62% Of All US Jobs Don’t Pay Enough To Support A Middle-Class Life

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is rapidly disappearing...

According to a shocking new study that was just released, 62 percent of all jobs in the United States do not pay enough to support a middle class life.  That means that “the American Dream” is truly out of reach for most of the country at this point.  Today, Americans are working harder than ever but the cost of living continues to rise much faster than our paychecks are increasing.  Earlier this month, I went and looked at the latest numbers from the Social Security Administration, and I discovered that 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year.  But that is just above poverty level.  In fact, the federal poverty level for a family of five is currently $29,420Most families are just barely scraping by from month to month, and most U.S. workers are just one major setback away from falling out of the middle class.

It wasn’t always this way.  At one time, America had the strongest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world.  But now this latest study has discovered that “it’s only 38 percent of people who get the middle class life or better”

When wages are weighed against the cost of living in the largest 204 metropolitan regions across the nation, 62 percent of jobs don’t pay enough for a dual-income household with children to meet the definition of ‘middle class,’ according to a new ‘Opportunity Index‘ developed by Third Way, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

‘We were shocked to find out it’s only 38 percent of people who get the middle class life or better,’ said Ryan Bhandari, a policy advisor for Third Way, in an interview with DailyMail.com.

It is no wonder why so many people are shopping at Wal-Mart and the Dollar Tree these days.

For many Americans, those are the literally the only places they can afford to shop.

When I was growing up, it seemed like literally everyone else around me was “middle class”, but now those days are long gone.  Here is a breakdown of some more of the numbers from this latest study

  • 30 percent of jobs are “hardship jobs,” meaning they don’t allow a single adult to make ends meet.

  • 32 percent are “living wage” jobs, enough to get by but not to take vacations, save for retirement or live in a moderately priced home.

  • 23 percent are middle-class jobs, allowing for dining out, modest vacations and putting some money away for retirement.

  • 15 percent are “professional jobs,” paving the way for a more comfortable life that includes more elaborate vacations and entertainment and a more expensive home.

It sure must be nice to be in that top 15 percent.

And the definition of a “middle class income” changes based on where you live.  As the study noted, it is much cheaper to live a middle class lifestyle in the middle of the country than it is to do so on the west coast.  The following comes from the Daily Mail

For example, a worker in San Francisco – one of the most expensive housing markets in the country – must make a minimum of $82,142 to achieve a middle class lifestyle.

By comparison, workers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa can achieve middle class status in a job paying $40,046 or more per year.

So many of us have run ourselves ragged doing the things that we were “supposed” to do, and we assumed that a middle class life would be the reward at the end of the trail.

Unfortunately, that reward has never materialized for millions of hard working Americans.  USA Today profiled one of those deeply frustrated workers in a recent article…

Esther Akutekha, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, has a good job as a public relations specialist that pays more than $50,000 a year.

But because of the $1,440 a month rent on her studio apartment in the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, she never takes vacations, dines out just once a month and scrapes together dinner leftovers for lunch the next day.

Can you identify with Esther?

I sure can.

It can be soul crushing to work as hard as you can only to realize that your goals are now farther away than ever.  At this point, Esther is not even sure that she will ever be able to afford to have children

“I’m frustrated with the fact that I’m not going to be able to save anything because my rent is so high,” says Akutekha, who says she’s 30ish. “I don’t even know if I can afford” to have children.

We have been told that the economy has been “booming” in recent years, but the truth is that it has only been booming for people at the very top of the pyramid.

For most Americans it is as if the last recession never ended, and things just seem to keep getting worse

“There’s an opportunity crisis in the country,” says Jim Kessler, vice president of policy for Third Way and editor of the report. “It explains some of the economic uneasiness and, frankly, the political uneasiness” even amid the most robust U.S. economy and labor market since before the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. But is the economy robust? Or are we being fed a line by the mainstream media? The middle class is not thriving, and increased regulations and higher taxes make it difficult for people to branch out on their own and create their own business.

