Tag: finance

One of the country’s most well known antitrust critics, Fiona Scott Morton, happens to be advising two of the biggest tech names in the country, Amazon and Apple, on the side. Morton was labeled a “antitrust crusader” in 2019 by the New Republic. 

Scott Morton has consistently said that tech giants are stifling competition and innovation in the country, but failed to recently disclose relationships with Amazon and Apple in papers she recently co-authored, according to Bloomberg. The papers laid out how the U.S. could bring antitrust cases against both Google and Facebook. 

She claims that she usually discloses conflicts and that lack of disclosure on the papers shouldn’t be an issue because “Apple and Amazon didn’t pay her to write them” and because they “didn’t focus” on either company. She failed to address the obvious, however: that those companies are competitors of both Google and Facebook. 

“I work for companies that I’m comfortable are not breaking the law. So you’re articulating what is making the market work well and how the company’s conduct is pro-competitive or efficient,” she said.

The consulting work she is doing raises obvious ethics questions, especially as antitrust probes are starting to broaden. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are all expected to face significant government scrutiny when they testify July 27 before a House panel.

Scott Morton’s past includes serving for the Justice Department’s anti-trust division from 2011 to 2012. She claims that consulting is “important to her research and teaching” (and wallet) and declined to offer further details about her work. 

George DeMartino, a professor at the University of Denver who specializes in ethic says that Scott Morton “should have disclosed her work for Amazon and Apple in the papers”. American Economic Association principles dictate that “economists disclose real and potential conflicts that might influence their work”.

DeMartino said: “Professionals have a duty to maintain trust, which as we now know is a fragile thing. That requires disclosing any actual conflict of interest or any entanglement that might reasonably be interpreted by others as a conflict.”

Gene Kimmelman, a senior adviser at Public Knowledge, who worked with Scott Morton on the Google and Facebook reports said that “conflicts are rife in the antitrust field”. He defended Scott Morton and said that she disclosed her work to him. “I wish all antitrust economists and lawyers had the level of integrity and consistency in analysis she has demonstrated over and over again,” he said.

He also says he hired an outside lawyer to navigate potential conflicts regarding 10 different advisors he asked for help. Almost all of them had conflicts, he said. “Part of the game is to hire them to prevent your opponents from being able to hire them. It’s a large investment that can pay off enormously.”

Economists are “among the most important” hires for companies facing anti-trust violations, Carl Shapiro, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, said. Google specifically has hired tons of economists, who have cranked out a total of about 330 research papers between 2005 and 2017 that the company supported directly or indirectly. Recipients failed to disclose the funding source in 65% of cases. 

Scott Morton stands out, however, because she has been such a high profile name: she has appeared on panel discussions and has testified in front of congress. Last year she helped pen a paper about the “immense power of tech platforms”. 

And the names funding her have also come under scrutiny. Amazon has specifically been the target of Elizabeth Warren, who Tweeted in 2019: “Giant tech companies have too much power. My plan to #BreakUpBigTech prevents corporations like Amazon from knocking out the rest of the competition. You can be an umpire, or you can be a player — but you can’t be both.”

At the time, Scott Morton retweeted the Tweet and said: “This is the most articulate explanation of this Amazon theory of harm I have heard so far.”

She has since deleted the Tweet. 

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

On March 20, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the FBI was formally investigating whether there were contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We later learned that the alleged basis for this investigation was the Steele Dossier. Since then, we’ve also learned that the information in the Steele Dossier was fake.

The big question now is when did the FBI know that the whole investigation, which severely handicapped Trump’s first term, was baloney?

The answer, based upon newly released documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee, is that by mid-February 2017 Comey knew or should have known that the Steele Dossier was a hoax perpetrated by the Hillary campaign.

To go back a step, we know from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report that the FBI relied upon the Steele Dossier both to spy on Carter Page and to investigate the  Trump campaign. The same report establishes that the FBI’s investigation revealed that Steele’s information came from a source who, in turn, got his information from yet another source. By March 20, when Comey announced that the FBI was looking into the Trump campaign, FBI agents on the ground had already stated that the primary source had no credibility.

