For the past couple of months, one of the lovely things about the weather is the sun shines. If you think about Africa most of the places you think of the sun shing every day and a logical step would be they need more solar polar to generate electricity.

In an article by Allan Olingo of the Associated Press, somebody has thought about this is former New York City Mayor and founder of Bloomberg News, Michael R Bloomberg. He is also the UN Secretary General Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. It helps he had the ability to donate $285 million through the Bloomberg Philanthropies to strengthen clean energy industries in emerging and developing countries.

There are 600 million people in Africa and many do not are not connected to the grid or pay utility bills. Rather than paying to put up more solar panels, Mr. Bloomberg will invest in strengthening market design, regulatory capacity, technical expertise and industry institutions, areas viewed as essential for attracting private investment and accelerating use of renewable energy.

If you think about the North American companies there is a mixture of private and public utilities that generate electricity to put on the grid and that is distributed to every household for a fee. There is a state regulatory agency to ensure the companies spend money to keep the grid up to day and raise fees for service. The regulatory agency writes the policies that if someone puts up solar panels, the electricity can flow into the grid, and they can receive a monetary reward. The utilities can go the bond market to raise money to build the infrastructure to ensure the grid keeps meeting the demands of consumers and industry.

In Africa, there is weak market design, limited grid planning, slow permitting processes and fragmented regulatory systems.

If you think about Africa, you likely think about sunny days, with the Bloomberg initiative perhaps scaling up the projects will be possible and the systems in North America will be similar to the systems in Africa.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, many of these companies have a large infrastructure that has been built up and can profitably be accessed. Sometimes governments help pay for the infrastructure, but it is the private sector that benefits the most and that can translate to profitability and paying dividends.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

When you think about President Trump, one of the things on top of the list will not be he is a great administrator of government. If you read or listen to people who try to understand what goes on with the President, he seems more interested in “vanity” projects that proper functioning of government. Some people are big picture folks, some are very detail oriented, and there is a lot in between, but President Trump seems to focus on furnishings of the White House and a small part of Washington, DC. Unfortunately for the President, there are large swaths of the City of Washington that could use his “developer” mindset.

In an article by Clyde Russell of Reuters, one of the clever ways to deal with the President Trump is to make up acronyms using Mexican food.

TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out – reflects President Trump to escalate a situation before retreating once the economic and political costs became too heavy.

EMPANDA – Everyone Makes Promises And Nobody Actually Delivers Anything – used to describe countries make outrageous promise (invest trillions of dollars) and achievable trade promises in the hope of avoiding the worst of Trump’s tariffs. (the trade deficit is still going up, where is the domestic manufacturing that the President talks about?)

NACHO – Not A Chance Hormuz Opens – after the US started the war with Iran, the Iranian military shut down the Strait of Hormuz and no one knows if it is open or not? certainly the shipping traffic is down and far from where it was before the war started.

TAMALES – Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everything Shafted. The sector most affected is commodity trade. The trade disruptions have led to supply chain disruptions which led to higher prices which increased inflation. The danger is the world always, once in a blue moon, something actually works.

If there is a consistent pattern to President Trump’s presidency, it is he creates volatility and unintended consequences through policies and actions that largely fail to achieve their stated goals.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, there are all types of CEOs, some promise disruptions and one could argue that is what is needed, but after they leave the next CEO all they have to do is promise competence and normalcy. The longer you live, the more you will see what happens after the person leaves.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

One of the great motivators of the economic system we all believe in is cost or cost of alternatives. In every industry there is always an alternative, but most of the time it is costly from one perspective or another. One of the best industries to see it is oil energy. When the US started a war with Iran, oil prices increased and alternatives begin to show their face.

In an article by Heru Aspranto and Johan Purnomo of Reuters, the government is trying something to lower the price of gasoline. Indonesia is the world’s largest palm oil producer and exporter. It has large plantations devoted to growing palm trees and extracting the oil and it is used in many products in the grocery store.

The government has a B50 mandate which is gasoline sold in Indonesia should be a 50% palm-based diesel and 50% conventional diesel. This saves on the use of conventional diesel and should lower or keep prices lower for consumers. (in the midwest, bio fuel from corn is another example).