We definitely need to make it much, much easier for people to start small businesses, and this is something that I have written about extensively.  Small business creation has traditionally been one of the primary vehicles for upward mobility in our nation, but right now the rate of small business creation is hovering near all-time lows.  We desperately need to get that turned around if we ever want to have any hope of restoring vitality to our middle class.

If we continue on the path that we are on, we are going to continue to get the same results.  Tonight, more than half a million Americans are homeless, and the ranks of the poor are growing with each passing day.

America needs a strong middle class, but currently our middle class is disintegrating at a startling pace.

If we are not able to reverse this trend, what is the future going to look like for our society?

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Let’s Not Treat Koch’s Libertarian Opposition to U.S. Military Action in Yemen as ‘Unexpected’

Charles KochOver at The Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman takes note of the cross-ideological alliance trying to put an end to the U.S. military’s participation in Saudi Arabia’s deadly activities in Yemen. The alliance itself is not new. Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) and Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) have long been critical of our involvement with and funding of military actions that have killed innocents, especially since we are not officially at war with any of the nations involved.

What’s new, Ackerman notes, is that the Charles Koch Institute is briefing conservative lawmakers about a resolution introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) that would direct the president to end all military action in Yemen that is not covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). To keep U.S. forces involved in the conflict, the White House would need to seek an explicit declaration of war from Congress.

The resolution has 69 co-sponsors right now, only three of which are Republicans (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky among them). The Koch Institute and libertarian-conservative FreedomWorks are going to be pushing Republicans to try to get a vote in November, after the midterms. Whether such a resolution would actually change anything is a question that deserves our skepticism. Every presidential administration since that of George W. Bush has used the AUMF to justify military activity against any terrorist organization overseas.

The subheadline of Ackerman’s piece calls the Koch Institute’s involvement “unexpected.” Media companies should be past this by now, particularly since they’ve obsessed over the Kochs for nearly a decade. The Koch Institute’s foreign policy page is very clear that while it supports a strong military, it’s opposed to the sort of interventionist adventures associated that have defined our activities in the Middle East for years now. Here’s a blog post from 2016 expressing concern about military actions in Yemen and the negative consequences of our alliance with Saudi Arabia.

In fairness, Ackerman’s reporting does not treat it like an unexpected development. He notes that FreedomWorks has been lobbying for a year on a failed effort by Lee and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to force a vote on military action in Yemen.

But it’s nevertheless frustrating that the headlines tend to treat the Koch brothers’ very common libertarian attitudes toward a number of policies as surprising. We saw it happen years ago where people seemed to be surprised at David Koch’s position in support of gay marriage recognition in 2012, even though he, like many libertarians, had felt that way for quite a while (before many Democratic leaders, in fact). Media outlets seem to frequently feign surprise that the Kochs favor criminal justice reforms, even though they’ve supported such efforts for years.

There’s a tendency among some media outlets to approach the Koch’s libertarian brand of conservatism as though the brothers’ deviation from typical Republican stances are unusual for them. They’re not. When media outlets write this way, it tells libertarian audiences that they know very little about the Kochs and what separates libertarians from conservatives. Disappointing libertarians may seem like small potatoes, but it also misinforms people who know little about what distinguishes libertarians from Republicans. I would argue that this is actually bad: it allows Republicans to pass as lovers of liberty even when they’re not, and—perhaps in rarer instances—it allows libertarians to join ranks with Republicans when they shouldn’t. Treat them as distinct, and you make it harder for both groups to say one thing and then do another without consequence.

Disclosure: David Koch sits on the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this site.

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Trump Bumps Border Troop Estimate To 15,000 As Migrant Caravan Advances

President Trump on Wednesday said that the number of military troops deployed to the southern US border could be as high as 15,000 – more than the 14,000 deployed in Afghanistan – as he vowed not to allow people from the “very dangerous” caravan to enter the country. 

“Nobody is coming in. We’re not allowing people to come in,” said Trump. 

Speaking with reporters at the White House, Trump said “we’ll go up to anywhere between 10 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else at the border,” adding that the Untied States is “going to be prepared” and that migrants are “not coming into our country.” 

