, not to buy, that product or service.

Sanders’ disdain for private insurers’ market projections and their goal to make as much profit as possible are easily extensible to the economy as a whole.  That Progressives in the Democratic Party are demanding a government option to “compete” with private enterprise in ObamaMart is a clear demonstration of where that Party will take our economy the moment they gain control of our government.

You can bet Progressive-Democrat and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton soon will be echoing Sanders’ call for government control of our economy in her effort to retain Sanders’ supporters and to extend Obama’s policies.

This will be the Progressive Socialist economy.