Climate policy’s latest threat to property rights

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Say what you will about Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, but when it comes to property rights, he is pretty consistent. He was chairman of the Business Roundtable when, in 2019, in a statement co-signed by a large number of CEOs, it jettisoned its support for shareholder primacy — the idea that the principal purpose of a corporation is to generate return for its shareholders. That was old hat. Now corporations should “deliver value” to all their stakeholders, of which shareholders are only one class.

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Mr. CHIPS’s Pack Mule

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Those who believe in free markets — or who are familiar with the history of developed economies after they became developed (or, maybe, completed postwar reconstruction) — ought to have little time for industrial policy. Free markets are bottom-up, flexible, and work with their own imperfections. They function through a continuous process of communication that recognizes that the valuable message sent by a price yesterday may be worthless today. Much of their operation is by trial and error. To be sure, there are disasters — plenty of them — but they often point to a better use of capital elsewhere or next time. The prosperity free markets have brought, and the human flourishing they have enabled, is unmatched.

By contrast — and despite some successes — industrial policy has a generally inglorious track record…

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Germany’s folly: Berlin has miscalculated on Russia and China

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The notion that closer trade connections with the West will necessarily set less enlightened nations on a course toward prosperity and liberty is nonsense, but convenient nonsense. Germans have a phrase for it — Wandel durch Handel, change through trade — often given as a justification for their business dealings with Russia and China. Unfortunately, the change they triggered was in Germany. In one case it has been for the worse; in the other it appears to be headed that way…

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Ukraine Becomes a War of Attrition on Two Fronts

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The term “special military operation” was not just a euphemism. It also reflected the Kremlin’s hope that it could take Ukraine by means of a swift “decapitation.” Kyiv would be overrun, Ukraine’s leadership would be killed, arrested, or driven into exile, and the country would fall under Russian control. We will never know what was meant to have come next. Two days before the invasion, Russia had recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” that, with Moscow’s backing, had broken away from Ukraine in 2014. Those have since been annexed by Russia, along with Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts (regions), although parts of all these territories are still in Ukrainian hands. Moscow probably always intended that this portion of Ukraine would be transferred to Russia, not least because it constituted a broad land bridge to occupied Crimea…

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The truth about UFOs

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Even if Chinese spy balloons – or alien spacecraft scouting the planet ahead of their coming invasion – start being deployed more discreetly than they have been of late, there will still be more sightings than usual of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs: a new set of initials designed to help UFOs shed their dodgy past). The word has gone out that the stigma attached to military personnel who report UAPs has gone, and they appear to have responded: there were more reported UAP sightings between March 2021 and August 2022 than in the previous 17 years, including nearly 200 that remain unexplained. What’s more, the sensors that scan American skies have been recalibrated to catch slower-moving items, such as suspicious Chinese balloons – something that is bound to give rise to more false alarms. ..

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Stranded: The False Promise of Electric Cars

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The more the state ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” This may resonate with the driver of an electric vehicle (EV) who has pulled up at a charging station in the middle of nowhere, only to find it broken.

In January last year, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker (it was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot), described electrification as “a technology chosen by politicians” and said it was “imposed” on the auto sector. By contrast, the triumph of the internal-combustion engine (ICE) over a century ago was organic. Human ingenuity and the power of markets led to a product that swept almost everything else off the road. EVs (which first had a moment around 1900) were not banned, and neither was the horse. In due course, ICE horseless carriages for the Astors were followed by the Model T and its kin. The automotive age had truly arrived…

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ESG’s Bad (But Not Bad Enough) Year

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The year 2022 was not the best of years for ESG (an investment discipline under which portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance standards). To take one example, as of January 5, the price of BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF had declined by around 22 percent over twelve months, underperforming the S&P 500, which fell by around 20 percent. Those are only one year’s results (and they would have been marginally improved by dividends), but it’s still not the greatest of looks for an investment approach often sold (typically with higher fees) as a way of doing well by doing good. Making matters more embarrassing still, stocks in those wicked fossil fuel companies (in which ESG investors tend to be underweight) did well. The S&P 500 Energy sector index rose by around 44 percent over the same period…

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The Death of the Thatcherite Rebirth

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Last week, Britain’s newly minted (and now newly departing) prime minister, Liz Truss, replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) with Jeremy Hunt, a figure from the soggy Tory Party’s soggy center who was widely seen as “a safe pair of hands.” Hunt’s allies claimed that he would be CEO to Truss’s chairman, and that is how it turned out….

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To Be Anti-ESG Is to Be against Free Market Capitalism? Not So Much.

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With environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…

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