There are approxiamtely 2,100 National Guard members currently helping at the border, while the Pentagon last said that 5,200 active-duty troops could join them. 

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‘Godfather’ Of Market Analysis: “Technical Damage Done To The Stock Market Is Much Worse”

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The so-called “Godfather” of market chart analysis said that the damage already done to the stock market is much worse than most people are talking about. Ralph Acampora, a prominent market technician, says the stock market is in bad shape and it’s worse than many Wall Street investors appreciate.

From a technical perspective, the damage that has been done technically to the stock market is much, much worse than people are talking about,” he told MarketWatch in a phone interview on Tuesday. 

Acampora also said that the technical damage that has resulted in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 index erasing all of their gains for 2018, and the Nasdaq Composite Index falling into correction territory (which is usually characterized as a decline of at least 10% from a recent peak) will take months to repair.

“I’ve been a bull for a long, long time and like everyone, I was waiting for a correction but this is something different,” said Acampora.

“All the leadership is getting crushed,” he said. He added that he feels that the entire market will go into bear territory soon.

He speculates that the market may not be healed until around the first quarter of 2019.

Acampora said that the current dynamic in the market was eerily similar to the stock-market crash of 1987 when the Dow plunged a historic 22.6% in a single day on October 19 of that year.

“Honestly, I don’t see the low being put in yet and I think we’re going to go into a bear market,” he said according to MarketWatch. 

The Dow would have to fall another 3,162 points, or about 13%, from its current levels to close 20% below its October 3 record close of 26,828.39, as of Tuesday late-afternoon trade. Additionally. Acampora is not the only market analyst to feel that the bear market is upon us.  Peter Schiff actually says we are already in a bear market, so all news is bad news.

Schiff says that the media’s talking heads are simply using the tariffs as an excuse. The real truth is that most people are in a selling mood. “Stocks are expensive. The bull market is over. It’s now a bear market. People want to get out. People are allocating out. Growth is slowing whether people want to acknowledge it or not,” said Schiff. -SHTFPlan, April 2018

Michael Wilson, Morgan Stanley’s chief United States equity strategist, said he believes the market is undergoing a “rolling bear market.”

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It’s OK Not to Vote

You’re probably a good person, or at least you try to be. You want to do the right thing. But are you having trouble shaking the sense the you might have better things to do next Tuesday than voting?

Instead of trying to motivate yourself and others to do a thing that feels pointless, why not stop to consider the possibility it actually is pointless? And not in a “all of human endeavor is pointless” kind of way. In a highly specific way that can actually be dealt with productively.

First things first: Your vote is wildly, insanely, hugely unlikely to influence the outcome of an election. No presidential election has ever been decided by a single vote. Academic surveys of close elections have turned up one 1910 Buffalo contest that may have been a true single-vote victory, and that’s in 100 years of congressional races. In four of the 10 closest congressional and state legislative races dating back to 1898, further investigations and recounts nearly always unearthed margins significantly larger than what initially appeared in the official record. Your vote is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely to change the outcome of an election.

But what about the cascade effect, you ask? Won’t my decision not to vote influence others, reducing voter turnout and thereby the legitimacy of our very form of government, hastening the demise of the American experiment?

Probably not! People are hard to convince. I’m not even convincing you right now! You’re probably not going to vote anyway, and you’re still not convinced by this post! That’s OK. You’re just making my point for me. Your actions are unlikely to influence others in this instance, so you should do what’s right for you. (Alternately, you could skip voting and simply mislead others into thinking you did so. You can order a roll of “I Voted” stickers right now and have them in time for this Election Day and every single one thereafter.)

And listen, if you’re in it for the warm fuzzies and the people-watching, that’s fine. Maybe your own pleasure in the act of voting is the best you can do with your time to make the world a better place. That’s OK. It’s good to do things that make you happy! But for goodness’ sake, stop looking askance at the stickerless.

We have parent-teacher conferences (Why, D.C. Public Schools? Why!?). We have columns to write about the nature of civic virtue. We have a shift at the soup kitchen. We have one stamp and two envelopes to mail. We have a weddings or funerals to attend. We have Kenyan cows to Kickstart. We have a vacation later this year. We have jury duty. We have to correct someone who is wrong on the internet. We have puppies to pet. We have burritos to microwave. Exactly 100 percent of the activities listed above will have more tangible benefit in the world than voting.

