I Love This Country -- Nothing About The Bakken -- March 12, 2016

I'm sure folks from around the world would say the same thing about their country. I'm sure things in France, and Thailand, and Kenya, and Canada and Saudi Arabia are all just as wonderful for their citizens as the US is for their citizens.

But I love this country. 

Listening to conservative talk radio can be depressing and watching the liberal talk shows on evening television (which I can only do when traveling and then by accident while surfing to find "Criminal Minds") is even more depressing, so it's so wonderful to have the weekends free to read so much other good news.

Sticking to mostly business news, I absolutely love The Wall Street Journal. Today, here are just some examples of the wonderful and not so wonderful things happening in the business world in the US.

These are some of my thoughts on some of the articles in today's (Saturday) edition. These do no include the stories already linked in earlier posts.

It looks like Instacart may not last long. The headwinds:

• Amazon
• Amazon
• Amazon
• ObamaCare
• NLRB
• high cost for the subscriber

Porsche posted record earnings on Friday but warned things may not be quite as good in the future. The company continues to shoot for 15% profit margin but increased costs due to developing EV-luxury cars will be expensive. Tesla and Porsche (among others) need to team up on compatible charging stations.

This really caught my eye. For decades, Hachette Book Group in a licensing agreement with HarperCollins has mass-produced To Kill A Mockingbird has marketed an inexpensive edition for middle school students, about $9.00 / paperback. That agreement will end on April 25, and middle school students will now be paying a minimum of $14.99 for a "trade" paperback. Of course, the teachers won't know this because most of them don't read The Wall Street Journal or other business magazines/newspapers that might have carried the story. One word: greed. I don't know the details, but I remember the Justice Department stomping on Apple in its efforts to bring down the price of books.

In tennis (yes, The Wall Street Journal has a sports page, "there are no tears shed for Sharapova." She was caught using a banned substance; she says she did not know that it had been banned. She has as much credibility in my mind as that bicycle rider whose name I've now forgotten. She said her family doctor -- yes, her family doctor -- not her sports physician or an internist or a specialist but her "family doctor" recommended it because of "recurring illnesses, low magnesium, irregular electrocardiogram results and a family history of diabetes." I'm beginning to think millionaire athletes use "family physician" as a euphemism for their drug dealer; these guys and gals are so rich, they don't see "family physicians"; they see specialists, highly paid specialists.

Low magnesium is a hallmark of a bulemic, and low magnesium leads to irregular electrocardiograms. A "family history of diabetes" is a load of crap in justifying this particular drug.

The best quote from the article: "You just don't expect high-level athletes at the top of many different sports to have heart conditions. If you're taking a prescription drug that you don't actually need for what it's giving you, then it's wrong. She played a Grand Slam with a performance-enhancing drug -- there's not too many ways you can talk your way out of that. It's pretty tough to ask the [other] players to be sympathetic."

So, she played a Grand Slam despite an abnormal heart. 

This is what got me to thinking about this post in the first place: Amazon's Echo is gaining traction. I've been following the talk about the Echo over at Macrumors and elsewhere. I did not know whether those stories had any legitimacy but now that I see this in The Wall Street Journal, something tells me Jeff Bezos has another winner.

Negative interest rates hurting banks in Europe? Perhaps not. The ECB woke up to the "bank-profit nightmare" and has taken steps to prevent problems for the banks because of negative interest rates. With that safety net in place, it looks like there is no limit to how negative negative interest rates can go. I'm going to wait until VW pays me to "buy" one of their cars. From the article this was news to me and important, regarding negative interest rates in Europe: "Banks cannot pass negative rates to retail depositors because they fear cash will leave, or in some countries because they aren't allowed to by law." So, even with negative interest rates, your European money market account won't be less than it was a year earlier. LOL. Someone is paying for this, and I doubt it's the banks.

Angela Merkel's  approval ratings are in free fall over the immigration issue.

One wonders if the downturn in China this year, will be more than offset by the coming boom in Cuba. President Obama is going to leave office on a huge note once all those deals in Cuba are announced. This is the western hemisphere's equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down, and unlike the Western Germans who had to pay for that "revolution," the US is not going to be paying for the Cuban boom.

the EPA wants to control water in the west but in the eastern cities, the EPA's attitude toward drinking water: "just safe enough will do."

The one thing I do agree with this week with regard to President Obama: there was no need for him to attend the funeral.