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Ford is looking to create two nearly separate ‘businesses’ under one Ford label that would each focus on one type of automobile propulsion, gas turbine or electric. The biggest friction in the move could come from dealers, who might find their lives more complicated dealing with two separate ‘businesses,’ and might find themselves choosing between Ford Electric and Ford Gas.
Ford’s ‘radical’ move to split the company won’t come easy
From www.theverge.com
2022-03-02 21:17:01
Andrew J. Hawkins
Excerpt:
Ford’s decision to divide its business into two separate entities — one focused on electric vehicles and the other on gas-powered ones — may complicate the automaker’s efforts to recruit top-tier talent and could risk upsetting dealers already chafing under the shift to electrification, auto analysts and experts said Wednesday.
Ford also isn’t going so far as to spin off its EV divisions entirely as a separate business, as some major Wall Street banks advised. The automaker’s share price could suffer as a result. By keeping both divisions within the same company, Ford is entwining their fates. Ford Model E won’t succeed without the profits and efficiencies created under Ford Blue.
On Wednesday, Ford announced the creation of two separate entities: Ford Model E, focused on electric vehicles and advanced software projects; and Ford Blue, dedicated to the automaker’s much larger and profitable internal combustion engine vehicles. It’s a bold move — one analyst…
Many Americans across this country are experiencing dramatic spikes in their electric heating bills this winter, and you can thank Joe Biden and the DNC for that. Their efforts to shut down major American natural gas projects like the Keystone Pipeline are the most significant factor for your spike in your heating bills this winter.
As usual, DNC policy is created by isolated, sheltered experts in sterile rooms, who never have to live the consequence of the high moral choices they suppose they are making for the rest of us.
The spike in natural gas prices because of Biden’s almost seemingly intentional crippling of American energy independence capacity comes at a time when all of the trillions of dollars this administration has printed is now producing 40-year-high levels of inflation. 80 million people can’t be wrong, can they?
Dems’ tragic climate policy caused skyrocketing energy bills
From nypost.com
2022-02-14 21:47:12
Joe Borelli
Excerpt:
My January electric bill is up about 40% from last year, which itself was about 20% higher than it was in 2020. Before you ask: No, I didn’t invest in any new Christmas lights; nor did I suddenly start mining bitcoin. In fact, my Con Edison bill conveniently points out I used slightly less power this year.
It turns out I am just one of millions of middle-class schlubs in New York whose wallets are lighter this winter thanks to the Democratic Party’s catastrophic climate policy — and my humble 40% increase is nowhere near some of the triple-digit horror stories out there.
If you listen to Con Ed, the spike in your bill is a direct consequence of the rising cost of acquiring natural gas, due to its global supply and demand. The past few months, the commodity price has hovered between $4.00 and $6.00/MMBtu, which are averages we haven’t seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
It would be criminal not to mention that President Joe Biden scrapping…
Moderna Stock Crash: Losses Top $140 Billion As Insiders Sell Millions Of Dollars In Shares
Excerpt:
Shares of Moderna plummeted Monday as Covid-19 vaccine-makers led a turbulent market decline, pushing the stock to its lowest level in nearly a year after disappointing study results and a slew of sales from the firm’s top executives added to concerns that have made one of last year’s top-performing stocks crash more than 70%.
by Ralph Benko
Inflation.
Shame to open 2022 on a downbeat note. Forewarned, however, is forearmed.
Inflation is a greater threat than a regnant China (who might be the rival America has long needed). It’s worse than climate change which some well-respected experts predict will cost the world less than 3% of its GDP, 80 years hence. Not insignificant but not catastrophic.
Alas, both Democrats and Republicans as well as most of our professional economic thought leaders are getting the cause and cure of inflation wrong. And as Mark Twain famously never said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
As for the Donks, the Biden White House’s blaming rising prices on Big Business? Keynes, himself no Keynesian, likely would have been horrified at such economic nonsense.
The young John Maynard Keynes well understood inflation’s bad money basis. In his 1919 breakthrough classic The Economic Consequences of the Peace he wrote, “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction. …”
Wait. It gets worse! The Pachyderms are loonily indicting federal spending as inflationary, ignoring Milton Friedman’s profound (and true) dictum, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. …” Profligacy’s a bad thing. Yet not an inflationary thing.
Inflation is busting out over much of the world, see here, there, and everywhere. So, inflation obviously has nothing to do with U.S. federal government spending. Rather, the Fed, under White House pressure, has been weakening the dollar, the world’s reserve currency. Voilà: inflation.
