33 Comments
Feb 26, 2022·edited Feb 26, 2022

I keep trying to explain to people, the leveraging power Putin has with Western Europe's energy dependence, but it's hard to get through to people undergoing moral outrage and watching cable news.

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Hi Matt, just subscribed. Great research and explanation once again. I spent my career in supply chain and recall a sales visit in Nashville area to the HQ’s of a company buying salvage and scrap yards…private equity funding it. As you know, historically, family run enterprises. Look forward to future articles. MM

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Feb 27, 2022Liked by Matt Stoller

For the benefit of your readers in Missouri and those with friends in our state, the Arms Control negotiator Matt cites, Lucas Kunce, is a Democratic Candidate for US Senate and he is a very serious candidate. He could use your help at www.lucaskunce.com

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From Greg Palast: "If the US and Europe simply end the insane, unjustified embargo of Venezuela, the price of oil will collapse, Germany can then get its natural gas from the Caribbean..."

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Stoller, dude. Fightin' the good fight, my man.

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"Today they filed a statement in court against non-compete agreements forced on two thirds of the anesthesiologists in Northern Nevada."

Non-compete agreements are regulations forced on workers by corporations to curtail their freedoms. Did monopoly capitalists lobby to remove government regulations just so that they could replace them with their own?

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Short here, simplify the problem,, by having limits One person holds and or company holds as to percentage caps on market shares. Say sample as 20% total shares of any market as to Nationally and or global. tha`st maybe to high! Just a idea here. Gov`s needs to refine what a small company is and helping start-ups. 500 employees isn't small to me, also, not big. Break it down more to multi sizes categories, as to regulating and taxation.

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Matt - I may be misunderstanding the first segment of your piece. Sure Europe buys oil from Russia and with the price increase that revenue is going to Russia to fund the war. But they new that going to war would decrease oil sales and financial sanctions would result in huge economic loses. So in aggregate I dont think the price increase is really funding the war in aggregate.

All that said, the Monopoly problem is legitimate. Why does Russia (or any company) have that monopoly in the first place? Totally get that.

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Interesting. Russia uses its oil and gas market clout to invade countries. The US invades countries through its military clout to control the oil and gas produced by those countries. Read Iraq.

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Environmentalism didn't cause the present day energy issue, but ESG was certainly a factor as is COVID.

Public firms are investing half as much money, percentage wise, into new exploration vs. private ones.

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What's your source on the midstream guys exploiting the drillers? I thought they used the same infrastructure as the rest of the raw hydrocarbon products?

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"That means an additional $100 million a day of revenue for Russia, purely on the back of geopolitical tensions it created"??

Russia has been trying since Minsk to lower geopolitical tensions, but no no no no no.

Zelenskyy's rejection of the Minsk agreements, coupled with a threat to re-start Ukraine's nuclear weapons program created geopolitical tensions that pushed us over the brink.

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Wow -- many thanks. Germany imports even coal from Russia -- about 50%. Simply amazing...

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Something struck me while reading this. Traditionally, the expectation is that if these middlemen charge inflated rates, someone will come in and disrupt their model.

What I'm wondering is how specialized equipment creates barriers to new entrants and the kind of technological bottlenecks that might exist that would keep capital from being deployed. My hunch is that it's a combination of domain expert knowledge and patented equipment.

These kinds of limitations would probably be found across middlemen. If it turns out the technology doesn't make that large of an impact, it's strictly a network access problem (ie. all the buyers are on Ebay because all the sellers are on ebay).

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Possible tip: Dish taking over Direct TV from AT&T.

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From Greg Palast: "If the US and Europe simply end the insane, unjustified embargo of Venezuela, the price of oil will collapse, Germany can then get its natural gas from the Caribbean..."

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