Parting Shot -- Or Perhaps, Better, "A Parthian Shot" -- Monday, March 8, 2021

A week before the devastating, crippling unfavorable event in Texas just last month (February, 2021), no one predicted how severe it turned out to be. 

And yet we know to the tenth of a degree how much warmer the earth will be one hundred years from now. 

Link here. 

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No Dog In This Fight.

Link here. 

After seventeen years, the story is almost Biblical in time span. 

Backstory, from Forbes, October 3, 2019, or how long does one carry a grudge?

The US government announced yesterday a 25% tariff on all single malt Scotch whisky imports, as part of a wider set of tariffs aiming to punish the European Union.

Taking effect October 18th, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office released a list of hundreds of goods that will get hit hard beyond whisky. It includes Parmesan cheese from Italy, olives from France and Spain, wool clothing from the U.K, and European aircraft. The overall list covers approximately $7.5bn of goods.

So why is this happening? It all has to do with planes, rather than the tariffs that the E.U. had placed on Bourbon in 2018 (which in turn were initially placed because of U.S. tariffs on E.U. tariffs). This latest round is the result of a dispute that originally began in 2004, when the U.S. complained to the World Trade Organization about the subsidies the E.U. was providing to Airbus for the development of its A380 and A350 planes, to the detriment of Boeing. The case has been rolling ever since, and has now escalated following a WTO ruling issued yesterday as global trade wars between the Trump administration and the rest of the world heat up.

It certainly is a major piece of bad news for the Scotch whisky industry, as the U.S. is its largest market. Overall Scotch whisky exports to the US last year were worth $1.3bn, accounting for over a fifth of total global exports by value. The U.S. single malt market itself is worth $463 million dollars, over a third of the entire global market for Scotch single malt.

We have a huge liquor store with probably the biggest and best Scotch selection in the world about ten minutes, by bicycle, down the road from us. I haven't visited that store in, what? Maybe a year? 

But this week, I'm going there to price some Scotch whiskies, won't buy any, and then two weeks later, will go back and check the prices again. 

My hunch: the prices will remain unchanged. The store is a "discounter" so it will drop prices if it can but my hunch is that demand will keep prices unchanged. 

For the past several years I have bought a gift box of "special" Scotch -- you know, the Christmas Scotch that comes in a big wooden box with a couple of nice Scotch glasses -- and have never opened them. I now have at least seven such gift boxes. My plan is to start enjoying Scotch again, on my 90th birthday. I figure by then, the harmful effects of alcohol will be the least of my worries. Let's see, that's about twenty more gift boxes of Scotch. LOL. 

Also, if oil gets back to $150/bbl, I will sell a few shares of CVX and buy a $2,300 bottle of Scotch and see if it's really that much better than the $55 Scotch that I used to buy.

I guess I better put in the disclaimer now that I've mentioned CVX:

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