One of the beneficiaries of the change towards more biofuels is garages. Cars that use the fuel will go back to the carshop more often because the fuel filters need frequent cleaning because the biodiesel leaves more sediment than conventional fuel.

Indonesian President Pravowo Subianto said B50 is a big achievement, maybe we should go to B60.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, much of the innovation in the world happens when something is deemed expensive or a luxury good. How do you drive down the price? In the past it took years, for example the cost of pepper was expensive to Europeans, eventually spices came back to Europe in ships which flooded the market, drove down prices but made the pie bigger as middle income people began to use spices. High prices can equal innovation and competition.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you read or are involved in the strategic planning of a company, invariably you will want more growth. Growth can turn into more profits to then pay shareholders and higher stock valuations, which is good for shareholders. Everyone wins, except possibly the consumer. This is an issue when the largest companies seem and really do have a monopoly, but from their perspective there is always competition in all their fields of operations. At the moment, it is just not affecting profits, but there is competition. An example is the health insurers.

In an article by Reed Abelson and Rebecca Robbins of the New York Times News Service, the 3 biggest health insurers are UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health Group, and Cigna Group.

All the companies are similar to UnitedHealth includes a major insurer; a pharmacy benefit manager; PBM; a vast network of doctors and clinicians; a chain of surgery centers a clearinghouse that processes claims; a mail-order pharmacy and a bank.

Increasingly, Americans rely on one of the 3 titans for nearly all their medical care. The same company that employs their insures them also employs their provider and dispenses their drugs.

The 3 conglomerates each rank among the largest 15 US public companies by sales. None of them were in that category as recent as 2011, according to FactSet, a financial data provider.

Critics say the conglomerates have exploited conflicts to profit from their vast array of businesses, driving up medical costs and dampening competition. For example, a PBM often directs patients to its parent’s company pharmacies. The PBM is responsible compensating drug stores for a patient’s medications, but often it pays other pharmacies less than it does its affiliated pharmacy. What do you think typically happens – go to your pharmacy at higher price or lower price competitor?

The idea that PBMs should be severed from pharmacies has garnered support from 39 state attorney-generals; 25 policy and advocacy groups and Mark Cuban who runs an online pharmacy.

Under President Trump, the idea has been to cut corporate taxes, cut regulations, do you believe President Trump will call for a break up?

Linking to dividend paying stocks, every company wants growth but it you have too much of the pie and the pie is not growing, there will be calls for breakup. If you cast back to the 1900’s there were investment trusts that control almost every industry. Eventually they were all broken up, are we there. no but if consumers are worried about costs, that is one alternative to examine, how much real competition is in the marketplace. President Trump has said in the past, that he was going to fix the health care system in a day or a week with his plan. After 6 years, there still in no plan in sight.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Every generation is the title of a song and because it is generic to everyone the words are true from the 1980s when it was written and sung. The song talks about how every generation relates to movies often more than twice. Now days we might change movies to social media, because what social media you use often describes your age or generation. For younger people who have grown up with the smartphone there is an app for that. That suggests there are many apps for people to use and more importantly, it takes something special to break out and become widely used. One app that is very popular is TikTok..

Emily Baker-White wrote a book called The War over TikTok – every screen on the planet, published by W. W. Norton & Company, NY 2025.

Zhang Yiming, founder of a company called ByteDance, fueled by a central algorithm that profiled users, determined their interests and fed them news and entertainment that it thought they would like. It’s secret sauce was attention, if an app could hold users’ focus for long enough, it could track their decisions and actions and use those decisions and actions to predict what they wanted to see next, before they knew to look for it.

ByteDance, would build an app called TikTok: a frictionless feed of short, entertaining vides trained meticulously on people’s interests, personalities, and senses of humor. The company was founded in 2012, by 2021, TikTok would overtake Google as the most visited website in the world, by 2024 it had more than a billion users.

As a business, ByteDance was an extraordinary success.

The issue outside of China, is in China the government tries very hard not to let opposition to whatever it is doing to come to the forefront. They have cybersecurity people monitoring apps in China to ensure whatever position the government has, few words and videos are allowed to be aired. If companies allow too much, the government has and will take actions including shutting down the app.