What the Horowitz Report did not address was when Comey personally learned about the credibility problem. Comey refused to cooperate with the IG investigation, so Horowitz glossed over Comey’s knowledge or lack thereof. One of the problems (see pp. 370-371 of the report) was that the FBI agents who interviewed the sub-source wrote documents falsely implying that he was reliable, even as their notes said otherwise.

That confusion held Horowitz back from imputing knowledge to Comey. The two newly declassified documents, however, practically cry out that, when Comey announced the Trump investigation, he knew or should have known that it had no basis.

The first document, which is heavily redacted, establishes that the primary source was not (as many speculated) a highly placed Russian. Contacts with the Kremlin would have militated in favor of believing him or her. But when the FBI identified Steele’s primary source, they found that he was not a Russian official, nor was he even based in Russia.  That should have been a huge red flag that there was a problem.

The second document poses an even bigger problem for Comey. On February 14, 2017, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contact With Russian Intelligence.” Peter Strzok, who headed the Trump investigation (aka Operation Crossfire Hurricane), read the article and made notes establishing that the FBI had no basis for investigating Trump. Sharyl Attkisson quoted the notes:

Claim in NYT article: “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”

Note by Strzok: “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians (both Governmental and non-Governmental)” and “There is no known intel affiliation, and little if any [government of Russia] affiliation[.] FBI investigation has shown past contact between [Trump campaign volunteer Carter] Page and the SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation], but not during his association with the Trump campaign.”

[snip]

Claim in NYT article: “Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, and how many of Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians.”

Note by Strzok: “Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intel officials” and “Our coverage has not revealed contact between Russian intelligence officers and the Trump team.”

[snip]

Claim by NYT: “Senior FBI officials believe … Christopher Steele … has a credible track record.”

Note by Strzok: “Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of subsource network.”

The FBI’s decision to investigate a duly elected president was arguably the most consequential investigation the FBI has ever undertaken. The man leading the investigation, who was only two levels below Director Comey, wrote notes that strongly imply that, five weeks before Comey announced the investigation (and after the FBI had engaged in months of intensive work), the FBI had nothing.

These documents make it more likely than not that Comey knew that the investigation was baseless. If he did know, and he nevertheless continued the investigation and publicly announced it, thereby deliberately and severely damaging a duly elected president, what he did was nothing less than sedition.

The fact that Comey still walks free is a troubling indication that it’s business as usual in the Swamp. When swamp rats who support Democrats break the law, they go free.

America’s energy dominance could be coming to an end as the country’s shale industry is experiencing steep production declines. Rarely do we hear President Trump these days touting shale jobs and production output, mostly because the industry has entered a bust cycle.

Matt Gallagher, CEO of Parsley Energy, a top 20 producer in Texas, spoke recently with the Financial Times and said crude output of 12 or 13 million barrels per day is over: 

“I don’t think I’ll see 13m [barrels a day] again in my lifetime. 

“It is really dejecting, because drilling our first well in 2009 we saw the wave of energy independence at our fingertips for the US, and it was very rewarding . . . to be a part of it,” Gallagher,37, said. 

Us Crude Oil Production 

The shale bust of 2020 is an ominous sign of America’s energy dominance is over. Crude output will continue to wane this year and likely into next. The lack of shale profitability, mainly due to West Texas Intermediate (WTI) prices sub-$40 per barrel won’t be enough for highly indebted shale companies to survive.  

We’ve pointed out the shale industry could be on the verge of destruction due to the sharp decline in demand and plummeting energy prices brought on by coronavirus pandemic. So far, bankruptcies in the shale patch are accelerating to levels not seen since the first half of 2016. 

Another significant driver of lower production levels is a halving of rig counts due to collapsing price and demand; rigs dropped from 539 in mid-March to 258 last week.

