The Economy

Pioneer produces 350,000 barrels a day. Global demand for oil is more than 100 MILLION barrels a day.

Whatever conversations he was having, or whatever attempts he was making to try to sell the product his company produces to people voluntarily for the highest price he could possibly get (the horror, imprison him!) he actually had zero chance of having any affect on the price of oil in what is a global market.

But indeed. Anyone who "conspires" (boogity boogity) to sell a product to people who voluntarily buy it (without any coercion involved, just voluntary exchange the way actual free societies operate) for a higher price than populist opinion has decided is "fair" should go to prison.

But not everyone, actually. When it involves the rest of us. ... who run a business or our personal life in a way that tries to maximize what we freely earn for anything, we should definitely NOT be imprisoned.

Leave a job because you can earn more somewhere else (voluntarily). ... and you definitely should NOT go to prison for being unfair to your old boss. Find someone who will voluntarily pay you more for your home than everyone else thinks is fair and we should definitely not lock you up and throw away the key. Cause that's different.

The fact that this crap becomes populist fodder and we have an FTC that lords over everyone's economic lives with this nonsense, to the point where they needed to apologize profusely like they did something wrong or immoral to get their merger to go through (at a cost to all of us), does so much harm to us. It actually makes everything more costly.

 

Not even a good attempt at snark. ... He wasn't stealing from anyone, and certainly from the other "monopoly" players, so your post made no sense. He was trying to get them to team up with him if any of what the FTC says is true (it often isn't since Lina Khan took over; she keeps getting laughed out of court while all of us pay for what she has been doing with higher prices), not steal from them.

And like I said, FWIW. ... a company that produces 350,000 barrels of oil a day in a market that sells more than 100 million barrels a day is not playing Monopoly anyhow. It's why even though the rank populism ropes people, it's particularly absurd.

 

https://www.profstonge.com/p/killing-the-golden-goose-millennials

Rattling off the numbers, for Americans born in 1951 -- that's baby boomers -- fully 80% were earning more than their parents. By Gen X that was down to 60%. For Millennials it's barely 50%. We can only imagine what's coming for the Zoomers.

 

Rob Kaplan Rejoins Goldman Sachs as Vice Chairman and Member of the Management Committee

That's Robert Kaplan, who used to be the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, where he was given immense power over our lives to rig financial markets to benefit politicians and fuck us all. In his case, though, it went beyond that, because when the Fed went batshit crazy monetizing debt during the pandemic so that Congress could spend like drunken sailors, Kaplan -- WHILE he was president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank -- made like Raj Rajaratnam sitting on insider information and was executing million dollar trades to front run what he and the Fed was about to do to rig the mortgage-backed securities market, in order to line his own pockets.

The unfortunate reality was that even though he got caught (and quietly resigned a year later), most Americans have no idea what the Federal Reserve does (and just how much it harms their economic lives) or who is on the board, so the Fed swept the corruption under the rug, did an "investigation," and the corruption goes on.

Good for Goldman Sachs. His rolodex will make them lots of guaranteed money at the expense of the rest of us.