About Covid inflation

It was largely price fixing.

For years, there has been a debate between macro-economists [...] about the source of post-Covid inflation. Many economists chalked up price hikes to workers demanding more money and saw the way to address it as scaring workers into accepting less money by throwing a bunch of them out of work. “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation,” said Larry Summers.

[...]

By contrast, [...] CEOs were routinely telling investors that they were raising prices to increase margins, not to meet wage demands. Or it might have been because they experienced large and unexplained price increases in meat, rent, hotels, groceries and restaurants.

[...]

One software and consulting pricing firm for landlords, RealPage, specialized in telling its clients to hike rents more than they otherwise might. As of December of 2020, RealPage had nearly 32,000 clients, including “10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States”. There are multiple antitrust suits accusing the private equity-owned firm of organizing a massive price-fixing conspiracy to inflate rents across the board.

Beyond rent, the Biden administration or private plaintiffs now have credible antitrust claims against firms engaged in price-fixing in meat, hotels and large online sellers like Amazon.

[...]

Rent, meat, oil and hotels are big sectors, so criminal activity in the form of price-fixing to boost profits should bust through the illusions economists have about how our markets really work. There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.

The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.

The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.

  Guardian

It won't happen with a Republican Congress, and I'm skeptical it would even happen with a Democratic one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Here we go again

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's not the cows?

   

In the course of about four hours of flying, we found at least six sites with high methane-emissions readings, ranging from about 300 pounds to almost 1,100 pounds an hour, including at DCP Pegasus, which is part owned by the energy giant Phillips 66.

Those readings would very likely put those sites in the category of “super emitters,” a term used by scientists to describe large-scale releases that are responsible for a disproportionately high share of methane emissions from oil and gas sites. In a 2017 study of the Barnett shale basin in Texas, methane releases of about 60 pounds or more an hour were classified as super emitters, making up just 1 percent of sites but accounting for nearly half of total emissions.

[...]

Detecting methane emissions is difficult work that often begins with flights like these. Oil and gas sites are not required to install round-the-clock emissions monitors, and flights are one of the ways to spot trouble.

[...]

Methane is loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply. The Times’s aerial and on-the-ground research, along with an examination of lobbying activities by the companies that own the sites, shows how the energy industry is seeking and winning looser federal regulations on methane, a major contributor to global warming.

[...]

Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.

[...]

Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration, either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane, a review of regulatory filings, meeting minutes and attendance logs shows. These local companies, along with oil-industry lobby groups that represent the world’s largest energy companies, are fighting rules that would force them to more aggressively fix emissions like these.

[...]

The findings address the mystery behind rising levels of methane in the atmosphere. Methane levels have soared since 2007 for reasons that still aren’t fully understood. But fracking natural-gas production, which accelerated just as atmospheric methane levels jumped, is a prime suspect.

[...]

The regulatory rollback sought by the energy industry is the latest chapter in the administration’s historic effort to weaken environmental and climate regulations while waging a broad-based attack on climate science.

[...]

The efforts were part of a broader industry push to reverse Obama-era rules that would have forced operators to more aggressively monitor and repair natural gas leaks while reducing flaring.

[...]

The companies found an administration willing to listen. Before his appointment to the post of assistant administrator at the E.P.A. overseeing air pollution, William L. Wehrum lobbied on behalf of oil and gas producers, including gas processors and petroleum refineries.

But of course. While other Republican administrations have put people in charge of agencies who are expected to deter or destroy them, this administration has elevated that approach to art.

Mr. Wehrum resigned from the agency in June and is under investigation for his contacts with former clients. His former boss, Andrew Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, also lobbied for energy companies earlier in his career.

By this August, the E.P.A. had proposed a broad rollback, including rescinding direct regulations of methane emissions completely.

[...]

Methane leaks from oil and gas production threaten to erode the advantage that natural gas has over coal in meeting the world’s energy needs, scientists say. When burned for electricity, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide that coal does. But if methane is not burned off when released, it can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

  NYT

Oh, Christ. Trump is going to go back on the coal soap box when he hears. Make that when someone explains it to him.

Methane also contributes to ground-level ozone, which, if inhaled, can cause asthma and other health problems. “It’s increasingly clear that fossil fuel production has dramatically increased global methane emissions,” said Robert Howarth, an earth system scientist at Cornell University and author of a study estimating that North American shale gas production may be responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.