“Tight oil production will decline by 50% by this time next year. As a result, US oil production will fall from to less than eight mmb/d by mid-2021,” we noted via Arthur Berman via OilPrice.com.

The combination of the Saudi-Russia oil price war and the virus pandemic has been nothing but disastrous for shale companies. These two factors forced Gallagher earlier this year to shut down wells and slash spending. 

He said the recent oil-price crash was “hands down” the worst ever. In April, WTI prices dove below the zero mark for the first time in history due to oversupplied conditions triggered by virus-related lockdowns. 

WTI May contracts dove into negative territory in April. 

Gallagher said car and air travel demand has slumped – which could result in oil production stabilizing around 11 million barrels per day. He said producers would focus on maintaining output, not increasing it.

Gallagher concluded the interview by saying hundreds of thousands of jobs depend on the shale industry, adding that activity levels for the industry will be “dramatically lower for a long time.” 

Slumping crude production is more bad news for the stock market… 

Contrary to Larry Kudlow’s constant touting of a “V-shaped” recovery – this is more bad news that deep economic scarring from the virus pandemic will result in years of high unemployment and sub-par economic growth. And it now appears shale has lost its energy dominance in the world. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

As businesses, agencies and organizations recalibrate to the reality that the V-shaped recovery was nothing but a brief fantasy, 6 million additional jobs lost may be a best-case scenario rather than the worst-case scenario.

It is somewhat less than reassuring that the “official” unemployment rate of around 12% is roughly half of the “real-world” unemployment rate. As always in the wonderful world of statistics, especially politically potent ones, it depends on what you measure, what you don’t measure / act as if it doesn’t exist, and how you measure what you do measure.

Everyone who digs beneath the headline numbers of employment / unemployment soon discovers a number of jarring anomalies in what the media presents as “factual statistics.”

The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t actually count the number of people who are employed / unemployed; they rely on a sampling survey of employers, which is more like an election poll than an actual measurement.

Secondly, they estimate the number of new businesses which are “born” and existing businesses that “die”, and then guesstimate the number of additional employees this real-time churn generates. This birth/death model is notoriously inaccurate, as it ignores little things like pandemics and is often magically revised to create or eliminate hundreds of thousands of presumed jobs.

State unemployment offices tabulate the number of unemployment claims received and processed. These are real numbers, not guesses like the BLS estimates. Wolf Richter prepared a chart of the real unemployment claims numbers which is reprinted below, from his post 32 Million People on State & Federal Unemployment, 2nd Highest Ever: Week 17 of U.S. Labor Market Collapse.

The BLS reported that the U.S. employed workforce stood at about 152 million in February. With 32 million claiming unemployment, that’s an unemployment rate of 21%. How do we arrive at a 12% unemployment rate? We ignore the 14.3 million contract / gig workers who are currently drawing emergency Federal unemployment via Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA),and the 936,000 in the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program.

But even the 21% real-world unemployment rate doesn’t reflect the full unemployment picture: previously full-time workers who have had their hours cut to part-time aren’t counted in unemployment statistics, even though their employment status has changed for the worse. 

Then there are the millions of workers who were recalled to work as businesses re-opened whose employment is up in the air as the expected return-to-normal has failed to materialize.

An entire class of workers has been glossed over: small business owners who have closed their businesses. Those owners who incorporated and paid unemployment insurance on themselves as employees of the corporation qualify for unemployment, but many small business owners didn’t pay themselves as employees, and their status is uncertain.

Anecdotally, the number of small business owners who have decided to close in recent weeks appears to be significant, as the hoped-for V-shaped recovery failed to materialize even as states re-opened. This trend could gather momentum as hope decays into realistic assessment and funds borrowed from emergency federal programs (PPP) run out.

The number of employees who will be laid off again as a rising flood of small businesses throw in the towel could quickly become consequential.

Barring an immediate additional influsion of federal stimulus, local governments will also start laying off temp and contract workers as tax revenues continue their downward spiral.

