If you are an early bird like me, perhaps you caught Sir Richard Branson this morning on Squawk Box talking about Virgin Charter?

There were more than a few interesting subjects discussed. First his official launch of Virgin Charter, which is a system to fill empty legs of Private Jets. It is basically a registration system that allows companies to put passengers on an otherwise empty Jet. Some paying customers is better than paying for fuel on and empty plane as it flies back to home base after dropping off people at their destination.

Virgin Charter is finally open for business as of today. If you have never flown by private jet, it is the way to go. With airport delays these days even on a one or two hour trip you can waste the better part of a whole day just getting somewhere.   You can check them out here at www.VirginCharter.com .

Whereas with a charter, you usually fly to a smaller airport that is much closer to your destination, and in many cases you can arrive only five minutes before you take off. This can literally save you a whole day’s worth of work.

Just think about this, if you have a whole day to work on what makes you money can you use that time to come up with an idea that will make you an extra $5,000 to $20,000 this year? If so, you probably just paid for your trip and then some.

If you take four or five people with you, the economics really makes sense when you add up what a whole days worth of lost production.

Branson also discussed the state of the economies around that world and the fact that he fully expects India to top 10% economic growth this year and China not to be far behind. While here in the US, we are going to be lucky to break 1%.

This should cause a great deal of concern. He rightfully points out that much of this can be contributed to governmental interference and protectionism that is going on here in the US.

He brought up the insane sugar subsidy that is causing America to pay nearly double the price for sugar as the world market, which in turn has caused us to use corn for producing ethanol which is 8 times less efficient per acre than sugar. This in turn has caused food prices to skyrocket. Have you seen what has happened to the price of a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs this year?

Talk about what I like to call the Stupidity Multiplier. 99.9% of all market malfunctions can be attributed to Government interference and the Stupidity Multiplier and he spoke about just a few more examples that are going on in the US.

He also spoke about the knee jerk protectionist restriction on foreign investments in US airlines and in other areas.

He rightfully points out that most of the US airlines are Dinosaurs that should have been extinct decades ago but continue to receive government bailouts no matter how badly they are run.

If you have ever flown on a decent foreign airline, you know how bad most of our airlines really are.

One other note, silver has topped $20 per ounce and to think that just a few short years ago it was at about half of that.

I am trying to get an interview with someone from Virgin Charter. We will see how responsive their PR people are.

With all of this in mind, knowing that the government is artificially keeping up grocery prices and oil prices here in the US is there a way that you can take advantage of this? Are they going to blame everyone and everything else and do even more harm trying to “fix” things? Could be some great plays coming up.

Overall, you can look at energy prices continuing to rise at least 10% short term and I predict we might see oil top $110, to even $120 a barrel before the year is out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Economics, Investing, Stupidity Multiplier Alert, The Market. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.