oil prices and the mismaged economy

As far as I can see, his “study” consisted of handwaving away predatory pricing by re-labeling it “competitive pricing.” That’s not a fact-based argument; that’s sophistry.

Falling prices define good product? Microsoft just lowered the price of Vista. 'nuff said.

Even more interesting. If you don’t mind, what are the conditions that must exist for a company to be (considered) a monopoly? I do hope you’re not going define away the issue by saying a monopoly is exactly “a corporation that is granted protections (of some sort) by the government”.

Disclaimer: I think Microsoft was indeed a monopoly, so this isn’t exactly an innocent question.

From Wiki:

Another definition:

The way I learned it was that a Monopoly is either a company or coalition of companies who so control their portion of the market that there is zero competition…and they are able to set their pricing at whatever they want (controlling as they do such a large percentage of the market) without any outside market forces.

Microsoft is definitely not and never has been even close to a monopoly. Even when Novell (who probably got closer than MS ever did on the micro server side) folded and Apple was at it’s nadir MS only controlled (IIRC) something like 60% of the market on either the server or WS side. Unix was still out there, and Apple never really completely folded…and even Netware still held onto some portion of their market share.

Standard Oil was probably close to the strict definition of a monopoly…and to a certain extend government colluded with them to allow them to gain as much of the market share as they did.

-XT

Microsoft has spent millions fighting law suits against its’ monopoly practices. If only the lawyers had your ability to see through it all they could have saved so much time and money.
Relearn your definition. It is not zero.It says all or nearly all.
How many antitrust suits have there been? Opera sues.Netscape sued,US government sued.
United States v. Microsoft Corp. - Wikipedia US vs Microsoft. Not close???

:stuck_out_tongue:
Let me rephrase that.

:stuck_out_tongue: !!

Why would I need to relearn MY OWN definition? You could say my definition is wrong…but then you’d have to present some, well, evidence, that it is.

And this proves…?

-XT

But then you ignore your own first cite, notably: “the term does not bear any intrinsic expectation that there ever be a single firm with total control anymore than the theory of perfect competition requires competition to be perfect in order to exist”. Even though the number of hypothetical “perfectly competitive” markets is vanishingly small, I’m quite sure that you’ll still apply the concept to imperfectly competitive markets, right? If we discard the strict absolutist garbage, one question I’d ask is: what percentage of a market must be under one firm’s control to qualify as a monopoly?

And this would be incorrect also, but using your second cite. Notably: “A situation in which a single company owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service.” You seem to want to treat computing as a monolithic type. However, if you were to claim that MS is not a monopoly because of the vastly greater proportion of the computing market taken up by embedded devices, I believe most people would look at you oddly, if not think you were nuts. These things are different in kind.

No, the appropriate “type of product or service” one would look at might be desktop computing. IIRC, MS had at least 85% of the market (although I think it was higher…in fact, Microsoft Watch in 2004 said over 90%). Not only that, they had (and still do, IIRC) explicit barriers to market entry – specifically, their OEM agreements that they will get paid whether a computer is shipped with Windows installed or not.

One might even propose office software or web browsers as the appropriate type of service. I would think that it’s notable that, according to the wikipedia page on Internet Explorer, it had a 95% market share in 2002-3. While I don’t think there is any way to tease apart the reasons for IE’s decline (and it still has a 75% market share, according to the above link), it seems common sense to me that without Judge Jackson’s finding of fact (in 1999) that MS was a monopoly, other browsers would have been locked out permanently.

At least, that is, until the MS monopoly was eventually broken by government intervention.

Cite? Because I see no evidence of this.

When oil prices are moved 2-3% in a day, does that really have anything to do with underlying factors like consumption?

No.

No. As I cited in the mortgage thread, the current spike is from speculation, in part because people think oil will go still higher, in part because it seems the best investment for the money that would have gone to mortgage instruments.

Sure it does. The futures market is not looking at today’s consumption, but the relationship between supply and demand over the next several months. A small piece of information revealed today can have dramatic effects over that time period and can cause large price swings that are entirely rational.

It is speculation on making profits. It does not react to supply it guesses on future supply.

Making informed predictions* about future supply is related to “underlying factors”, which is what the original question was about. So, you were wrong with your “no”, above, and flex727 was right when he corrected you.

*you don’t make money by guessing, as you are as likely to guess wrong as to guess right.

Which is exactly why so many “smart” investment managers do no better than the indices. Are you seriously telling me that no one puts money into a stock or commodity on the expectation that it will rise due to the market as opposed to the underlying strength of the stock or market? If that were true, the market would be a lot less volatile than it is.

I’d be interested in a list of the underlying factors in the oil market that have changed so much in the past few days. The biggest one I can think of is the increased evidence of a recession, which should drive prices down, not up. (We can remove the influence of the falling dollar, which is of course a factor.)

Depends on how you look at it. Sure, people put money into stocks because they have historically risen, if you hold them long enough. Betting on short term oil futures is a lot like buying call/put options. As you probably know, most of those expire worthless. I don’t recall the exact number, but I think it’s close to 90%. Remember, buying futures can go either way-- betting the market will go up or go down. In the short term, you might as well roll the dice if you don’t have any actual information that is telling you it should go up or down. But if you do have such knowledge, then you’re not guessing. Which is what I objected to in gonzo’s post.

So you think they know . Sorry Charley, they are gambling and many fortunes have been lost in the market.

I never said they knew. Don’t mischaracterize my posts. You’re just spewing a bunch of BS in this thread, so I really have no interest in carrying this discussion any further.

I suppose gambling is a better term than guessing. And the knowledge people have may well be spurious - which is how the stock spam scam works. In any case the point is that prices can be driven by short term speculation on market swings, not production and consumption numbers.

Do you agree at least that more money coming into a market drives up prices?

Why is gambling a better term. ? A toss of the dice is a better display of money management than guessing? If the knowledge Mace claims is what drives investors,if so they would all make money. Such knowledge does not exist. It is speculation.,gambling.