To be clear: If someone said to me, “KMW, you are the only voter in this election. What you decide will in fact determine the outcome of the election,” then I would vote. I do not think the act of ballot casting is (necessarily) intrinsically bad for all humans. But neither is it intrinsically good.

If you do want to dig deeper on that intrinsic badness angle angle, may I suggest philosopher Jason Brennan’s book on the topic? In 2012, I was raring to go on the idea that voting might in fact be immoral. But I’ve mellowed in my old age. I don’t want to fight you about whether an uninformed vote may actually cause harm by incentivizing stupider party platforms and rhetoric. I don’t want to squabble about whether believing the candidates or the system are ethically flawed or produce bad results makes voters complicit in the subsequent abuses by the powerful. I don’t want to holler about how damaging the cliche “if you don’t vote you can’t complain” is to the fundamental tenets of free speech. (Hm. I guess I actually still do want to fight about those things.)

Bless this lineup of “young people” who explained to New York magazine why they are not voting. They seems to be the only ones in this crazy world who understand opportunity cost. The article has been shared a lot, and I suspect mostly in the service of vote-shaming and fostering generational warfare. I am in favor of both shame and generational warfare, but this is not the way to go about it. Because, to be honest, nearly each and every one of these 20-somethings is making solid points.

“The idea of leaving work, forwarding all of my calls to my phone, to go stand in line for four hours, to probably get called back to work before I even get halfway through the line, sounds terrible,” says Maria, 26. She goes on to note that she cares deeply about certain issues, including immigration and reproductive rights, but rightly recognizes that standing in line to vote is not an efficient way to further those causes. And there’s Thomas, 28, who says: “Over the years, I’ve started to think maybe we don’t have to frame this so much as an individual act with these moral consequences and that I need to stop being so dramatic about it.” Wise. And of course Tim, the hero of the forum who bravely proclaims: “I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety.”

So here’s a simple a proposition: Instead of voting on Election Day, just do the things that actually benefit you, your family, your community, or the world. Instead of queuing up to enact a symbolic ritual with a vanishingly small chance of altering the course of events, take the time and money you would have spent voting—even if it’s very little time and/or money—and do literally anything else as long as it has real world impact. Including fighting with me on Twitter about this post, if you like.

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Wild Animal Populations Down 60 Percent Since 1970

BiodiversityRobertAdrianHillmanDreamstimeTwenty-six million elephants roamed Africa before 1500, according to one estimate. That dropped to around 10 million just before the outbreak of the First World War and now stands at around 350,000 today. Some 200,000 wild lions hunted in Africa a century ago; now only 20,000 do. Between 30-50 million guanacos grazed the South American Pampas before the arrival of Columbus; now 2 million or so do.

In North America, 30 to 60 million bison used to ranged from the Appalachians to the Rockies, from the Gulf Coast to Alaska. By 1889, there were just 1,091 left. Today, the private and public herds number about 500,000 bison. Before 1500, North America was home to 60 to 400 million beavers; today 10 to 15 million live in the wild.

In 1900, India was home to 20,000 to 40,000 wild tigers. That number had fallen to just over 1,400 by 2006, but has since risen to more than 2,200 in 2014, when the last census was done. In 1800, about 1 million rhinoceroses lived on earth. Today there are fewer than 28,000. (The Chinese government just announced that it will allow the use of rhino horn and tiger parts for cultural and medical purposes.)

The new Living Planet Report amply confirms these anecdotal declines in wildlife abundance and goes further by aggregating data on overall vertebrate species population trends. The 2018 report’s Living Planet Index, compiled by the Institute of Zoology and the World Wildlife Fund, measures biodiversity abundance levels based on 16,704 populations of 4,005 vertebrate species across the globe and shows an overall decline of 60 percent between 1970 and 2014. Basically, the number of animals living in the wild—mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians—has declined by 60 percent.

