Category Archives: markets

Mixed View

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European oil companies are engaged in a fierce competition for the best oil and gas fields in Iran when Western sanctions are lifted, while American energy firms watch from the sidelines.

Much of what’s holding American energy firms back are the still in place American sanctions that block US companies from such business. Nevertheless, American firms of any industry shouldn’t be doing business with Iran, even if it might become strictly legal. We shouldn’t be helping a terrorist nation-state that has as its sworn goal the extermination of Israel. Neither should anybody in the West, including those European oil companies.

On the other hand, such business by the Europeans can go a long way, if done right, toward reducing or eliminating European dependency on Russian oil and gas—and so to eliminating Russia’s ability to extort Europe.

That’s not all bad.

A Bipartisan Misunderstanding

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Congressmen Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) and Randy Neugebauer (R, TX) rightly decry the partisan nature of the Elizabeth Warren/Dodd-Frank Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but their solution is wholly wrong. They want the existing single-director power structure replaced by a multi-person bipartisan commission, one that wouldn’t be so prone to the party in White House…influence.

As an example of how well a bipartisan commission would work, the Congressmen cite the SEC, the fair and balanced commission that uses in house judges to act on and punish those the SEC accuses of illegal investing practices.

It’s interesting that they didn’t cite the FCC, of Internet interference notoriety, or the NLRB, the commission that’s an arm of Big Union.

No, the proper correction to the partisan nature of the CFPB is to get rid of this wholly unaccountable even to Congress, with budgeting on demand from the Federal Reserve Bank, monstrosity altogether.

Replace with what, then? Nothing. The function is not needed. American citizens aren’t as slack-jawed, droolingly stupid as the Know Betters in government—of either party—make us out to be.

White House Timidity

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President Barack Obama says he’ll veto a bill making its way through the House of Representatives that would repeal the oil export ban in place since Gerald Ford’s administration. Obama thinks he’s acting from a position of strength in saying “No” to anything Republican.

He’s actually acting from weakness and timidity. Leaving aside the destruction of potential American jobs such a veto, if carried through, would represent, there are a couple of foreign policy/national security aspects to lifting the oil.

The free flow of oil to Europe that lifting the ban would facilitate would go a long way toward weaning Europe in general and Ukraine, Poland, and Germany in particular from their current dependence on Russian oil exports.

Freely flowing oil will hold down the cost of energy and of materials industries: plastics are made from oil. Those lower costs strength the economies of all of the nations that use energy in their industries or that import other nations’ production—which is to say the economies of nearly every nation on the planer.

Both Russia and Iran need oil prices above $100/barrel in order to balance their national budgets and so to better fund their attacks on their neighbors, in Russia’s case, and to fund their terrorist clients and attacks on Israel, in Iran’s case. Freely flowing oil would keep oil prices in their current $50-ish range, if not push those prices lower.

But neither Putin nor Khamenei would like that.

Obamacare Strikes Again

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The Obamacare law set up “risk corridors” for insurers in an effort to smooth the transition from quasi- (albeit very quasi) free markets for health insurance coverage to Obamacare’s government mandated health welfare coverage. Health plan providers that did relatively well in the transition were supposed to pay a taste of their profits into a pool—the risk corridor—from which health plan providers struggling with the transition were supposed to be able to draw to ease their losses.

There’s this snippet in Anna Wilde Mathews’ and Stephanie Armour’s piece in The Wall Street Journal on these risk corridors [emphasis added].

Federal authorities said that insurers will at first receive only about 12.6% of the money that they requested from the program, known as risk corridors, for 2014, its first year of operation. Insurers have requested approximately $2.87 billion in payments from the program based on their 2014 results. But the pool available to make those payments is just $362 million, which came from collections from other insurers that did relatively well on their marketplace business.

That doesn’t look like very many health plan providers did well last year. That does look like most of the plan providers were harmed by Obamacare. And through them, lots of Americans are going to be harmed by this Democratic Party’s law, as health plan providers withdraw from ObamaMart or from health plan provision entirely.

Hypocrisy of the Left

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Sanctuary City San Francisco has

proposed new city regulations, which could only be aimed at High Bridge Arms, would have required the shop to take and preserve video of all transactions and turn customers’ personal data over to police on a weekly basis.

There was only one gun shop left in San Fran at the time these new rules were proposed. That shop already had 17 cameras installed and turned video over to the police on their request. However, as the shop’s General Manager said,

it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods[.]

Rather than accepting that increased invasion, not just of an honest business doing business, but of the privacy of honest Americans doing honest business, the gun shop is closing.

Clearly, the Sanctuary City’s government and the residents that elect them care more about the ability of illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime to get guns than they do about honest Americans’ ability to defend themselves.