Category Archives: markets

Some Duplicity in Obamacare

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Recall that a while ago, in 2014, the GAO ran some tests of Obamacare: they set up 12 fake persons with invalid Social Security numbers, fake citizenship, and/or false income claims. Eleven of these got coverage, several of them got subsidies, many of them got renewed for this year, and some of the renewals got increased subsidies.

…officials running Obamacare told the GAO they possess “limited ability to respond to attempts at fraud….”

Worse, these guys added in wide-eyed innocence

that measures to ensure program integrity would undermine “consumers’ ability to ‘effectively and efficiently’ select Marketplace [Obamacare] coverage.”

It’s like voter ID: if we protect the sanctity of an American’s vote, the Democrats’ favorite demographic—the frauds—won’t be able to vote Democratic.

Changing the Subject

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Planned Parenthood and President Barack Obama are partners in this misbehavior.

Recall the hoo-raw over the videos published by Center for Medical Progress showing Planned Parenthood doctors discussing the best way to harvest valuable (monetarily) body parts from freshly aborted babies. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards spent her time decrying the videos as “edited” and insisting that Planned Parenthood behavior was both legal and ethical.

Obama’s only comment on the matter came through his Press Secretary Josh Earnest, and it was centered on the editing and a repeat of Richards’ claim of “ethical behavior.”

Neither of them addressed the question of aborting babies and cutting out the good parts for resale (or “donation”). Both of them ran screaming from the subject.

The PRC’s Markets

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Beijing thought they could “rescue” the PRC’s stock market. Recall that those markets had tanked collapsed last month, with no bottom in sight. Then the government stepped in:

There is the buying program financed by the central bank. A state pension fund has gone into equities for the first time. Beijing mandated that anyone holding 5% of a company can’t sell for six months. And brokerage firms, directed by regulators, are sitting on a boatload of shares as inventory, notes Erwin Sanft of Macquarie.

There’s also the government rule that stocks aren’t allowed to fall more than 10% in a day—at that threshold, trading in the stock must halt. This, of course, only adds sell-off pressure to the next day…. There are additional overt government interferences, but you get the idea. Associated with this, the markets stopped falling and rose quite a bit. And there’s the PRC buying for its government accounts shares of Chinese blue chip companies, ostensibly to prop up those share prices.

Monday, all that propping up came to a screeching halt. Those markets fell, in that single day, 8.5%, and the representative indices stand at just 5% above the pre-intervention low of three weeks ago.

All of that fall represents investors—at least the ordinary citizenry and those investors not directly under government control—leaving the PRC’s markets. At this pace, the only players left will be the government and its agencies and government run “private” institutions. And the government’s blue chip stock holdings.

That’s a centrally planned economy by another name.

Democrats and Regulation

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Uber is successful in competing with the established taxi industry, and New York City Mayer Bill de Blasio (D) is all upset about it. He wants to freeze Uber’s (and other ad hoc rides-for-hire companies’) growth until he can figure out how to regulate them:

[W]e support a short pause in the rapid increase of for-hire vehicles to make sure that the future growth of this industry lives up to the policies and principles we set out as a city.

“Short pause.” Sure. He supported his argument in that piece by citing other jurisdictions where Uber had resisted…being over-regulated.

Hillary Clinton is his BFF on this:

while the “gig economy” may be “exciting” and “unleashing innovation,” “it is also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”

Because. Just because. It exists; it has to be regulated.

Democrats abhor anything that’s not under their regulation, not under their control. Americans just are too stupid to see to their own affairs without Know Betters instructing us. And our Know Betters are the only ones qualified to define “what a good job will look like in the future.”

Update: de Blasio seems to have recognized the error of his ways. For now.  Clinton has not.

Artificial Demand

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Nearly two weeks ago, with Chinese stocks tumbling, Beijing let loose its strongest effort yet to boost the market, including extracting a pledge from 21 brokers to buy shares as long as the Shanghai Composite Index was below 4500.

With its push, the government halted the plunge and engineered a modest rebound.

What happens when that artificial demand goes away? Or its effects peter out?

Hmm….