Economy

Cockburn doesn’t believe in coincidences. That’s why when he saw that Nancy Pelosi and her multimillionaire husband Paul saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling shares one month before their stock price plummeted, he thought that it was probably more than just an educated guess. According to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, model citizen Mr. Pelosi sold 25,000 shares of technology company Nvidia, at around $165.05 in July which resulted in a loss for him of $341,365, a set of disclosures showed. Luckily he dumped the stock in time, as one month later, Nvidia revealed that the government had imposed export restrictions on the company’s A100 and forthcoming H100 circuits.

Comedy has been absorbed into Twitter’s zeitgeist tornado: a whirling panopticon inhabited by 23 percent of the most humorless and opinionated denizens of the internet (and the top 25 percent of them produce almost all the tweets, according to a study by Pew Research Center). Twitter’s superusers are journalists who have never left the eye of the storm; Twitter has become their “ultimate editor.” It has what the New York Times calls an “outsized role in shaping narratives around the world.” But what kind of comedy clicks for these dopamine-addicted trend chasers?

How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant bonus from the global oil price spike provoked by the war in Ukraine? Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles when you’re sitting on oil reserves so abundant and so easily accessible that your marginal cost of producing the next barrel is less than $10 when the market price has just doubled to $130 — as it did in March, before settling back to around $95 today. And you might think that this recent price retreat is likely to continue as oil demand begins to shrink with the onset of recession in developed economies – just as you worry that your own reserves will one day dwindle.

One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter. The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name. I hate to burst the bubble of those celebrating the departure of one of the most dishonest figures in the national media, but Stelter, for some reason or another, is highly respected in the industry. His CNN newsletter is one of the highest circulated among journalists, whom Stelter worked to shield from controversy from atop his perch on the wall at CNN.

To all of the bitter skeptics who doubted President Joe Biden, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve, I have a message for you: come forth now with your most heartfelt apologies. For a few months the Ivy League know-it-alls had to back-pedal their claims that inflation was transitory. But that changed this week. After months of ridicule, it is Joe Biden and his team of Nobel Laureates (all seventeen of them) who are getting the last laugh. Inflation changed faster than anyone could have imagined. In fact, according to the White House, we went from 9.1 percent inflation in June to 0 percent inflation in July. Joe Biden — as pleased with himself as ever — couldn’t wait to break the news to the American people.

Woke corporatism has taken over America. Nike nixed a sneaker launch featuring the Betsy Ross flag after noted anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick claimed it was offensive. Coca-Cola and other companies threatened to boycott doing business in Georgia over the state's new election security legislation. Levi's allegedly booted its president over her anti-school closure views during the pandemic, and nearly every major retailer features pro-Black Lives Matter or Pride Month messaging on its storefronts and websites. It can seem impossible as a conservative to avoid giving your hard-earned money to businesses that hate you. Even for moderate or apolitical consumers, it can be frustrating and tiresome to be hit with a wave of political messaging when you're just trying to purchase a product.

For a man that supposedly wanted to cut his connections with the Big Bad Royal Family, Prince Harry still appears to be reaping the rewards of his blue-blooded lineage. Last week, Cockburn discovered that BetterUp, the mental health company that named the Duke of Sussex as its “chief impact officer” in 2021, has been branded by people purporting to be former employees as a “psychologically unsafe place to work” on Glassdoor, a website where posters can review companies. Posts on the site allege that the leadership “lie, play games, test/watch/spy on employees” and say the company “a pretty nasty underbelly.” BetterUp did not respond to a request for comment regarding the claims.

Every two years or so, the Spectator World issues a takedown of New York Times columnist and “expert” economist Paul Krugman, who has a notable history of being wrong about absolutely everything. Well, it seems it's that time of year again. The Australians are getting in on the Krugman-dunking game so why shouldn't we? Here’s Cockburn's authoritative ranking of Paul Krugman's Greatest Hits. Krugman denies the recession Fresh from his New York Times opinion piece titled “I Was Wrong About Inflation,” Paul Krugman decided it was time to be wrong about the recession. On Brian Stelter's CNN show Reliable Sources, Krugman said, “I think that what's happening now is that there's been a kind of a negativity bias in coverage.

Vince McMahon displays a T-Rex skull in his office. It is mounted against blood-colored walls. But is it real? It doesn’t matter, as it’s authentically Vince McMahon to mount such a garish display of masculine bravado on his wall. It’s the kind of over-the-top centerpiece you’d expect from the mogul who built World Wrestling Entertainment into the behemoth it is today. A giant of a man, McMahon has spent four decades laughing maniacally as he feasted on the flesh of his puny competition. “It’s on my wall and symbolic of my voracious appetite for life,” he tweeted. There’s also prophetic symbolism to the dead-dinosaur skull. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the WWE board was investigating a “secret $3 million hush pact by CEO Vince McMahon.

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over. “Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.” Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream.

Cockburn was on one of his regular jaunts through LinkedIn this week, on the lookout for more gainful employment than the Speccie currently offers him. During his perusal, one word kept catching his eye on the profiles of other users: “Rescinded.” Prospective employees are deciding to denote when a company had made them a job offer — and then changed their mind after a change in corporate hiring plans. The cryptocurrency wallet company Coinbase appears to be one of the biggest offenders. Ashutosh, a software engineer, posted the following: After considering several factors, I had chosen to join Coinbase over pursuing a PhD.

Recently The Spectator sent me undercover inside Ron DeSantis’s Disney World. Allow me to explain. Back in April, Florida lawmakers voted to dissolve the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. Reedy Creek, for those unfamiliar with the seamy world of crony capitalism, was a self-governing enclave within Orlando, Florida, run by the Disney corporation. It had been set up to allow Disney World to effectively function as its own nation-state, setting its own rules, levying its own taxes, even administering its own public services. Reedy Creek was established in 1967. It was part of Walt Disney’s original vision for his parks, which was exceedingly ambitious, seeing, for example, EPCOT Center as growing into its own autonomous futuristic city.

The fight for a $15 minimum wage started in 2012 with a bang. Hundreds of Walmart, port, and fast food workers walked off their jobs in protest of low wages. An organization called Fight for $15 formed in 2014 following two national strikes by laborers. Seattle became the first city to require a $15 minimum wage that same year. The White House issued an executive order that required new federal contracts to include a $10.10 minimum wage because legislation had stalled in Congress. The stalled federal push led to more state and local action. California and New York put together slow-rising $15 minimum wage laws in 2016 and 2017. Eight other states, mostly in New England, followed with plans to reach a $15 minimum wage by 2026 at the latest.