jerry bowyer

You probably know who your governor is and your senators too. But do you know who your state treasurer is, auditor general, how about your comptroller? Well, it's time to start paying attention, because these officers have emerged as the new frontline against the intrusion of politics into finance under the guise of  ESG. 

On my podcast, “Meeting of Minds,” I recently interviewed John Murante, Treasurer of Nebraska, an agricultural state. He warns that the war against fossil fuels is now turning into a war against agriculture as government and activists push companies to divest not just from the energy industry but from industries that use energy, and farms use energy. 

Whether they know it or not, ESG activists would create a world where we are colder, more hungry, and in the dark. It's time to start engaging with the companies you own in your 401(k). Remember, they work for you.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission recently sent a letter to Chevron denying the company's request to exclude a request from a shareholder for a vote from other shareholders which asked the company to study the risks of giving up the production of fossil fuels. 

Green activists routinely try to cajole oil companies into trying to guess the effects of fossil fuel usage on the weather decades into the future. But one shareholder, the financial advisor David Bahnsen is asking the more relevant question. What would happen to our investment value if Chevron got out of the oil business? 

It’s high time that people who are actually investing their own money get into the game which up until now has been dominated by activists. Exxon also will have a similar proposal on the ballot. It’s their chance to speak up and defend what they do every day: power the world. 

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We tend to think of the resurrection of Jesus as only a religious event, with no political implications.

But Jesus was executed by the state as an enemy of the state. The debates about resurrection in first century Judaism were intensely political. The Sadducees, defenders of the status quo, denied the resurrection. The more orthodox Pharisees affirmed it.

This makes sense.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright points out that states derive their power ultimately from their ability to kill people. By rising from the dead, Jesus conquered death, disarming that power. Christ’s resurrection was inherently—in the best sense of the word—revolutionary.

His victory gives men and women the courage to resists the Caesars, and the Kaisers and Czars of this world. The cross, the sword, the guillotine, the gulag and the firing squad do not represent the end.

The spirit of Caesar is still around, but more importantly so is the Spirit of Christ.

He is risen.  He is risen, indeed.

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President Biden has issued only one veto so far, and he used it to protect gigantic Wall Street firms such as Blackrock who use an approach to investing called ESG, which imports social factors into financial decision-making. 

The Trump administration had—rightfully—told pension managers that they could only use ESG in the investment process if they could make the case that such factors would likely improve the financial returns for retirees. 

That’s the standard to which pensions have historically been held. Managers have a fiduciary duty to focus on one thing: The financial good of retirees. 

When, for example, a state treasurer is making decisions about the future retirements of school teachers and firefighters, politics should be left out of it. Retirees and their widows and orphans deserve nothing less. 

The president’s veto sided with the big boys and against the little guys—and with woke politics over faithful fiscal management.

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Vanguard—one of the two largest money management companies in America—shocked the industry recently when they announced its withdrawal from an anti-fossil fuels industry alliance. 

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, CEO Tim Buckley not only defended that move, but went on to say that Vanguard’s research shows no benefit to ESG investing and investment firms should basically stay out of politics—and let boards of directors govern in the interest of shareholders, not hot button political issues.

This is big. 

It's been a terrible year for ESG and politicized capital. Blackrock's been getting fired by red state pension managers, left-wing proposals are getting voted down and now one of the most prestigious names in finance is shifting in rhetoric. 

Will they walk the talk? 

We'll see, but the shift in rhetoric alone is a big win for advocates of the separation of investment and politics. 

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The failure of Silicon Valley Bank sums up, in one ongoing crisis, the failure of our ruling class. 

Inflationist monetary policy created a bubble and bust cycle, and SVB was unusually dependent on both the bond bubble and the tech bubble. 

Silicon Valley’s economy in general was subsidized by easy money and Covid shutdowns which pushed Americans out of malls and theatres and onto e-commerce and streaming services. 

SVB recklessly expanded as if the bubble would never pop, all the while its chief risk officer whose bio leads with “queer person of color” ignored risk management for months on end to focus on diversity and sexual identity politics. 

Now legacy media is pushing for investigations, not into the incompetence of the ruling class, but to the few investors who saw the risk and warned others about it. 

We need better rulers…or better yet, true self-rule

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The Congressional Budget Office just updated its forecast—and the bottom line is that our fiscal position is deteriorating.

The last report increased its debt forecast by 1.4 trillion and this one just added another increase…3.1 trillion. CBO is forecasting average annual deficits of $2 trillion dollars.

What they are not forecasting is a recession, which if it does occur would certainly worsen the debt picture.

Biden’s fiscal policies are a direct assault on the young.

Every time you read about a new spending initiative out of Washington, imagine the political class pointing at millennials and Gen Z and saying, “Put in on their tab.”