As Corporate America’s revenues falter, the only ways to reduce costs are 1) dump leases on commercial space and 2) lay off employees and 3) slash spending to the bone. All of these end up triggering layoffs.

Could the number of unemployed rise to 38 million from 32 million, a 25% rate of unemployment? As businesses, agencies and organizations recalibrate to the reality that the V-shaped recovery was nothing but a brief fantasy, 6 million additional jobs lost may be a best-case scenario rather than a worst-case scenario.

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A San Diego yoga instructor who refused to wear a mask in Starbucks says she plans to sue a barista who wouldn’t serve her.

Amber Lynn Gilles took to Facebook earlier this month in a now-deleted entry, posting a photo of the barista, Lenin Gutierrez – complaining that he “refused to serve me cause I’m not wearing a mask. Next time I will wait for cops and bring a medical exemption.”

After Gilles’ post went viral, Orange County resident Matt Cowan started a GoFundMe – which received over $100,000 in donations.

And Gilles wants half of it.

“It was discrimination and everybody is OK with it and enabling and rewarding that behavior,” she said, adding that she has medical conditions which prevent her from wearing a mask. “One of them I get shortness of breath, dizziness and it messes with the heartbeat. And I do have asthma as well, and I do get mask-acne. So there’s several things going on and not only that but it doesn’t even work.”

She provided KGTV with two documents to prove her medical exemption. One is a pelvic exam from 2015 with results that say “probable exophytic fibroid arising from the anterior wall of the uterus measuring 2.9 cm size,” and “simple 2.5 cm left ovarian cyst.” A second piece of paper is a handwritten note with letterhead from a San Diego chiropractor who she asked not be named. The handwritten note reads “Amber has underlying breath conditions that prevent her from wearing a mask or any type of facial covering whatsoever. Please contact me if have any questions.”

When that chiropractor who wrote the note was called, he said he could not discuss her situation. When Gilles was asked why a chiropractor gave her a breathing-related medical exemption, she responded “because they are dedicated to providing non-invasive personalized care and treatment. They are real doctors.” –WTVR

When asked if she wanted to apologize or had a message for the public, Gilles – who’s been labeled a “Karen,” said “No absolutely not. I feel like I need the apology. I’ve been discriminated against, I’m the one who’s sick.”

Gilles says she’s too broke to sue right now, and has set up a GoFundMe to raise money for ‘expensive’ lawyers.

Authored by Maria Copeland via Campus Reform,

A mental health app circulated by colleges recommends allying with efforts toward antiracism for users with anxiety. 

Sanvello, a service marketed as the “#1 app for stress, anxiety, and depression with over 3 million users,” offers therapies for dealing with mental health stress, including tools for coaching, peer support, and self-care. Users receive premium access to the app free of charge for the duration of the pandemic.

The website for the app recently published a blog article titled “Anxiety over racism: A path towards peace” which encourages readers to work through their anxiety and choose to be active against racism, in a piece listed under the same category as articles providing tips for managing anxiety attacks and handling flight anxiety. 

“If you’re white, approaching the process of unraveling racism may seem foreboding, yet discomfort (and there will be some) does not dismiss the necessity of the work,” author Roxane Battle writes.

“To be sure, there will be bumps in the road ahead. Mistakes will be made. But the fear of saying the wrong thing or not getting it exactly right should not deter. It’s part of the process. As many a scraped knee can attest, we have to keep climbing back on [the] bike until we all learn to ride.”

Allyship, Battle writes, “is a pathway forward, a path towards peace.”

The Sanvello app has been endorsed by universities across America. 

The University of Missouri-St. Louis promoted Sanvello as a resource for dealing with stressful situations. 

“It helps people gain more mindfulness around their mental health and well-being,” the associate vice provost for Student Affairs at UMSL commented.

“The great thing is that it’s customizable and really specific to different circumstances. Before you give a presentation in class, you can listen to a 10-minute meditation on being mindful about how you’re going to present yourself. There’s also one for flying. People can gain some valuable skills if they get into the app and really immerse themselves in it.”

