Lynne Kiesling Like “price gouging”, “windfall profits” is an economic non-concept that rears its ugly head in the political machinations surrounding exogenous economic dislocations like national disasters. Senators Cantwell and Dorgan, who are sensible on some other, electricity-related, energy issues, really get it wrong here. Steve Chapman’s column on the topic points out the economic …
Lynne Kiesling Last week while I was off philosophizing, the Federal Trade Commission released a new report on the factors that influence retail gasoline prices (hat tip to Todd Zywicki). The FTC watches retail gasoline prices carefully, and every spring like clockwork when prices go up and my Senator (that would be Dick Durbin) rails …
Lynne Kiesling Over at Truck and Barter, Kevin has a post on Wal-Mart’s next victims now that they’ve stomped all over the large toy store model. One of the next victims that Forbes names is retail gasoline. Retail gasoline is a natural extension of the Wal-Mart business model. Sourcing the product through a distributed supply …
I wonder if California’s politicians will ever stop externalizing all of the responsibility for their failed electricity restructuring. Now they are moving beyond placing all of blame on Enron and other “greedy, out-of-state, price gouging” power suppliers to Perot Systems, the company that wrote the software to implement California’s failed “market” design and made marketing …
Michael Giberson A story reported by Kim Barker, ProPublica (a version of the story ran in the Washington Post). I’m excerpting several parts of the story, but the whole story is worth a look: The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely …
Gusher of BP Oil-spill Fund Creates “Spillionaires” Read More »
Michael Giberson Complaints about online clothing resellers “preying” on their customers prompted one reseller to open up about the costs of doing business: A reseller friend of mine bought a dress at Anthropologie on first cut sale. The dress originally retailed for $138 and was marked down to $69.95. She listed the dress on eBay …
Michael Giberson Bryan Caplan, in How Wise is Repugnance?, questions Leon Kass’s argument that “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom.” (From Kass’s essay, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”) Kass runs through a list of things that he thinks the reader will accept as obviously repugnant (incest, bestiality, mutilating corpses, cannibalism, and so on) and …
Michael Giberson Free Press columnist Ed Shamy offers “a stroll through The Burlington Free Press archives about gasoline prices,” beginning January 16, 1974, continuing to today: Jan. 16, 1974: Gasoline in short supply in Vermont. Entire communities without a single open filling station. And gasoline is obscenely expensive, an average of 48.7 cents per gallon …
A Longer View of the Retail Gasoline Experience in Vermont Read More »
Lynne Kiesling A few mergers have been in the news recently, including the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger that the U.S. Department of Justice Federal Trade Commission has decided it will challenge. In February I commented that I thought the appropriate market in which both firms compete includes options like Trader Joe’s and community agriculture. Apparently …
The timing cannot be a coincidence … in the wake of two different sets of audio tapes and transcripts from Enron that illustrate quite explicitly how venal their traders were, California’s Attorney General Bill Lockyer has chosen this week to express public outrage at a FERC order issued on May 12, over a month ago. …
The California Refund Process Will Not Go Gracefully Into That Good Night Read More »
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