Tag Archives: markets

You Bet

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British Prime Minister is hiring Tony Abbott, ex-Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, to be a senior adviser on trade for Johnson’s government.

Abbott, a Brit by birth and an Australian by citizenship, had some words for the Oxford Union’s debating society back in 2018, then regarding Brexit [emphasis added]:

This is the country that has seen off the Spanish Armada, the French emperor, and the German Kaiser, won against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, against William II, and then against Hitler. This country did not need Europe—it saved Europe. No country on earth should be more capable than Britain of standing on its own two feet.

Can I get an amen on that?  Abbott will be a good choice for the Brits.

They Shouldn’t Let the Door Hit Them

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…on the way out.

Norway’s largest private money manager, Storebrand Asset Management, excluded and divested itself of more than two dozen listed companies under its new climate change policy, citing concerns with lobbying, coal, and oil sands.

Virtue signaling climate justice is more important than making money for a company’s owners. Which money and associated investment profits are the only means of amassing the wealth necessary to do anything substantive about our environment (which is useful) or about our climate (which need is dubious at best).

Of course, the other alternative, which would be the end game if enough climate justice warriors succeeded en masse, is global impoverishment and the shutdown of modern economies. That, as the now known to be foolish lockdowns have shown, reduced pollution to a significant degree, even if they had little effect on climate.

Luv ya, Storebrand, mean it, buh bye.

Oh, and I won’t be investing my pennies in Storebrand.

Facebook’s Targeted Ads

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Facebook is upset with Apple because the latter, with the privacy changes (improvements?) it has made to its upcoming iPhone software, will greatly hinder the former’s ability to generate targeted ads on apps outside of Facebook’s.

Note, though: Facebook can’t deliver targeted ads without first tracking us.

Apple’s move, then, to the extent Facebook’s characterization is accurate, can’t be all bad on two counts: users won’t be limited in what they see regarding specific products or products in general, which is what targeted ads do, and users won’t be tracked as effectively, which is another purpose of ad targeting.

But, Facebook complains, Apple’s software changes

will affect its Audience Network business….

It’ll affect one of Facebook’s business models.

Willy Sutton’s business model was to go where the money is. Go there often. Maybe he should have been left alone, too.

A Bilateral Trade Agreement

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Antony Phillipson, Great Britain’s Trade Commissioner for North America, offered an assessment of the current state of the trade negotiations occurring between the US and the UK in a recent Wall Street Journal Letter.

Among other things, Phillipson had this:

US tariffs on UK steel, aluminium, and significant exports like Scotch whisky raise prices for US consumers and are an unhelpful backdrop to negotiations. We are pushing for a settlement to the Airbus-Boeing disputes and removal of all retaliatory tariffs.

The Brits, along with the EU at large when they still were a member state, the OECD, and the G-7, were offered a completely tariff-free regime, years ago, by President Donald Trump.

The Brits, along with the rump EU, the OECD, and the G-7, have yet to respond to that offer.

So, Commissioner Phillipson, what is your answer?

Safety and Efficacy

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Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan had some thoughts on drug trials in the context of the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not theirs) situation. For the most part, they’re right. There’s one aspect of their op-ed, though, that I want to comment on.

…if we don’t know what works, and what doesn’t, we’ll waste time and money on treatments that won’t help and may harm. Even if a vaccine is discovered and approved, the pandemic won’t end unless most Americans get vaccinated, which will require confidence in the product’s safety and efficacy.

The FDA currently must determine both safety and efficacy. That’s misplaced, though, and it misuses both time and money, and it misidentifies the money involved.

The FDA should be intimately involved in determining a drug’s or vaccine’s safety; we don’t need a market of snake oil salesmen claiming the safety of their wares.

But we don’t need Government involved in free markets. The free market here is that of patients and their doctors; they should be free to use—an extension of the Right to Try concept—drugs to mitigate the virus’ infection or likelihood of infection, and they should be free to use vaccines to achieve longer-term protection from the virus as soon as those chemicals have been shown safe.

The right to try given safety also would answer one of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns about numbers of trials and trial size: there are lots more patients and doctors in the market than would be participating in FDA-supervised trials, every one of those patients and doctors would be volunteers, and their data would be both more broadly based and available much faster than via an FDA-supervised trial or the series of them that might be necessitated by questions arising from a given trial.

Another of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns is that waste of money. Their concern proceeds from the assumption that it’s the government’s and pharmaceutical companies’ money being wasted. In Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s paradigm, that’s true. But in a free market—those patients and doctors—it’s the patients’ money being spent; it’s their assessment of whether their money is being wasted. Pharmaceutical companies will recoup much, if not all, of their expenses through their sales, and Government need not be involved at all.