Pepperdine University and Southwest Tennessee Community College advertise Sanvello in conjunction with other COVID-19 resources, while Brigham Young University,  Syracuse University, Texas A&M University, the University of Maine-Machias, the University of Missouri System, and the University of Washington-Seattle recommend Sanvello as part of their student wellness services. 

When discussing an initiative to improve mental health resources for students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, co-chair Kathryn Brewer said the university was seeking to update its services and develop new strategies — which specifically included the addition of Sanvello. 

“These initiatives will save lives,” Brewer said.

A wealthy St. Louis couple who made headlines last month for displaying firearms in front of their home as a group of BLM activists marched towards the Mayor’s house will be charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon, and face a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.

St. Louis’ top prosecutor, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, announced on Monday that she would be filing charges against personal injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey.

A St. Louis couple defends their home with guns as protesters march through their neighborhood:pic.twitter.com/LqzvrBSREu

— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) June 29, 2020

“It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner — that is unlawful in the city of St. Louis,” Gardner said in a statement, adding that she was recommending community service in lieu of up to four years in prison, according to Politico.

The McCloskey’s defenders – including several GOP leaders, President Trump and  others have urged Attorney General William Barr to investigate Gardner – while Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said in a Friday radio interview that he would likely pardon the McCloskeys if they were charged and convicted.

Gardner responded by suggesting that Trump and other McCloskey defenders are attacking her to distract from “their failed approach to the COVID-19 pandemic” along with other issues, per Politico.

St. Louis, like many cities across the country, has seen demonstrations in the weeks since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, and the McCloskeys’ home was initially incidental to the demonstration on June 28. Several hundred people were marching to the home of Democratic Mayor Lyda Krewson, a few blocks from the McCloskeys’ home. Krewson had angered activists by reading on Facebook Live the names and addresses of some who had called for defunding police.

The McCloskeys live on a private street called Portland Place. A police report said the couple heard a loud commotion and saw a large group of people break an iron gate marked with “No Trespassing” and “Private Street” signs. A protest leader, the Rev. Darryl Gray, said the gate was open and that protesters didn’t damage it. –Politico

The McCloskeys have repeatedly said they were defending themselves as tensions have flared during destructive and violent BLM riots across the country.

Less than two weeks ago, St. Louis authorities raided the McCloskey residence, confiscating the AR-15 used by Mark McCloskey. The couple said their attorney was in possession of the pistol Patricia McCloskey brandished during the confrontation.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

On the day on which Dominion Energy and Duke Energy canceled the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, Dominion Energy said it would be selling substantially all of its gas transmission and storage assets to an affiliate of Berkshire Hathaway.  For Dominion Energy, the nearly US$10-billion deal, including debt assumption, is part of the company’s push to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050.    

For Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, it was the first major acquisition since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and the biggest acquisition in four years.  

While there are growing calls from environmentalists that natural gas should follow coal’s fate and start being dumped from power generation because it’s not as clean as the ‘cleaner-than-coal bridge fuel toward renewables’ narrative would like us to think, Warren Buffett is unfazed. 

Buffett is looking at the asset the way he has always done with his investments – buy cheap assets that very few others are willing to buy. And betting that these assets will deliver returns. 

Buffett’s bet on natural gas comes at a time when U.S. natural gas prices slumped to a 25-year-low, while natural gas is set to continue to dominate utility-scale electricity generation for years to come. 

In 2019, natural gas accounted for 38 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the United States, followed by coal with 23 percent, nuclear with 20 percent, and renewables including hydroelectric with 17 percent, according to EIA data.  

Natural gas continues to displace coal-fired electricity generation, and so do wind and solar, but still, natural gas is expected to be the biggest source of power generation over the next few years. 

Buffett’s US$10-billion bet on natural gas infrastructure shows that the billionaire investor believes that natural gas hasn’t run its course, regardless of what environmentalists and climate-conscious investors think. 

