In one of the most convoluted lawsuits of all time, a cabal of state attorney generals and the Federal Trade Commission, under the incompetent leadership of chair Andrew Ferguson, are now accusing financial firms Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard of monopolistic behavior.
The complaint asserts that these firms bought coal stocks and then helped impose radical environmental restrictions on the companies they partially own, so that coal output would fall and the price of coal would rise. The lawsuit alleges that this strategy generated "supra-competitive profits" for those investors.
If your head is spinning around from this loopy conspiracy theory - it should be. If it were true, then these asset managers must be capable of pulling off the equivalent of a triple-bank shot in billiards. They allegedly invested in coal companies, then partnered with environmental groups to destroy them.
The Vanguards of the world didn't need to conspire to restrict coal production: that's what Democrats like Joe Biden and the environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have been doing for years.
Over the past 15 years, 63 major coal companies have closed their mining operations. So just where exactly are these "supra-profits" that the FTC and the state lawyers are asserting? Coal production has been dropping for two decades.
