Notes
KEDM summary
Stocks to watch:
- $FRTT: gold producer (miner?); a spin-off
- Technip Industries ($TE) is a forced exit play,
- $FSP has a lot of insiders buying,
- $COTY same,
- $BW same,
- $CNDT same,
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$SPOK, cluster buy, has momentum.
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$ELVT on buybacks,
- $WRLD has buybacks and insiders buying,
- Coinbase IPOing: shorting this works as a hedge against crypto assets,
- $IMCND: an Israeli cannabis name!
- $IPL in Canada has some action relating to hostile takeover by Brookfield.
I have not researched any of these. The list is really for me to take a look at tomorrow.
Successful policies
It’s really almost impossible to reverse a policy which had the effect of giving members of an easily identified group of individuals free stuff, especially if this group can be reached and organized and weaponized by a political faction. Especially if this group is regarded by wider society as deserving. One example is cancer sufferers who were denied treatment with Herceptin by NICE, which decided that its clinical benefits were marginal. This really is the ratchet of government action. It’s partially our instinctive dislike of loss being greater than our liking for gain. It’s partially that simply nobody can visualize the losses suffered by the resources being diverted from more productive uses. Milton Friedman wasn’t quite right. Occasionally good is done by spending other people’s money. Governments probably should tax and spend to build flood barriers. But the vast bulk of government spending is quite different. Ronald Coase thought deeply about this. See The problem of social cost on Wikipedia for an introduction to to the problem.
Why is it so difficult for people to understand that when political action diverts resources from use A to use B not only does the reduced spending on B represent a cost, but that the redistribution of resources and the damage to incentives might reduce the total resources to spend on A and B in aggregate.
I got thinking about all this when I read the replies to this tweet from Helen Barnard:
I've got an idea for a book: Policies that Worked. What policies in the last 50 years have been a resounding success?
— Helen Barnard (@Helen_Barnard) February 27, 2021
People proposed all sorts of terrible policies as having been a resounding success, in the teeth of good statistical evidence to the contrary. Most people do not have any sort of feeling for statistical inference and use their gut instinct to decide on which policies are good. And their own net wealth. Why should they do otherwise? Any politician that uses statistics or economic reasoning to point out why their are wrong is simply commiting electoral hara-kiri.
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