“The main drivers of biodiversity decline continue to be the overexploitation of species, agriculture and land conversion,” notes the report. Overexploitation is exemplified by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2018 finding that the percentage of marine fish stocks exploited at biologically unsustainable levels increased from 10 percent in 1974, to 33.1 percent in 2015.

Declining numbers of wild animals is not a new trend, but it might be reversible.

The historical trajectory of how animal populations have changed over the millennia is captured in a fascinating study on global biomass distribution published last June in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

The PNAS study notes that “human activity contributed to the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction between ≈50,000 and ≈3,000 years ago, which claimed around half of the large (>40 kg) land mammal species.” Among the 178 now extinct mammal species are the woolly mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, toxodons, Irish elks, and woolly rhinoceros.

The study estimates that the biomass of wild land mammals measured in gigatonnes (1 billion metric tonnes) of carbon (GtC) prior to the period of extinction was at ≈ 0.02 GtC. The present-day biomass of wild land mammals is approximately sevenfold lower, at ≈ 0.003 GtC.

Despite these wild species extinctions and reduced numbers, the biomass of land animals has never been greater. Today, the PNAS study reports, the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 GtC) is an order of magnitude larger than that of all the terrestrial wild megafauna before the extinction period. Even the total biomass of humans (≈0.05 GtC) is around twice the biomass of all wild megafauna before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction event.

HumanBiomass

Thus in a real sense, “the natural state of the world—to be full of large herbivorous animals and carnivores that eat them—continues to the present day,” suggests York University conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas in his riveting book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. Now the herbivores are cows and chickens and we’re the carnivores.

As I have written earlier: I mourn the loss of species. Each species embodies complex genetic libraries, behavioral repertoires, and evolutionary histories that are both scientifically fascinating and aesthetically fulfilling. As a relatively well-off First Worlder, I have had the intense pleasure of walking in the wild within 40 feet of grazing rhinos and of swimming with Galápagos penguins. It would be a shame if future generations do not have an opportunity to enjoy such experiences.

There is good news with regard to the Living Planet Report’s concerns about land conversion—the amount of land used to grow crops is declining. As a likely result of this trend, a recent study using satellite data found that global tree cover has expanded by more than 7 percent since 1982.

Jesse Ausubel, a researcher at Rockefeller University, calculates that we are on the verge of peak farmland. An area nearly double the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi could be restored to nature by 2060. It is feasible that new production technologies will greatly reduce the amount of land and other resources devoted to crops and livestock even more.

As more people voluntarily move from subsistence agriculture to take advantage of better life opportunities in cities, ever more land will to revert to nature. Signatories to the Convention of Biological Diversity adopted, in 2010, the goal of setting aside at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas for conservation by 2020 (the U.S. has not signed). Since 2000, the amount of land incorporated into protected areas has grown from 11.9 to 15 percent. The area of oceans has increased from 0.7 percent to 7 percent.

Given these trends, there is scope for the expansion of wild nature over the course this century. In my review of Chris Thomas’s book, I note that he argues that since ecological change is inevitable, we need to throw aside static notions of restoring local ecosystems to some imagined prehuman Edenic state. “Our aim should be to maintain robust ecosystems (however different from those that exist now or existed in the past) and species, rather than defend an unstable equilibrium,” urges Thomas. “We can let change happen.”

“We can think about engineering new ecosystems and biological communities into existence, inspired but not constrained by the past,” explains Thomas. Employing such strategies also means that “we can protect plants and animals in places where it is feasible to do so, rather than where they came from.”

For example, why not “rewild” parts of North America that once contained mammoths, camels, and saber-tooth tigers with ecologically similar species from other parts of the world? Let’s loose elephants, lions, cheetahs, camels, and llamas to roam unpopulated regions of the West. In place of the now-extinct woolly rhinoceros and European hippopotamus, why not settle the Sumatran hairy rhinoceros and African hippopotamus in the Camargue wetlands of southern France? Or transplant giant flightless birds—ostriches, rheas, cassowaries—to New Zealand, where they can fill the ecological niches of the giant moas eaten to extinction by the Maoris’ Polynesian ancestors?