We need not rely on mere appeals to authority or circumstantial evidence. Politico recently published a resounding vindication of the morally courageous anti-inflationary stance of former regional Fed bank president Thomas Hoenig.
“Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. … Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. … He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system. On all of these points, Hoenig was correct.”
Sadly, our Democratic, Republican and technocratic leaders seem oblivious as to both the cause and historically proven healthy cure for inflation without recession. What is that cure?
Currency reform.
What’s that? One great example is that of Germany after WWII. Germany was a bombed-out ruin, widely believed doomed to poverty pretty much forever. How did West Germany, against all odds and in the face of expert pessimism, become the economic powerhouse of Europe?
The socially-conscious free market Ludwig Erhard, acting against all expert advice, introduced currency reform and abolished price controls. He did so on June 19, 1948. This instantly produced the Wirtschaftswunder, the “German Economic Miracle.”
As Erhard wrote in Prosperity through Competition:
“Jacques Rueff and Andre Piettre, summed up the combination of economic and currency reform thus: ‘Only an eye-witness can give an account of the sudden effect which currency reform had on the size of stocks and the wealth of goods on display. Shops filled up with goods from one day to the next; the factories began to work. On the eve of currency reform the Germans were aimlessly wandering about their towns in search of a few additional items of food. A day later they thought of nothing but producing them. One day apathy was mirrored on their faces while on the next a whole nation looked hopefully into the future.’”
Or as the distinguished (later Fed governor) Henry C. Wallich observed, “The spirit of the country changed overnight. The gray, hungry, dead-looking figures wandering about the streets in their everlasting search for food came to life.'”
Good money is fundamental to equitable prosperity. And, properly understood, it’s really not hard to do.
So, what now? The evidence, most recently compiled by Peter C. Earle and William J. Luther’s superb The Gold Standard: Retrospect and Prospect, is persuasive that restoring the classical gold standard would be the optimal currency reform.
Whether or not one agrees on the gold standard, all signs point the way to subduing inflation, without inducing a recession, lies in currency reform. Sadly, our political class is oblivious.
What to do? Email a link to this column to your congressperson. Then cross your fingers.
Then, if ignored, buckle up for a bout of stagflation and attendant penury. If, against all odds, they listen?
Onward to a golden age!
Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko’s reports — More Here.
by Ralph Benko
There is one, unconventional way to quell inflation without recession; it would save Joe Biden’s presidency. Conventional folk think the gold standard an anachronism.
Think different.
Inflation is putting Biden into desperate political peril. His popularity rating is lower than any modern president (except Trump) at the comparable time in his presidency.
Sending shockwaves through the political class, the Republicans dominate Democrats in the generic poll. I’m not an alarmist. But this scenario is, as it should be, alarming to Democrats.
It’s also alarming to me, a paleoconservative Republican. I, the “second most conservative man in the world” (per a Washington Post columnist), fear that a GOP political hegemony will degenerate into the Republicans’ default country-club Republican policies of mercantilist oligarchy in supply-side drag.
The reversion to Republican mean, ThurstonHowellIIIconomics, “freshen Lovey’s martini Gilligan, chop chop!” Pretty mean!
Mr. President? Go for the gold!
It’s curious. Yet political transformation often comes from the unexpected source.
Nixon’s anti-communist credentials from his congressional days persecuting Soviet gentleman-spy Alger Hiss immunized him to claims of softness on Communism.
Nixon to China!
Welcome to the “Twilight Zone” of politics where the right does the left thing, and the left does the right thing. And everybody grumble-cheers.
It goes both ways. From out of left field, wholesale deregulation was pioneered by President Jimmy Carter.
The big push for dropping the top income tax rate, attributed to Reagan, came from top Democrats: Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., and Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., dropping the top rate from 70% to 50% (Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., voted aye).
Then, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., to 28% (Sen. Joe Biden voting aye). President Bill Clinton gave the capital gains tax rate a whopping cut. (Sen. Joe Biden voted aye.)
Now? Inflation is a dagger at the jugular of the Biden presidency.
What to do that would be safe and effective and dramatic enough to persuade us pesky voters that Biden has a firm grip on ending inflation?
Let’s walk the cat backwards. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shut down the London gold pool, and President Richard M. Nixon, who “temporarily” closed the “gold window,” were the perps letting the inflation genie out of the bottle.
The world monetary order of the prosperous, low inflation, post-war era was constituted by the Bretton Woods Agreement. This was an international gold standard, with a critical flaw.
