The Shanghai Composite Index closed [Wednesday] 1.2% higher, having earlier fallen as much as 5%. The turnaround came after a number of companies disclosed that state-backed companies were among their top shareholders….
Of course.
Still want to “invest” in the PRC?
Many observers have called for the FOMC to tighten monetary policy by raising interest rates in the near term. But such a course would create profound economic risks for the US economy. Why would a near-term tightening of monetary policy be so problematic? Because given the prevailing economic conditions, higher interest rates would push the economy away from the FOMC’s economic goals, not toward them.
On the contrary. If the Fed’s target inflation rate for satisfying its statutorily imposed mandate of price stability is 2%, inflation rate is and has been since the Panic of 2008 substantially lower, and Fed-suppressed interest rates are artificially low—in the zero-to-not-much-more range—and have been over substantially the same time frame and longer, then the thing to do is to raise interest rates allow interest rates to float to levels historically consistent with an inflation rate of 2%.
After all, rising interest rates is intrinsically inflationary, and the Fed has (quite properly IMNSHO) said 2% inflation is the stable price inflation, not substantially less than 2%.
Continued interference in the free market, whether by the elected government or by the Federal Reserve Bank, is not just ineffective, it’s actively counterproductive.
Russia has filed a claim for some 463,000 square miles of Arctic Sea “coastal” shelf, extending more than 350 nautical from Russia’s Arctic Sea shore. Russia intends to exploit the vast oil and natural gas deposits below the sea floor.
Senator Dan Sullivan (R, AK) thinks has demurred, thinking this in combination with Russian military force transfers into its northwest coupled with our own military drawdown is a “strategic blunder.”
Aside from Russia’s land claim and the military contrast not being particularly related to each other, Sullivan is badly overstating the implications of Russia’s seabed claim before the UN. In fact, this is a vast opportunity for us, did we have an administration astute enough to take advantage of it.
Certainly, we should oppose the claim itself, if only to retain the accesses to those deposits, along with the rest of the sea bed’s deposits, for ourselves and for our friends and allies. However, Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone already extends for 200 of those 350 miles; reaching another 150 is significant, but if the territorial claim is blocked, it’s not that big a deal.
Now. Notice that phrase “vast…deposits.” Recall, too, that Russia’s economy is almost exclusively an extractive one, that is, the revenue Russia earns from trading with the world is almost exclusively from selling physical assets—and physical assets have finite supply. In his case, those Russian assets are oil and natural gas (much of it underneath Siberia and as yet undeveloped), and Siberian timber. Finally, recall that Russia needs oil prices to be above $110/barrel in order to balance its budget (as long as it’s as dependent on oil exports as it is), while oil prices following the shale and fracking boom in the US and Canada have been in the $50-$60 range for the last couple of years, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
While we should oppose the claim itself, we should be helping Russia develop and extract all that oil and natural gas (while retaining access to the technology itself. Russia already has played out most of the oil and gas that it can with its own technology; it needs western—or Chinese—technology in order to extract the rest, like that below Siberia, for which it’s working on a deal with the PRC). With that large increase in supply, the price of oil (and of natural gas) will remain depressed compared to what Russia needs to balance its budget if the price doesn’t fall further from this supply increase.
This could be a big win for us.
The Federal Trade Commission in its 100-year history has never agreed on formal principles for policing companies engaged in “unfair” competition. That looks set to change.
Members of the FTC are close to a bipartisan agreement to lay out for the first time how the commission views its authority to bring cases against businesses it believes compete unfairly, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
An accord would be a breakthrough for Democrat and Republican commissioners who have clashed over when and how the FTC should deploy the century-old Section 5 of the FTC Act in enforcement matters. The provision declares “unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce” to be unlawful. But the agency has faced criticism that with no formal guidelines or parameters, it is hard for anyone—businesses as well as regulators—to know what may be considered unfair.
“Unfair” in this context is a purely legal definition, and there already are laws on the books governing what is and is not permissible in our commerce. We have anti-trust laws that govern abuse of monopoly power. We have truth-in-advertising laws that govern how businesses can market their products. We have contract laws that sanction dishonesty in contract negotiations and that define liability when mistaken, but fundamentally honest, statements are made in those negotiations.
That’s all that we need, that’s all the FTC needs, and the FTC has had that for well over 100 years, dating at least to the Sherman Antitrust Act. This new “accord” will be just another bureaucratic nightmare, adding layers of compliance requirements and determinations to any FTC action—and so elevating costs for any business the FTC contemplates violating in some way.
Underlying all of that is all of this: Americans don’t need a rule, or a “guideline,” to govern every aspect of every action in their lives.
The Senate failed a cloture vote on a bill related to one already passed by the House that would have diverted some $550 billion of American taxpayer money from Planned Parenthood and sent it, instead, to a number of other women’s health facilities around the country, facilities that don’t do abortions. The bill would have preserved access to health care for women who need it and don’t have, for instance, the economic resources to get it. As a result of the failure, the bill is near death—Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) voted against it when it became clear it would fail; his vote means he can bring it up again this session. He and his fellow Republicans have said the question is far from dead.
The Senate Democrats who caused the cloture vote to fail, though, did so explicitly because they want that money to keep going to Planned Parenthood. The key distinction between Planned Parenthood and the other women’s health facilities? One dissects aborted babies’ bodies for parts, and the others do not abort babies in the first place.
So much for any war on women. Sending money to women’s health facilities—regardless of whether you think the Federal government should be doing that at all—hardly constitutes a war on women.
Never mind, too, the increased risk of breast cancer that women face from pregnancies that are catastrophically interrupted (from any of a variety of causes of which abortion is one).
The Democrats’ war on babies, though….