America is highly resilient, but we are not utterly immune to the sort of debt crises we saw hitting Europe ten years ago or emerging markets in the 1990s. We like to think debt doesn't matter, right up until the moment when it is the only thing which matters.

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Senator John Fetterman of my native Pennsylvania has been hospitalized once again. 

First, during the campaign, he suffered a stroke. The campaign played it down and media ran interference for him, but it became obvious just how serious the damage was when he debated Dr. Oz. 

Unfortunately, the debate happened late in the season after a large number of mail-in votes had already been cast. Those of us who could see that the man was obviously seriously impaired were subjected to condescending lectures. 

Fetterman won, with a clear assist from the media. Then he was hospitalized again for unclear reasons, then released and recently hospitalized yet again for clinical depression. 
People of goodwill ought to pray and trust for his recovery.

But there ought to be a reckoning for all the media propagandists who shamed people into silence about Fetterman’s health, starting with an apology to the voters of Pennsylvania.

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2022 was a down year for markets, which is a bad sign for the economy. 

Investors, unlike pundits and politicians, have skin in the game. If they are wrong, they suffer real economic consequences.

So markets are better forecasters than economic experts – yes, better than people like me. 

When risk-sensitive investments are down much more than safer ones, that's a serious recession signal. 

The S&P is down roughly 20%. Stocks are down more than bonds. Risky bonds are down more than safe ones. Large tech companies are down about twice as much as the S&P. Consumer discretionary companies (vacations, jewelry, eating out) are down much more than consumer staples (groceries, cleaning supplies, toothpaste). 

Investors are betting on necessities. 

When the best performers of the year are recession hedges, inflation hedges and tax shelters, it says a lot about where things are headed.

For America, it's not good.

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The new employment report showed a gain of roughly half a million jobs in January, and immediately “Biden boom” started trending on Twitter. 

Not so fast. Yes, that’s a lot of jobs added in one month, but one month does not make a boom. For most of the past year job growth has been weak, and the economy faltering. Real wages fell and people's saving fell along with them. Credit card debt mounted up. People who were out of the workforce saw their savings and credit depleted, read headlines about layoffs and got worried enough to go back to work. 

Usually new jobs are a sign of a growing economy, but the growth data points to a stagnant economy right now. It's good that people are going back to work, but there's a difference between job growth from an actual boom and hard times driving people back to work. 

This is no boom.

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The markets appear to be pricing in a recession in America.

In fact, recent data suggest that we may have already entered it. But this recession was avoidable. It was, in baseball parlance, “an unforced error.” You see, a distorted economic theory called Keynesianism teaches that inflation is caused by too much growth and so the solution to inflation is … recession! It might be an official recession, half a year of negative growth or it could be what's called a growth recession in which growth remains positive but sluggishly low. 

The problem is that when inflation gets very high, government thinks its needs to hit the economic brakes hard, and that usually leads to a bona fide recession. Supply side economics is the right answer. It sees growth as the solution, not the problem. Tax and regulatory easing to help with growth and monetary tightening to help with inflation. Forcing a recession to fight inflation is all pain and no gain. It’s time to bring back Reaganomics. 

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Recent media coverage celebrating "falling inflation" is taking a victory lap a little too early.

Yes, inflation is lower … somewhat. It certainly has come down from the stratospheric levels of nearly 10 percent a year, but at 5 percent a year, it's still unacceptably high. There's no grounds for our policymakers to declare victory … the job just is not done.

Rising demand for inflation hedges like gold, bitcoin, and inflation-protected bonds and foreign currencies show that investors know that the inflation crisis is not over yet, even if the ruling class which caused it and benefits from it is in denial. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to know what's going on, you just need to go to the store and buy a dozen eggs. When pay doesn't keep up with the cost of living, that means you're losing ground, and government is the culprit.

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According to a number of news reports, CVS recently fired a nurse practitioner whose conscience prevented her from prescribing abortifacients to patients. 

CVS had previously offered her religious accommodation as appears to be required by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. She was considered a good employee and had recently received a performance-based raise. It is also reported that other nurse practitioners were willing to administer the drugs and so no patients were deprived of any services. 

So: Why the change? 

CVS was among the corporations pressured to cave into the abortion lobby ever since Roe vs. Wade was put in legal jeopardy. 

The firing was unnecessary and wrong—and it has brought legal exposure to CVS, now facing a lawsuit from the formidable Alliance Defending Freedom.

CVS should apologize and change its policy. Other companies should learn from their mistake.

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2022 was a down year for markets, which is a bad sign for the economy. Investors, unlike pundits and politicians, have skin in the game.

So, if they are wrong, they suffer real economic consequences. Markets are better forecasters than economic experts—yes: better than people like me.