In the US, you can read whatever you want into the above statement, an app that is based in China may or may not be helping the Chinese government. The algorithms can pinpoint opposition and they can take action. In the US, the data is supposed to be used as a block, not pinpoint individually.

The people who worry about cybersecurity started to worry about TikTok and the book is about the legal journey and ways TikTok tried to allow control in China, but outside of China to be less controlling and allow people to have joy while watching the videos.

In the end, all apps end up trying to monetize themselves because in 2020, businesses spent more than $75 billion on Chinese ads in China. In the US, businesses spent $130 billion on digital ads.

The book is about how the cybersecurity people were alarmed with what information the Chinese could or possibly could collect, what ByteDance did to try to lessen their concerns such as moving their headquarters from China to Singapore, but emails were found that Chinese regulators had a say. The US government considered seriously shutting down TikTok but President Trump was the wildcard. Trump represented neither the conservative or liberal position. He was an island, with the position: TikTok is good because TikTok is good for me.

As President, he has advocated TikTok’s US operations be sold to a group led by Oracle, Silver Lake Partners, and Aubi Dhabi based MGX now control 80.1%, while ByteDance owns 19.9%. The US operations use Oracle’s data centers.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the difference between the administrations of President Biden and President Trump is under Biden, Congress and Cybersecurity experts controlled the narrative. Under President Trump, the company has to pander to Trump so he is not personally affected, as long as he is neutral, companies can do what they need to do. Learning to be responsive to government is what executives must do.

There are more questions than answers, till next time – to raising questions.

Whenever there is big event that goes on, the rules change slightly and the question is always will they go back to where they were? or is the change permanent? For some, it is elections, but live sporting events have staying power and FIFA is changing viewership.

A number of years ago, a World Cup event meant more viewers for Cable TV and sale of more TVs. Then the internet came along with smartphones and today people use their phones and maybe a big screen watch party.

In an article by Brendan O’Boyle of Reuters, in a country that loves football or soccer, Brazil, watching the games meant watching TV, this year only half the games are broadcast the usual way.

You Tube-based CazeTV showed 104 matches for free, turning Latin America’s largest media market into a closely watched laboratory for live sports in the streaming era.

Early ratings such the market is being split. The streaming shift has given younger fans more ways to watch, while making some games easier to miss for casual viewers accustomed to finding the World Cup of free to air TV.

CazeTV says it peaked at 21.3 million simultaneous connected devices. Its owner took the same concept to Portugal where LiveModeTV has reached 90% of Portguese households.

LiveMode’s co-founder Sergio Lopes, said Brazil’s sports culture, high digital engagement and influential content creators created the correct environment.

FIFA, the governing body, said it signed the agreement with CazeTV to connect to younger audiences through digital community driven coverage.

Danni Moore, a broadcasting analyst at UK-based Ampere Analysis, found that 53% of sporting fans aged 18-34 prefer streaming, compared to 45% of fans overall.

Jose Carlos Marques, one of Brazil’s leading scholars on soccer media, Globo’s failure to buy all the World Cup rights in 2020 was a strategic mistake that allowed CazeTV backers to seize an opportunity in a country where online engagement is exceptionally high.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for years cable companies would have expected and forecast sales to be higher for sporting events, now the equation has changed. The monopoly has been broken and every new smartphone continues that change. It will be a big hurdle for CazeTV to turn the audience members to regular members that can be monetarized but change has happened. What other changes happened over the big event?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Most of us who live in urban areas, when we go to the grocery store we do not think about how the fruits and vegetables arrived at the Supermarket, just thankful they did when we want to purchase what we want and need. Thanks to a lawsuit in California we have added material to consider.

In an article by Claire Rush of the Associated Press, there is farmer in Reedley located in the Central Valley of California that has a on going lawsuit against Giumarra Brothers Fruit Co. over a new nectarine called Monalise which has a sweeter taste than the normal nectarine.

Court filings show the farmer Mr. Mora signed a sublicensing agreement with Giumarra in 2017 to grow the Monalise. The farmer required him for the fruit to be packed and sold through Giumarra. Under the agreements, the farmer was to pay Giumarra a royalty of $2.50 a tree and a 4% production royalty based off the gross sales of the fruit the trees produced.