Three researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society argued in their June BioScience article that humanity is poised to move in this century from an ecological bottleneck to a conservation breakthrough. “For the first time in the Anthropocene, the global demographic and economic trends that have resulted in unprecedented destruction of the environment are now creating the necessary conditions for a possible renaissance of nature,” they argue. “Drawing reasonable inferences from current patterns, we can predict that 100 years from now, the Earth could be inhabited by between 6 and 8 billion people, with very few remaining in extreme poverty, most living in towns and cities, and nearly all participating in a technologically driven, interconnected market economy.” These fortunate trends, they contend, will result in vast expanses of land and sea being returned to the natural world.

The Living Planet Report is describing the current bottleneck, but the Wildlife Conservation Society researchers marshal strong arguments that we are well on the way toward the breakthrough period that relaxes the current anthropogenic pressures on species and ecosystems, and which will enable nature to recover extensively by the end of this century.

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Shocktober Is Over – Global Stocks Lose $8 Trillion, Most Since Lehman

Eight. Trillion. Dollars…

And it’s gone…

“The volatility you’re seeing is in reaction to a market that has continuously had a buy-the-dip mentality that is being challenged now,” said Rick Bensignor, president and founder of the Bensignor Group.

“The market is finally putting people’s beliefs to the test.”

October’s Carnage at-a-glance…

  • S&P 17 down days most since 1970

  • Nasdaq 100 worst month since Oct 2008

  • S&P worst month since Feb 2009 (lowest monthly close since April)

  • FANG stocks crashed 21% in October – the biggest monthly drop on record

  • Semis plunged almost 15%, the biggest monthly drop since Nov 2008

  • “Most Shorted” stocks down 13.8% in October – worst month since Jan 2016 (or best for shorts)

  • S&P Financials dropped over 7% in October – worst month since Jan 2016

  • GSIBs (Global Systemically Important Banks) dropped over 10% in October, worst month since June 2016 (Brexit)

  • China

  • European stocks worst month since Jan 2016

  • Hedge Funds were hammered as Goldman’s VIP Basket plummeted 11.5% in October – its biggest drop ever.

  • Stocks and Bonds both fell on the month (first time since Feb 2018)

  • This is the worst October for Junk bonds since 2008 (HYG saw record volume in October)

  • USD’s biggest monthly gain since Nov 2016 (Trump election)

  • USD and Gold both rallied for first month since Feb 2017

  • Gold’s biggest monthly gain against Yuan since June 2016

  • Oil’s worst month since July 2016

While the world’s stocks (ex-US) are down almost 13% YTD, US equities are unchanged (erasing the entire year’s gains in October)…

 

So, let’s start with China – because that’s where the chaos seems to be emanating from…Chinese stocks in October fell the most since Jan 2016, despite the heavy hand of The National Team…

 

European stocks tumbled around 6% on the month – the worst month since Jan 2016… Italy and France were worst on the month

 

Despite ending the month with the biggest 2-day rise since the rebound from Brexit…

Iit was an ugly ugly month for US stocks…

In managing to close green today, the S&P avoided doing something it has never done before – not having one back-to-back positive close.

 

The Dow managed to scramble back above its 200DMA today but disappointingly closed below the crucial technical level…

 

We note that today’s ramp was not a short-squeeze per se as “Most Shorted” stocks actually fell on the day. October was the biggest drop for “Most Shorted” stocks since Jan 2016…

Breaking the longer-term uptrend…

 

Bigger picture themes show growth stocks underperforming value stocks by the most since March 2001…Russell 1000 Growth/Value breaking below its 200DMA for the first time since March 2017…

Growth bounced back the last two days…

 

Only Staples and Utilities managed gains on the month… Energy and Industrials were worst

 

FANG Stocks suffered their worst month ever…

 

…led by NFLX and AMZN (even with the bounce on the last two days)…

 

Intraday trading in October was also extreme with TICK crashing twice to its lowest since May 2010’s Flash Crash…

But even more stunning than that, Monday’s swing this week was almost unprecedented as investor psychology switched from buy-the-dip to sell-it-all. The breadth gauge spiked to almost 1,500 before tumbling to about minus 1,700. Such a big intraday turnaround has happened only once before in data going back to 1989.

