Kevin Duffy on investing in energy stocks

You have to be willing to be politically incorrect.  It takes a certain amount of courage to do that, and most people aren’t wired that way.  The green energy lobby has basically been trying to put fossil fuels out of business, but that’s the type of industry that interests me.  Oil and gas companies provide a vital commodity in which supply is severely constrained by ideology and politics.  Reality is starting to sink in that we can’t just cancel fossil fuels and that this was always a delusion.  So even though many commodity prices will go down, energy prices should be a lot stickier.

~ Kevin Duffy, "We're Dealing With a Very Different Animal," The Market, July 18, 2022

Genevieve Roch-Decter: "those stimmies weren't free and the bill is coming due"

Pandemic led to lockdowns.  Lockdowns led to stimmies.  Stimmies led to inflated asset prices.  Inflated asset prices led to irrational exuberance.  Irrational exuberance leads to stock market crashes. 

Those stimmies weren't free and the bill is coming due. 

~ Genevieve Roch-Decter, tweet, September 28, 2022

President Biden brags about stock market hitting record highs (2022)

The stock market—the last guy's measure of everything—is about 20% higher than it was when my predecessor was there.  It has hit record after record after record on my watch, while making things more equitable for working class people.

~ President Joe Biden, January 7, 2022

(Video tweeted by ABC News on that day.)

Tom Woods on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline attack

Our ruling class will not stop making catastrophic decisions.  Destroying society over Covid is now no longer their primary idiocy.  Now it's risking nuclear war, without so much as a thought of negotiation or diplomacy, as normal people would be pursuing right now. 

I agree with Dr. Pierre Kory from episode #2209 of the Tom Woods Show: I am not jumping on any bandwagon, or putting some mob-demanded emoji on my social media, ever, unless I have thoroughly investigated the situation and decided it is not yet another psyop being played on me by psychotics. 

So now we've learned of a terrorist attack, almost surely state-led, on the Nord Stream pipelines. 

Our CIA-run newspapers (no, they aren't literally run by the CIA, but if they were, how would they be any different?) of course rushed to blame the pipeline destruction on Russia, which has precisely zero motivation to do such a thing.  If they wanted to impede the movement of natural gas from Russia to other European countries, couldn't they just turn the pipelines off rather than destroy a $20 billion project? 

Meanwhile, we have footage of Joe Biden and creepy Victoria Nuland -- Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, an unnecessary office if there ever was one -- assuring the world at the beginning of 2022 that if Russia were to invade Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 would not go forward. 

For that matter, Der Spiegel ran this headline: "CIA warns German government against attack on Baltic Sea pipelines."  And Radek Sikorski, a member of the European Parliament who chairs the delegation that deals with relations with the United States, responded to the news of the pipeline blowing up by saying: "Thank you, USA." (At the same time, the Ron Paul Institute's Daniel McAdams notes that Sikorski could be distracting attention from the actions of his own government.) 

Do we know for certain what happened? Of course not. But we know this: it's now far easier to keep European countries in line that might otherwise have broken ranks to seek energy supplies in the face of the extremely challenging winter that's on the horizon.

~ Tom Woods, September 28, 2022

James Freeman on poor performance at Calpers due to political activism

There is no such thing as a free lunch.  Activists who think they can use public companies to pursue political agendas without endangering shareholder returns are indulging in a fantasy.  Disappointing results at a giant government pension fund cannot all be tied to political agendas, but the retired workers who rely on Calpers have every right to demand that fund managers adopt a singular focus on maximizing returns. 

[...]

Let’s hope Calpers finally gets it, and a good fresh start would include a determination to urge portfolio companies to simply pursue profits, not politics.  For years, the big fund has been fairly active in pursuing the latter, despite early red flags.

~ James Freeman, "An ESG Champion Stumbles," WSJ, September 28, 2022

Benjamin on stock market forecasts

If I have noticed anything over these past 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what's going to happen in the stock market.

~ Benjamin Graham

Peter Thiel endorses Alex Epstein's book 'Fossil Future'

The climate debate ignores the reasons we burn fossil fuels in the first place.  Alex Epstein reminds us that rich countries may be able to treat green lifestyles as luxury fashion, but for much of the world reliable energy is a matter of life and death.

~ Peter Thiel