Lynne Kiesling A reading recommendation, especially for those of you in the mid-Atlantic interested in business and energy commentary: Jay Hancock’s blog at the Baltimore Sun. Jay has lots of trenchant insights into local and national business and economic events.
Lynne Kiesling I am on a plane all day today, flying to England for a few days of holiday before proceeding to Stockholm for the Mont Pelerin Society annual meeting. My main activity for the flight is to work on my course prep for my new freshman seminar this fall, entitled “Adam Smith and the …
Lynne Kiesling I really appreciated this Wall Street Journal article on how Whole Foods is adapting its corporate strategy to the current economic downturn. Their direction: shift away from a gourmet/”Whole Paycheck” focus and toward “healthy eating”. Founder and CEO John Mackey sees this adaptation as a movement in focus back toward his original commercial …
Evolving Competition: Whole Foods, Costco, Trader Joe’s Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In a Cnet Green Tech article, Martin LaMonica points to some developments in an area that I’ve been pushing on for years: the potential consumer value creation from bundling residential electricity service with home security services. The potential for such bundling is one example of why I argue so emphatically for retail competition: …
Home Energy Management and Home Security Product Bundling Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve had several conversations with people my age and younger who work in the electricity end-use technology space in which we use a particular shorthand for the change in culture and mindset that we want to see happen in the retail electricity industry: “there’s an app for that.” In our conversations it’s shorthand …
Michael Giberson From Fortune-Investor Daily: If Congress or the CFTC forces through stiff curbs on futures trading by so-called “speculators” — i.e. investors who use futures to bet on future price movements but don’t buy actual oil — it may lead to higher, not lower, oil prices over the long term. Why? Imagine you’re an …
Keeping Some Speculators out of the Oil Market May Lead to Higher Oil Prices Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Last week Newsweek had an article on smart grid investments and projects that provides a good overview, focusing on the newly-funded Department of Energy demonstration projects. Many of you will already know more about these than the details provide in the article, but it’s a good overview if you don’t.
Lynne Kiesling I’m at a NIST smart grid workshop, where the objective is to take the identified, prioritized smart grid interoperability standards requirements and start working on the game plan for developing interoperability standards out of them. Toby Considine sat next to me yesterday morning and wrote about his observations, so I’ll spare you mine, …
Michael Giberson High frequency trading practices by some financial firms have spilled into the news. The Economist provides a summary of the issue. Bloomberg notes the Sen. Charles Schumer has proposed to ban one such trading strategy. Here, Tyler Cowen said he is not worred about high frequency trading (HFT). In a follow-up, he said: …
We Can “Cure” High Frequency Trading, but is It Really a Public Policy Problem? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler notes that someone is purifying, bottling, and selling New York City tap water, at a price lower than competitors. He then observes “I suspect this will seem odder to you, the older you are.” I have never understood why so many people find the idea of selling bottled …
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