 

The percent of Nasdaq Composite stocks still above their 50- and 200-DMAs understandably has plummeted to the low double-digits.

Nasdaq stocks have plunged as one with intra-index correlation soaring in October…

 

If you need another example of the extreme pain in the tech sector, Nasdaq VIX is at its highest relative to S&P VIX since 2004…

 

Stocks and bonds both fell on the month – first time since Feb 2018…

 

October has been positive for high-yield bonds in every year since 2008, when the market tumbled almost 16 percent in the month.

It was also the worst month for HY bonds since Dec 2015 (and HYG – the HY Bond ETF – saw record volume)…

 

Energy HY bonds were the biggest laggard but every sector was hit…

 

Treasury yields were higher on the month (despite stocks plunge) with the long-end underperforming… (up 37bps in the last two months)

 

That is a dramatic steepening on the month – 2s30s +13bps (biggest since Nov 2016 – Trump election)…

 

The Dollar surged over 2.3% in October -0 its biggest month since Nov 2016 (election) to April 2017 highs…

Offshore Yuan fell for the 7th month in a row

 

EURUSD tested down to critical support levels today with the biggest monthly drop since May…

 

On the day the Turkish Lira tanked after the finmin announced plans to cut taxes… October was the Lira’s best month since May 2003…

 

All the pesos were punished in October except Argentina – The Real and Lira also gained…

 

Cryptos were all lower on the month with Bitcoin the notable outperformer… vol has collapsed in Bitcoin too

 

Despite the strong dollar, gold managed gains in October as crude was crushed…

 

Gold and the dollar both rallied in October – the first time since Feb 2017…

 

Commodities were pretty much a one-way street lower all month…

 

WTI tumbled today back below its 200DMA with the worst month since July 2016… to the lowest in over 2 months

 

So are you buying this dip? With the rest of the world’s markets and the most systemically important bank stocks all collapsing along with global balance sheets, roll the dice?

Do you feel lucky punk?

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Local News Spreads Panic About Under-18’s Taking Uber and Lyft Unaccompanied

Local news has seized on a new terror plaguing the nation: minors riding unaccompanied in Ubers and Lyfts.

Las Vegas ABC affiliate KTNV warned viewers yesterday that this “dangerous practice is rampant across Las Vegas and drivers say no one is trying to stop it.” On Monday, Nashville’s FOX 17 ran with a hard-hitting investigation of a 15-year-old who went undercover for the station in order to take an Uber to a coffee shop.

In February, D.C.’s FOX5 did a segment featuring a 12-year old who was shuttled from one parent’s house to another alone, via Uber. That same month, NBC’s Bay Area affiliate warned of a “state loophole” that “leaves minors at risk while riding Uber and Lyft.”

The danger all these children are in apparently is that they run the risk of being kidnapped, assaulted, or worse, by whichever random psycho they connect with via ridesharing apps.

Amy Sulam-Gibbs, the mother of the 15-year-old in the FOX 17 story, told the station: “They can’t do full psych evals on these drivers. You really are taking a risk. You’re getting into a stranger from the internet’s car.”

The “loophole” that NBC believes is endangering minors is the fact that Uber and Lyft drivers do not need to be fingerprinted the same way daycare providers and school bus drivers are. Other stories blame the ridesharing companies for failing to better enforce their own terms of service, which specifically prohibit those under 18 from using the app.

Yet, for all the fearmongering, crimes committed against minors by ridesharing drivers are mercifully rare.

The KTNV story mentions only two examples of a minor being assaulted by their driver, one in Orange County, California the other in the Miami, Florida area. The NBC story mentions a third incident in which a driver exposed himself to a 16-year-old passenger.

All three incidence are, of course, terrible. However, in the two assault cases, the information collected by ridesharing companies meant the perpetrators were quickly caught.