[...]

Energy giants including BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Shell have, to varying degrees, publicly supported methane regulation. However, trade associations representing all three, including the American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America, have fought against direct regulation.

How convenient.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

As if they don't know already

And as if it will change their behavior.

The three children in question — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump — were all officers at the Trump Foundation, which was accused by prosecutors of fraudulently misappropriating funds for the president’s personal expenses.

The Trump Foundation agreed to voluntarily disband as part of its settlement with the New York Attorney General, and Trump paid out $2 million in compensation to eight different charities to make up for the money that the foundation misused over the span of several years.

In addition to paying $2 million, the president also had to admit that he misused foundation funds to fund his own presidential campaign, pay off his businesses’ legal expenses, and to buy a $10,000 portrait of himself that wound up being displayed at one of his Florida hotels.

  Raw Story

But he's the least corrupt president we've ever had, right? ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Don't worry, the titans of capitalism will save the world

The rise and catastrophic downfall of WeWork founder and former CEO Adam Neumann has been chronicled in gleeful detail across the international financial press in the wake of his company’s ill-fated attempt at a public offering — which resulted in disastrous revelations about the company’s mismanagement, its devaluation and, ultimately, Neumann’s resignation.

But a new Vanity Fair article by Gabriel Sherman, titled “Inside the Fall of WeWork,” asserts that Neumann’s “millennial entitlement gone insane” and guru-like “egomaniacal glamour” extended beyond the business world and into the world of Middle East diplomacy.

[...]

Last summer, some WeWork executives were shocked to discover Neumann was working on Jared Kushner’s Mideast peace effort. According to two sources, Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like.”

Kushner, he added, “showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.”

Sherman reported that Neumann also told his colleagues “that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes.”

Finally, an anecdote that connected Neumann both to Kushner and the Saudi prince involved a claim by Neumann that three people were going to save the world: Crown Prince Mohammed, Jared Kushner and Neumann himself.

  Haaretz

What do you want to bet Kushner and the Crown Prince agree?

After all the WeWork scandal in the news, I still had to look up just WTF the company is. According to Wikipedia:

WeWork is an American commercial real estate company that provides shared workspaces for technology startups and services for other enterprises.

And saves the world, of course.

You might have heard of Adam Neumann, the grifter mastermind behind WeWork, a failing real estate company that claims to be worth many billions.

  The Guardian

I know that person under a different name: Donald J Trump.

Neumann, like Mark Zuckerberg or Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, is another offspring of Silicon Valley’s slash and destroy culture, reaping great wealth off a startup that was either actively corrosive or merely unnecessary.

After a disastrous public offering that forced Neumann out, WeWork, which rents office spaces from landlords and refurbishes them as tony workspaces for customers, announced this week it would lay off 2,400 employees. The cuts represent 19% of its workforce. Neumann, the former CEO, was set to walk away with a $1.7bn golden parachute. [...] Backlash from WeWork’s beleaguered employees may trim the deal – Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate that has been propping WeWork up with investment cash, could cut some of Neumann’s benefits.

But either way, he will exit the company he built a very wealthy millionaire or technical billionaire. He will never want for anything again. The same can’t be said for the 2,400 about to be unemployed.

The WeWork story is now a disturbingly familiar one, in an era when the economics of major startups can seem as surreal and ludicrous as whatever happens in the White House. Capitalism has always been a deeply flawed way of arranging a society, but big business, until around the 21st century, was at least bound by a few basic laws of monetary gravity. You were successful when you produced more revenue than the cost of running the business. You expanded when your profit margins increased.

[...]

Ford or US Steel or IBM could not just lose money and indefinitely survive. Their stock would plummet. Headquarters and factories would shutter.

Those days are gone.

While a few of the tech behemoths, like Amazon, Facebook and Google, do indeed turn profits, many others don’t come close. In the startup world, the logic is inverted, the math alchemic. You are worth the appeal of your idea to a bunch of rich people and companies who will keep giving you money in the hope that one day a fiction will be made real. You can keep losing money at spectacular rates as long as you, like a junkie after the next quick fix, keep expanding, at whatever maniacal clip the market justifies.

[...]

