Another week, and more bloodshed in Ukraine. How the Russian invasion will play out remains anyone’s guess, but one result seems increasingly likely. What began as an imperial gambit may well end up with the imperialist transformed into the junior partner, or even satellite, of a greater superpower still on the rise.
Read MoreWe live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.
Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….
Read MoreOn Monday, the Financial Times ran an article by Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever (a company that, as he mentions, was recently in the news over its pursuit of objectives seemingly unconnected to its bottom line). A forceful, if unpersuasive, argument for stakeholder capitalism, it is an interesting and unintentionally revealing read. Above all, it demonstrates how, whatever BlackRock’s Larry Fink may claim, stakeholder capitalism is intrinsically political. Indeed, as it is an expression of corporatism, that is — or ought to be — a statement of the obvious. Corporatism, regardless of the form it takes, is an ideology revolving around an idea of how society should be organized. That is the very essence of politics…
Read MoreThe buck may have stopped at Harry Truman’s desk, but today’s eroding dollar is having trouble finding a berth in Joe Biden’s Oval Office.
For much of last year, the president insisted that inflation was temporary. (To be fair, the Federal Reserve claimed something similar.) But with prices likely to continue rising at a brisk pace for some time — in December, inflation reached levels not seen for 40 years — Team Biden is changing its tune, and, as administrations in a political mess tend to do, it’s looking for someone to blame.
Read MoreIt’s the time of year when Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, comes out with his annual letter to CEOs, a letter in which he tells CEOs what he expects of them. As BlackRock marked the end of 2021 by passing the benchmark of $10 trillion under management, an impressive figure however you look at it, many CEOs will treat Fink’s thoughts with rather more respect than their shareholders or our democracy deserve — $10 trillion will do that.
Read MoreThere are quite a few underlying reasons — political, personal, and ideological — why British prime minister Boris Johnson may now be forced out of office, but that the trigger for his potential downfall has been a series of “parties” (what constitutes a party is now a contentious topic) appears to have surprised some on this side of the Atlantic. To them, it seems, well, a touch weird that a prime minister with a healthy majority could lose his job because his staffers occasionally enjoyed drinks at their workplace (or in the garden outside) — and that he had attended, albeit briefly, one of these get-togethers — even if it was at a time when tough Covid lockdown controls had heavily restricted social gatherings. That Johnson might not have been entirely accurate in his evolving statements about what had occurred, what he knew, and so on, well . . . #ShouldersShrugged.
Read MoreThe only surprise in this story (to me) is that someone at the European Central Bank, Isabel Schnabel, the member of the ECB’s Executive Board responsible for market operations, has been talking frankly about greenflation. Her motive for doing so may (I’m guessing) come in part from her well-publicized worries about the ECB’s, uh, aggressive use of its balance sheet, but her speech is focused elsewhere than on the quantitative-easing debate.
Schnabel highlights how much energy prices have risen in Europe (a development, it must be said, that’s hard to miss). To be fair, it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t owe a great deal to climate policies (except in the U.K. and, arguably, Germany). However, Schnabel’s key point is that, sooner or later, such policies are going to have a more persistent impact on the cost of energy…
Read MoreShell’s decision to pull out of the Cambo North Sea oilfield-development project in early December — which could have also provided enough natural gas for 1.5 million homes for a year — may not seem like something that should concern Americans. Check a little more closely, though, and this grim tale begins to look a lot like an example of how our own oil and gas production is going to be — or is already starting to be — constrained, not necessarily by legislation but by a combination of regulatory overreach, activist agitation, and the increasingly malevolent influence of financial institutions. Many of those in the last group on that list are major institutional investors out to advance a socio-political agenda unconnected, whatever they may claim, to the generation of financial return for their clients. This agenda is often sold under the guise of “socially responsible investing” (SRI), and particularly these days, as “ESG,” a peculiarly virulent variant of SRI under which actual or prospective investments are not only assessed for the money they might make but also for how they score against certain environmental, social, and, much more reasonably, governance benchmarks.
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