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Notes -
This is incorrect.
Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.
J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.
This is partly sarcasm, but I don't know how much.
The trouble with Vance is that we don't know who he is. Hillbilly Elegy is a good character origin story. But what follows? After serving with distinction as a Marine Corps ... Public Affairs ... yeah, nevermind ... he went Yale Law School and time at Thiel backed venture capital firm where he invested in ... an agribusiness?. Vance lived mostly in San Francisco before running for Senate in Ohio. He's a Catholic Convert married to a non-practicing-anything. His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.
In 2016 he's a Never Trumper. When he runs for Senate, DJT helps get him over the finish line (along with Mitch McConnell but, hey, the real one's always operate from the shadows). In the Senate, he's staunchly pro-Israel, questions support for Ukraine, and says Lina Khan has done a good job.
As a VP pick, the move is to try to lock down Pennsylvania's electoral votes. Anointed as Trump's successor? Dyed in the wool MAGA? I think not. Another commenter mentioned Palin. I think that's a good comparison.
Trump has been moving to the middle on everything this cycle besides immigration and tariffs. The true believers are already losing their primaries (Bob Good in Virginia). OG MAGA (which was Tea Party 2.0) is on the way out. MAGA 2.0 is really riding a lot of the currents that popped off with COVID and BLM riots. Throw in a bunch of Grey Tribe Tech Bros and Vance makes a ton of sense.
The real question is when Trump finalized the decision - before or after the assassination attempt?
Khan. I can’t figure her out. She’s blocking a mid-tier luxury hand bag merger but Microsoft got to buy Activision for $68 billion. Google just announce they are buying Wiz for $23 billion. I’m actually concerned about big tech getting bigger but some mid tier consumer garbage she targets? Perhaps google just thinks the deal doesn’t close till she’s out of a job.
I’d like to know more on Vance’s thoughts here.
Honestly, the U.S. just needs to approve a merger tax and then stop regulating this shit.
Start at 10% for buying a $1 billion company, then add another 10% for every additional order of magnitude. Problem solved. Google wants to buy Wiz for $23 billion? Cool. No problem. Pay the U.S. government $3.13 billion and you're all good.
If the EU wants to add its own tax then we let them but then also increase the wine and handbag tarriff accordingly.
All of the airlines would merge within a week under that regime, and then we'd all be paying monopoly rents to Amalgamated Airlines for the rest of our lives whenever we wanted to travel more than a hundred miles. And all of the other industries too. A 10% tax on deal consideration wouldn't even rate.
The airline industry is the one industry that sort of has the go ahead to break antitrust law. The combination of high fixed costs, no moat, and marginal revenue maximizing pricing of $0 makes them go bankrupt too much. Their CEO’s already get to answer questions talking about anti competitive behavior with only a thin plausible deniability.
It's funny to think that airlines don't have a moat, since it's a ridiculously expensive business to run. But I suppose if you define moat that way then they don't.
Correct, their actual moat is airport slots and routes which are now meticulously tabulated when DOJ considers airline merger agreements after US Airways / American Arlines merger empirically resulted in higher fares.
It’s less of a moat in many cases than people think; the experience of euro budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet shows that consumers are happy to go to airports 100 miles out of town for fares 1/4 of the legacy airlines. Startup costs are extremely low with the leasing business the way it is. I’m skeptical that looser competition laws would dramatically worsen the situation for consumers.
Then why did USAir/AA raise fares?
I take your point on Euro airlines, but suspect that the Euro airport/airline system is different in some fundamental way.
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