Hadrian, the third of the “five good emperors” of Rome, ruled from 117 to 138 in a time of consolidation of the Roman Empire. Best known for building Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the northern most reach of the Roman Empire, his policy focus was securing the Empire by leveraging its strengths rather than overextending its reach. Hadrian had a disciplined attention to detail and focused on the infrastructure needed not only to defend the Empire’s territory but leverage its resource potential and revenue growth.
Today’s economy is marked by uncertainty and volatility at home and abroad. This uncertainty is causing businesses to hoard cash—at last estimate about $1.4 trillion worth.
We have a huge federal deficit, a broken housing situation, and looming costs for unsustainable entitlement programs promised for generations by spend-now, pay-later politicians. …
As reported by Russell Gold at Environmental Capital, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has made an incisive new argument against his company’s investing in government-dependent renewable energy.
“If I wanted to kill [tax subsidies], the thing to do is for Exxon Mobil to go and invest heavily in them and then Congress would immediately cancel the tax subsidy. Actually what they would do is they would just cancel it for us,” said Mr.Tillerson, during the annual analyst meeting at the New York Stock Exchange.
He added: “In reality, that is what I fear would happen. So we are not going to go into investments that are dependent on a government providing a tax system to make them viable.”
This is very interesting. Former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and now Tillerson have argued against investing in politically dependent renewables because they have been-there-done-that, with investor losses in the 1970s.…