Tag Archives: markets

Economic Evolution?

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In a Wall Street Journal Letters offering, one writer, in supporting the Chamber of Commerce’s change of position regarding massive government intervention into our private economy, wrote

The 2020 economy is far different than that of 1980, and so what is good for business now is necessarily different.

This is wrong on two counts. The first is that the reason the economy of 1980 seems different from that of 2020 is the explosion of government intervention and intrusive regulation over those 40 years. That’s not actually an economic difference, though; it’s a government behavior difference, with the economy changing in result, not from its own intrinsic evolution.

The other is that what’s good for business is a constant: a free market that’s competitive among businesses, a free market with government intervention and regulation limited to ensuring that business managers don’t lie in their contracts or their advertising and that those managers don’t abuse whatever monopoly power might come their way. Sound economic principles don’t change.

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?