Uber is far more nefarious, driving down the wages of drivers and clogging city streets with unsustainable levels of traffic. It’s an unregulated cab company helmed by vulture capitalists.

And just lost its license to operate in London.

WeWork is comparatively benign: a lousy real estate company, conceived by Neuman, that tricked a lot of people into thinking it was something more.

[...]

WeWork’s initial public offering showed it burned through billions a year, racking up huge losses as it continued to rent out office space in just about every city imaginable.

The business model, if it can be called that, is vulnerable to economic downturns, since WeWork is locked into long-term leases with its landlords. Tenants of WeWork can more easily walk away if business goes sour. But WeWork can’t exit a 10-year lease from an office building if a space suddenly goes vacant.

SoftBank doesn't have a savvy lending department? Or is this a friend-of-Jared-Kushner thing?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The end is near

Over the course of 2017, both in Congress and in the executive branch, we have watched the task of government devolve into the full-scale looting of America.

Politicians are making decisions to enrich their donors — and at times themselves personally — with a reckless disregard for any kind of objective policy analysis or consideration of public opinion.

[...]

Members of Congress who under other circumstances might be constrained by shame, custom, or the will of their constituents have learned from Trump’s election that you can get away with more than we used to think.

[...]

The sheer quantity of bad acts makes it impossible for anyone to hold anyone accountable.

[...]

Trump and Ryan have completely dissolved the norm against dishonesty to the point where there are no longer any whistleblowers in the Republican caucus or the world of conservative media. You just say whatever you want, and dole out favors to your friends — moving at such a rapid pace that the country’s ability to process what’s happening gets overwhelmed.

[...]

While Americans are fascinated by major legislative drama, endless sexual abuse scandals, endless Trump-Russia scandals, and countless inappropriate presidential Twitter outbursts, key regulators — almost uniformly drawn from the ranks of corporate America — are doling out favors at a pace that boggles the mind.

[...]

The swamp is running wild.

[...]

Moral and political responsibility for the looting ultimately rests on the shoulders of the GOP members of Congress who decided that the appropriate reaction to Trump’s inauguration was to start smashing and grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their donors rather than uphold their constitutional obligations.

  Vox

Greed is rampant in America. And the people at the top of the list know that there is another devastating financial crash on the way. They've been looting since before the 2008 crash. They're causing the crash. And they're looting everything they can before the final blow that takes the country down for the count.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Major companies avoiding taxes

Longer list.

I hear bad things about Amazon's treatment of its employees, but on this scale (33% cash stashed overseas), it looks good by comparison.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Typical Trump Appointment

What an unfortunate Twitter handle:  usedgov

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is There Anybody in the Trump Administration Who Is NOT Involved in an Investigation?

“Wayne Tracker” cannot be forced to testify under oath. He does not exist.

But the man who used the “Tracker” alias, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, can be questioned — and is increasingly expected to be — as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman expands his sweeping probe into whether Tillerson’s former employer, ExxonMobil, misled investors about the impact of climate change.

[...]

Schneiderman may have only just begun to use the power of his office, however, in an investigation that has already spanned roughly 18 months and forced Exxon to release roughly 3 million internal documents.

[...]

The New York attorney general’s office will depose nine Exxon witnesses in the coming weeks in a series of lower-level depositions in a chain that is ultimately expected to lead to Tillerson. The State Department declined to comment on Tillerson’s involvement in the Exxon probe. The secretary of state has retained a private attorney to represent him in the matter.

[...]

The confrontation could be several months or even years away, however.

[...]

Exxon earlier this year acknowledged that Tillerson used the “Wayne Tracker” alias during email communications. The company says the alias was created to help the former CEO avoid a flood of messages after environmental activists obtained his actual email address.

  Tillerson

You can hide but you can't stay hidden.

Exxon officials testified that the company allowed several months of Tillerson’s emails to be deleted even after Schneiderman’s office flagged them for preservation.

Bad, bad Exxon.

Republican attorneys general in 12 states [...] filed a friend-of-the-court brief late last month in a related federal case brought by Exxon to try to block Schneiderman’s investigation. The state prosecutors, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, argue that the attorneys general in New York — and Massachusetts, which is also probing Exxon — are abusing their power to prove a political point about climate change.

With the blessing of a New York Supreme Court judge, Schneiderman’s investigation is progressing.