The farmer alleges in 2022, the company sold the nectarines to Taiwan in violation of the contract which states Giumarra would only sell the nectarines in the US and Canada.

The farmer did not like Giumarra and sold his fruit to another packer, which Giumarra sued him for breach of contract.

Giumarra says all rights to the Monalise variety are owned by Star Fruits Diffusion, a French company that works with plant breeding programs, while Giumarra holds to right to sublicense the variety for testing, production and sale.

In the meantime, the farmer would rather give away the fruit from the nectarines rather than sell it to Giumarra, which is why it made the news.

Plant breeders, including universities, have long experimented with new crop varieties. For example Washington State University developed the Rainer cherry in the 1950’s. The University of Minnesota released the Honeycrisp apple in the 1990s. Both varieties are now in the public domain and can be grown and sold by anyone.

Bradley Rickard, professor of food and agricultural economics at Cornell University, said fruit patents are becoming increasingly common. A patent allows a breeder to collect a royalty from the trees it sells, the fruit that the trees produce or both. In 2010, the University of Minnesota was sued about the Sweet Tango apple and won.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, often times you believe some industries are relatively simple, but they all have their complexities. Understanding how and who makes money is why you need to do your homework.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions. .

For as much as the world runs on technology, there is nothing like personal meetings to determine if co-operation is the name of the game. When a new CEO is elected, does he/she have similar values as the past CEO, what relationship do people have?

In an article by Francesco Canepa and Balazs Koranyi of Reuters, the European Central Bank’s Annual gathering in Sintra, Portugal (the Federal Reserve has an August meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming) new US Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh attended and made a good impression.

Officials believe Mr. Warsh’s outreach as a sign the Fed would stay engaged on the global state, easing fears of a retreat from the international forums that anchor central bank co-operation.

The reassurance was significant, that the White House will be committed to the international co-ordination that has long been a pillar of global monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve remains the ultimate provider of dollar liquidity in times of financial stress and for some countries, the custodian of a substantial share of their gold reserve.

It is also the most influential voice in global debates on monetary policy and financial regulation.

Many of the European bankers had a close working relationship with former Chair Jerome Powell. Several central bankers who have known Mr. Warsh since his time as a Fed governor between 2006 and 2011, or through his involvement in the Group of Thirty consultative body, said they recognized the same policy making they had dealt with for years.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, it is sometimes easier to focus on whether the company makes profits to pay dividends, but companies are made of people and relationships matter. Part of your evaluation of the business is the people of the company and if they have what bankers classified as character.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

When you think about which companies have large oil and gas reserves? You likely said countries in the Middle East, the US, Canada, Venezuela, and Russia. Of those countries, the only one that is at war is Russia. The Ukraine Russia conflict has lasted over 3 years and there are few signs it will stop.

Originally, Russia had the better conventional weapons and given it is bigger than the Ukraine, it had more soldiers to go to the battle fields. Then something changed, how war is fought has changed forever. Both Ukraine and Russia have drones, and Ukraine is getting better every year.

The Ukraine’s drone are targeting oil and gas infrastructure to ensure the average Russian sees the pain of the war. For given Russia’s oil and gas reserves, selling the oil and gas helps ensures the stability of the Russian economy. However, when Ukraine hits Russian oil refineries, shortages of output including gasoline happen.

In an article from Reuters, Russia needed to buy or import gasoline from India. Two tankers with 30,000 to 40,000 tons have been sent by India to Russia. Russia is buying up to 400,000 tons of gasoline from India and Belarus.

Gasoline consumption in Russia is at least 110,000 tons a day in the summer.

Belarus has tripled gasoline rail supplies to Russia to more than 70,000 tons in the first half of the June compared to the first half of May.

Russia’s oil accounted for more than half of India’s overall imports in June, up from 36.5% in May.

Recent reports suggest that 40% of Russia’s oil refinery infrastructure is down.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, infrastructure is a key driver in investments and how to see the world is doing. Russia has one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world, but Ukraine closes refineries which means there is a shortage of gasoline and long lines for consumers. Keeping your eyes on infrastructure is a good thing.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.