When risk-sensitive investments are down much more than safer ones, this is a serious recession signal. The S&P is down roughly 20 percent. Stocks are down more than bonds. Risky bonds are down more than safe ones. Large tech companies are down about twice as much as the S&P.

Consumer discretionary companies—like vacations, jewelry, eating out—are down much more than consumer staples—like groceries, cleaning supplies, and toothpaste. Investors are betting on necessities.

When the best performers of the year are recession hedges, inflation hedges, and tax shelters, it says a lot about where things are headed.  For America, it’s not good.

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I attended Microsoft’s latest Annual Shareholder meeting and asked the company about its intrusion into the abortion issue shortly after the reversal of Roe.

Microsoft spoke out in favor of the alleged right to abortion and even went so far as to announce subsidies for abortion fees and travel. The very next day, Microsoft's president Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella posted a discussion where they lamented an economy in which “we are going to have fewer people on which to rely,” and talked about training grandparents to program apps as a way to deal with the worker shortage.

The inability to see the contradiction between those two statements is breathtaking—lamenting worker shortage that would not exist without Roe and the 66 million people aborted in its wake while at the same time subsidizing for abortion fees and travel. Want more workers? Stop reimbursing employees for taking those innocent lives in advance.

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Economic anxiety, food supply disruptions, foreign wars, cultural decadence, corruption in the ruling class, populist uprisings…

No, I’m not talking about 2022, I’m talking about 2,022 years ago, or thereabouts, when Christ was born in Bethlehem. Light came into the darkness, but the darkness could not comprehend it. 

The darkness still cannot comprehend it, and will never defeat it. Herod tried, and died. Rome, the alleged eternal city, tried to murder the eternal God. But Christ rose and Rome fell. China is trying to eradicate the faith. It too will fail and then fall, until it repents. 

What happened in Bethlehem two millennia ago was D-day for the Kingdom of God, an invasion of the kingdom of darkness. We spend a lot of time arguing about politics and who should represent us—as we should. This time of year, how about refocusing us on the far more important question: Who our King is. 

Rejoice, Jesus the Messiah is born of the virgin Mary, rejoice!

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When the Soviet Union fell, the archives were opened—and all the world could see the corruption of the regime well documented by its own bureaucracy. Now, Twitter isn’t exactly the USSR. For example, no nuclear missiles. But the prior regime did fall and now Elon Musk has opened the files for all the world to see. 

Anyone who cares about the truth can see Twitter’s reign of censorship—every bit as bad as its critics thought. We see well-educated people permanently banning a former president, building blacklists and shadow-banning. It’s jaw-dropping. 

The whole thing is an object lesson for us all. This crowd should not be gatekeepers over our national discourse. Whether it’s Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook—or the government and elite media who colluded with them—the elite managerial class has shown that it cannot be trusted to decide which speech we should be allowed to hear. 

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Recent market volatility has led some to claim that markets themselves are inherently unstable. But the data do not back them up. 

The up and down of “risk on” and then “risk off” sentiment is associated with the instability created by our own central bank—the Fed—which has grown into a financial colossus starting with its reaction to the Great Recession. It’s now the single largest player in our financial markets. 

That's a problem in and of itself, but the other problem is that the Fed has an inherently unstable “dual mandate” from Congress. 

It has the job of fighting inflation by selling investments to drive down prices and also the job of fighting unemployment by buying investments to stimulate consumer sentiment. 

Every day, investors are forced to comb through the news and figure out which of the two contradicting mandates the Fed will follow next.

The Fed should stick to its original mandate, sound money, or be replaced with something that will.

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The origin of Thanksgiving goes back to the Plymouth plantation, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620. You may have learned that in school, but I bet you didn’t learn this in school: the original Thanksgiving came after the settlement abandoned socialism in favor of capitalism.

It appears that the original charter adopted a form of communal ownership and required equality of income. You’re probably not surprised that this led to starvation and, as a consequence, plague. After two years, the colonists did something which few socialists since have done—they learned from their mistake, and instituted private ownership. The starving times ended, the colonists traded their surpluses with the Natives and the new abundance was celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving.

It’s not just about food, it’s about freedom. Socialism is en vogue again today, but maybe this time around we can learn from history before we repeat its errors.

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We just got the new inflation numbers and they're bad. 

They especially expose the spin about this inflation being a result of the Russia-Ukraine war. You see, in addition to calculating overall inflation, the government also calculates inflation without including food and energy. They call that core inflation. And it's the highest since 1982. 

That means that even when you strip out the two categories of goods most affected by the war, we still have a once-in-a-generation loss in the purchasing power of the dollar. 

It might not be so bad if wages were keeping up, but they aren't.

There really is only one solution to the problem, a power shift in Washington. We need a Congress which will ride the brake pedal on growth in government and the gas pedal on growth in the private economy. 

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