Making the dollar, as well as gold, the official reserve asset for central banks was a subtle, fatal error. It led to a “melancholy, long, withdrawing” of gold from America’s reserves, plaguing both America and the world.
As foreseen by distinguished French economist Jacques Rueff, mentor of supply-side titan Lewis E. Lehrman (my own mentor), that world monetary order was doomed to a slow death.
On Nixon’s watch, the final nail was driven in.
Nixon, under the insidious influence of his treasury secretary John Connally – a moral bankrupt who died a spectacular literal bankrupt – officially closed the gold window. The pernicious Nixonian system of floating exchange rates today curses us to inequitable economic stagnation.
The fiduciary (paper) dollar is the last remnant of the “Nixon Shock.”
Republicans have proven incapable of unwinding it for very parochial reasons.
The classical gold standard, which had collapsed at the very start of World War I, was falsely indicted for causing the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover a generation later.
It wasn’t the Republicans’ fault.
It was, in the words of Rueff, a grotesque caricature of the gold standard that collapsed, an earlier gold-exchange standard.
Then FDR, under the guidance of the leading commodities economist of his day, George Warren, properly revalued the dollar from $20.67 to $35. The Great Depression lifted immediately and spectacularly. Per Pulitzer Prize-winning Liaquat Ahamed’s definitive account:
“During the following three months, wholesale prices jumped by 45% and stock prices doubled. With prices rising, the real cost of borrowing money plummeted. New orders for heavy machinery soared by 100%, auto sales doubled, and overall industrial production shot up 50%.”
Bad monetary policy by FDR’s Treasury, in which FDR acquiesced, thereafter caused a second dip in the Great Depression. That said, that first prosperity surge points the way out.
Joe Biden has an opportunity to go down in history as equal to or greater than FDR. How?
By convening a new Bretton Woods conference. Just as the late, great Paul Volcker, who quelled inflation in the 1980s, called for.
There, Biden should legally remove the dollar’s (and all currencies) reserve currency status while revaluing the dollar to around $2,000/ounce, or slightly higher, to preempt a worker/debtor damaging deflation such as crushed Britain in 1925.
Thereby, Mr. President, forge a legacy to rival that of FDR’s.
End inflation, restore equitable prosperity; enjoy the popularity and golden age legacy that Bretton Woods II, done right, would bring you.
Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. Read Ralph Benko’s reports — More Here.
by Ralph Benko
Hey la, President Biden?
Remember “The Angels“?
Inflation’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble.
Hey la, hey la, inflation’s back!
Uh oh.
While your administration denied resurging inflation Newsmax was ahead of it. Relying on the work of Prof. Steve Hanke, over six months ago I asked: Will Inflation Be the Sweet Meteor of Political Death for the Biden Administration?
Hanke’s a distinguished monetary economist. Plus: bipartisan!
Former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Director of Obama’s National Economic Policy Council Dr. Larry Summers also sounded the alarm last February, in The Washington Post:
“First… there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”
The Biden White House did not just ignore Summers. It attacked him.
Ryan Lizza, Garrett Ross and Eli Okun recently asked in Newsmax’s scrappy rival, Politico, Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?
“The reaction from the White House was fierce. Top advisers rushed to the cameras to push back. … Privately, White House officials were withering in their attacks on Summers. The White House continued to downplay inflation throughout the spring and summer. … They were wrong.”
An apology? Larry Summers once appeared on the cover of TIME with Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin as “The Committee to Save the World.”
Summers can take care of himself. Rather, President Biden owes it to himself to consider appointing an inflation hawk like Summers Fed Chair. Or, say, Prof. Hanke.
Now the Great Mentioner is mentioning only two candidates, both monetary doves: Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard. Both are honorable, smart and capable.
But doves.
Political handicappers are calling a near lock for Powell. Mr. President?
This is no time for inflation doves.
Biden may confront the fate of presidents injured, even politically crippled, by inflation. Consider the political careers of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, all presiding over inflation, all seeing their presidencies terminated with extreme prejudice.
Coincidence? Not really.
As the first celebrity economist, John Maynard Keynes, wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
“Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
Inflation—felt as rising prices yet really a sinking dollar—is politically lethal. Most politicians mishandle it. It’s that insidious.
President Biden? You are a self-proclaimed champion of capitalism and equity. So, now, pivot to good monetary policy to preempt “all the hidden forces of economic law” from settling “on the side of destruction.”