In the Miami case, police were able to subpoena Lyft for information on the driver after the victim reported the assault. In the Orange County case, the family member who had ordered the Uber ride for the underage victim was able to use the app’s tracking feature to find her and her assailant after she did not return home on time.

In the story reported by NBC, Uber proved particularly unhelpful, but that was, ironically enough, a byproduct of the company not allowing minors to use its app.

When the 16-year-old in question tried to report her exhibitionist driver to Uber, her account was deactivated because she was under 18, making it more difficult for her to give identifying information about him to law enforcement. (Uber also declined to give the driver’s information to law enforcement without a subpoena, which police were, according to NBC’s telling, unable to get because the underlying crime was only a misdemeanor.)

An exhaustive CNN review of assaults by rideshare drivers turned up 103 cases that’ve occurred in the last four years, and by far, the most likely people to get assaulted by their driver were not children, but adults, usually intoxicated women travelling alone.

There also seems to be little evidence that more extensive background checks—beyond the type that both companies already perform—would reduce the incidences of assault.

A 2016 story from the Associated Press was unable to say one way or another if passengers were more likely to be assaulted by rideshare drivers or traditional cabbies. A Cato Institute study the year before found that Uber and Lyft’s requirements for drivers were more strict than those governing taxis and other for-hire vehicles.

It’s important to recognize too that while there are risks for minors taking Uber and Lyft—which is against the companies’ terms of service—there are also risks to finding a way to prohibit youths from these services.

Rideshare companies can provide a sober ride home for under-18s who are too drunk to drive and too embarrassed to call mom or dad. It could also help children of single parents (or overworked couples) get where they need to go before and after school, or to and from part-time jobs.

Indeed, there’s already budding demand for these services, as evidenced by smaller, kid-focused ridesharing services like Zum and Sheprd.

It’s natural for parents to be concerned about the dangers of teenagers and younger children getting rides from complete strangers. That said, there is little evidence that this means of transportation is especially dangerous to minors.

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Police Detained a College Student Over Terminator Costume

|||Twitter/@UCFPoliceAn incident on the University of Central Florida’s campus is a reminder that not everyone is willing to suspend their fear and paranoia for the sake of Halloween.

The campus was put on alert Tuesday when unnamed student decided dress up like the Terminator. The student decided to take his costume to the next level by pairing his dark clothing with a bandolier containing real ammunition. According to a police statement, someone made a call to 911 to report the student as suspicious. Police arrived “swiftly,” detained the student, and questioned him. University police determined that he was not a threat and decided against making an arrest.

University police shared a picture of the student’s costume, warning that real ammunition and weapons “scares others” and “puts safety at risk.”

According to university policy, the possession of weapons and firearms is prohibited. This includes obvious items like swords, knives, chemical devices, and the like. Not mentioned on the list, however, is ammo. University police acknowledged that while possessing ammo was not against the rules, using it for Halloween props was discouraged.

Bonus links: Alarmists will likely spend the remainder of what should be a super fun holiday worrying about sex offenders, cultural appropriation, and drugged candies.

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Kudlow Says More China Tariffs “Not Set In Stone”

With just 26 minutes left in what has been by some measures the worst month for stocks since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Trump chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow appeared on CNBC to quiet investors anxieties about President Trump’s plans for the next round of China tariffs, in what we can only imagine was an attempt to shield ramping equities from any last-minute complications, as stocks have exhibited a concerning pattern in recent weeks of falling during the last two hours of the trading day.

Kudlow

In response to reports from earlier this week that Trump is planning to expand tariffs to cover all Chinese goods entering the US by the end of the year if no agreement between China and the US has been reached before then, Kudlow cautioned that “nothing has been set in stone”.

“Nothing is set in stone right now,” Larry Kudlow told CNBC on Wednesday, ahead of potential talks between Trump and Chinese President Xi at the G-20 meeting next month.

“It is possible some good positive things could – I say could – come out of President Trump-President Xi talks. It’s possible,” he said.

Kudlow added that he believes Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet at the G-20 meeting in Buenos Aires next month, but he added that “nothing has been set in stone.”

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