Berkshire Hathaway Energy is buying Dominion Energy’s assets that include over 7,700 miles of natural gas transmission lines, 900 billion cubic feet of operated natural gas storage with 364 billion cubic feet of company-owned working storage capacity, and 25 percent in the Cove Point LNG export, import, and storage facility in Maryland. 

“We are very proud to be adding such a great portfolio of natural gas assets to our already strong energy business,” Buffett said in a statement. 

Berkshire Hathaway Energy will thus own 18 percent of all interstate natural gas transmission in the United States, up from 8 percent now, according to CNBC. 

The fact that this acquisition was the first one that Buffett saw as attractive after the pandemic sent markets into turmoil in March suggests that the Omaha investor believes in the future of natural gas. 

That’s despite growing calls from environmentalists that the world should be moving away from it as it is just another fossil fuel and not a “bridge fuel” as natural gas producers and traders pitch it. 

Buffett’s natural gas assets acquisition is “a bet that the future doesn’t come as fast as some people think,” Jim Shanahan, an analyst who covers Berkshire Hathaway at Edward Jones, told Bloomberg. 

Warren Buffett’s fortune is the world’s third-biggest with links to significant levels of greenhouse gas emissions, after the Koch family in the U.S. and the House of Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, according to Bloomberg Green estimates.  

Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, for its part, pointed out to Bloomberg that Berkshire Hathaway had made some bad calls on fossil fuel investments in the past.  

Sierra Club, together with Earthjustice, published a report this month, saying that buildings account for nearly 40 percent of climate pollution in the United States, with much of that driven by the burning of gas for heating and hot water. The report refutes the idea that fossil gas alternatives are a viable alternative to building electrification. 

Amid the increased environmental awareness toward natural gas, Warren Buffett looks at cheap assets with potential for good returns, and his first investment since the COVID-19 crisis suggests that he believes that natural gas will continue to be a dominant energy source in the United States. 

If readers on the U.S. East Coast have stepped outside today, whoa! The heat is unbearable, especially in New York City. 

At the moment, 70 million Americans from Maine to South Carolina are roasting in a massive heat dome, reported Accuweather. The result of the heatwave has been a significant spike in energy demand from residential and commercial structures. 

AccuWeather shows temperatures across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Rust Belt are registering between 90F and 100F. 

New York’s Central Park hit 92F in the early afternoon hours Monday and could rise to the mid/high 90s by late afternoon. The heat index in New Jersey could soon hit 110F and be around 108F in Washington, D.C. 

Bloomberg reports the heat dome has pressured energy grids in the Northeast, resulting in a massive surge in energy demand. Shown below, New York City electricity demand surged to the highest level in seven years on Monday.

Matt Rogers, president of the Commodity Weather Group LLC., said eastern parts of PJM Interconnection LLC. (from Chicago to Washington) are expected to see spiking energy demand as residential and commercial structures turn thermostats lower to stay cool on Monday. 

Jim Rouiller, the lead meteorologist at the Energy Weather Group LLC., said population-weighted cooling degree days, the measurement of energy demand that it takes to cool a structure, could register the highest energy demand for July since the 1950s. 

Meteorologist Brian Hurley at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center said record-high temperatures for the date on Sunday were recorded in eight cities, including Washington at Dulles International Airport; Richmond, Virginia; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Plattsburgh, New York. 

Hurley said Norfolk, Virginia, hit 101F on Sunday, which is an anomaly considering the metro area is situated on the ocean.

Rouiller said above-normal temperatures are expected to continue in the Northeast through the first week of August. 

“The risk is there for renewed heatwave episodes continuing well into August,” he said. 

Rouiller warned this summer could be one of the hottest in two decades. 

Senior editor, Ash Bennington, hosts managing editor, Ed Harrison, to analyze the economic news of the day. Ed and Ash examine the recent jobs figures, and Ed describes why he believes the current jobless claims may be significantly underreported. They also discuss gold, and analyze ongoing progress of the EU recovery deal. In the intro, Jack Farley places in context recent movements in the dollar, yen, and euro.