Do not end up like the hapless Jimmy Carter. As I wrote here in Will President Biden Keep Inflation from Destroying Capitalism:
Carter, in a national address, on October 24, 1978: “Inflation is obviously a serious problem. What is the solution? I do not have all the answers. Nobody does. Perhaps there is no complete and adequate answer.”
Balderdash. Top economists like Friedman and Mundell knew precisely what causes inflation. We then knew and still know the solution.
The charter document for Supply Side economics was the Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis. By far most of it was about monetary policy (noting the advantages of the gold standard for quelling inflation and creating equitable prosperity). The “Laffer Curve” was, literally, a footnote.
Reagan, campaigning on Jack Kemp’s Supply Side platform, beat Carter. Then Reagan embraced a stable dollar, giving Fed Chairman Paul Volcker the support he needed to end inflation.
Thereafter the economy soared, propelling Reagan to a historic 49-state landslide. The Supply Side formula propelled the Dow from 814 to, over time, 36,000+ while doubling America’s real per capita GDP.
To swipe a phrase from Vice President Joe Biden: BFD!
President Biden? To regain the esteem of the American people, ignore the well-intentioned experts who led you astray.
Select an inflation hawk to chair the Federal Reserve. Say… Larry Summers.
Or maybe even a Mundell acolyte: Steve Hanke. Onward to a golden age?
Hey la, hey la, inflation’s back!
Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. Read Ralph Benko’s reports — More Here.
Activist Investors Circle Unilever, Peloton and Kohl’s
From www.nytimes.com
2022-01-24 12:30:05
Excerpt:
Nelson Peltz’s next target
Unilever has faced pressure on multiple fronts for weeks, including pushback from shareholders over its now-abandoned pursuit of GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer business. Now the consumer goods giant must deal with a potentially bigger headache: Trian Partners, the activist investment firm run by Nelson Peltz.
Trian has amassed a significant stake in Unilever, DealBook’s Michael de la Merced reports. It isn’t clear how big the firm’s holdings are, though Trian began buying shares before Unilever’s pursuit of the Glaxo business became public, according to a source.
Unilever has taken fire over strategic missteps. Investors and analysts scorned the $68 billion Glaxo bid, with Unilever’s shares falling sharply after the company said it still wanted to buy the business, despite being rejected three times. And another big Unilever shareholder accused the company of neglecting business fundamentals while overemphasizing its commitment to climate and…
China challenges Britain over Huawei ban – South China Morning Post
From www.scmp.com
2022-01-17 12:48:27
Excerpt:
Israel’s police chief announced on Monday a stricter policy on detaining journalists by officers, requiring the approval of an officer of the rank of Brigadier General or above.
Speaking at a meeting with the Israel Press Council, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said he will act to guarantee journalists are free to cover events and are safe to do so.
Treasury’s Yellen sees ‘much more work’ ahead to narrow racial wealth divide
From www.reuters.com
2022-01-17 10:08:00
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury took key steps over the past year to address longstanding economic injustices facing Americans of color, but still has “much more work” ahead to narrow the racial wealth divide, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday.
Yellen told a meeting hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network rights group that Treasury was working to right economic wrongs called out by slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
“He knew that economic injustice was bound up in the larger injustice he fought against. From Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the present day, our…
Nancy Pelosi thinks politicians using insider knowledge to trade in the markets and turn their 200Kwhatever a year salary into an empire of tens, sometimes hundreds of millions. The Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida allegedly thinks that should also apply to all government officials, not just our elected royalty (which was new to me, but Nancy set me straight).
Allegedly, he has been making some insider trading type trades during the pandemic, which shocks no one that it happened in government during this time.
The only thing that might be shocking is which of the many government grifters would be shaken from the tree as a sacrifice to the rest of the bad apples still hanging over us all from their gilded branches.
Fed Vice Chair Clarida to step down early following scrutiny over his trades during pandemic
From www.cnbc.com
2022-01-10 21:28:44
Excerpt:
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said Monday he will be leaving his post with just a few weeks left on his term and amid revelations regarding his trading of stock funds.
In an announcement released Monday afternoon, Clarida said he will be stepping down from his post this Friday. His term expires on Jan. 31.
The move comes following additional disclosures regarding trades Clarida made in February 2020, around the time when the Fed was getting ready to roll out what eventually would become its most aggressive policy tools ever, in an effort to combat the Covid crisis.
“Rich’s contributions to our monetary policy deliberations, and his leadership of the Fed’s first-ever public review of our monetary policy framework, will leave a lasting impact in the field of central banking,” Fed Chairman Jerome H. Powell said in a statement. “I will miss his wise counsel and vital insights.”
