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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Raise Taxes by $26 Trillion 

One of the challenges presented by the leftward turn in the Democratic presidential primary race is effectively capturing the scale of the tax and spending proposals the leading candidates have put forth. The numbers regularly stretch into the trillions, or even multiple tens of trillions. To put that in contrast, a decade ago, early drafts of the health law that became Obamacare were viewed as pushing the boundaries of political acceptability because they ran just over $1 trillion over a decade. A trillion dollars! Even for Washington, that was a lot of money, an expansion of the size of government large enough to give some Democrats pause. 

Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) says his Medicare for All plan would cost $30 or $40 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has proposed $2.75 trillion worth of education policy reforms, and her notion that she could implement a single-payer health care system with just—”just”—$20 trillion in new federal spending is viewed by many as unrealistically low. 

There is an element of unreality to these ideas, a sense in which they are meant as symbols and signifiers rather than practical, concrete agenda items. As Kate McKinnon’s parody version of Elizabeth Warren said on Saturday Night Live this weekend, responding to a question about Medicare for All’s enormous price tag, “When the numbers are this big, they’re just pretend.” 

And yet—these are, in fact, real and nominally serious proposals from actual candidates who are actually running for president. So it is worth putting them in perspective, not only on their own, but in context with each other. 

Sanders has proposed a whopping $97.5 trillion worth of new government spending over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl. To pay for all that spending, Sanders would presumably give speeches about how we don’t need to pay for all that spending. But he would also raise taxes by about $23 trillion over the same time frame. The federal government expects to raise roughly $3.6 trillion in tax revenue this year, and spend about $1 trillion more than that (hence our trillion-dollar budget deficit). The Sanders agenda, if enacted in full, would dramatically increase the tax burden Americans are expected to shoulder, and, at the same time, add about $90 trillion to federal deficits. The Sanders agenda manages to simultaneously be absurdly, almost comically unrealistic and economically catastrophic. 

And then there is Warren and her plans, many of which involve raising taxes. Warren has not proposed quite as much new spending as Sanders, but she has proposed even more in the way of new taxation. All together, Warren would raise taxes by $26.3 trillion, according to a new report by Nicole Kaeding of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Warren would supplement that by freeing up some currently untaxed dollars for taxation and increasing tax enforcement, which she claims would raise another $2.3 trillion. If Warren somehow managed to pass her entire wish list, the result would be a 63 percent increase in expected federal revenues over the next 10 years, according to Kaeding. 

Over that same time, total individual and corporate income tax revenues are projected to be about $26.8 trillion. “In other words,” Kaeding writes, “the total revenue effects of Warren’s proposals would be similar to a plan in which every individual and corporate tax bill was doubled outright.” Warren’s plans would amount to a historically unprecedented increase in the size and scale of government. 

Naturally, there are various technical problems with Warren’s plans that the headline numbers don’t fully capture. Her wealth tax almost certainly wouldn’t raise as much money as she hopes. The grab bag of taxes she has proposed were not designed to function in tandem, and the complex interactions between them would probably lower total revenue, which would lead to larger deficits without offsetting spending cuts. Warren has plans for all sorts of new taxes, but not for how to make them all work together. 

Wonky quibbles aside, however, it is valuable to simply consider the bigger picture. The foundation of Warren’s candidacy is her vast policy agenda—her plans for everything. But enacting each and every one of her plans would result, at minimum, in a profound transformation of the American economy, pulling tens of trillions of dollars out of the private sector and putting that money under the control of the federal government. The full Warren agenda would empower bureaucrats and politicians, and it would almost certainly drag down the nation’s economy, affecting jobs and livelihoods for millions of Americans, many of whom would not be billionaires or even millionaires. And while Warren claims not to tax the middle class directly, she only avoids doing so through tortured workarounds that would inevitably hit middle-class paychecks. 

One might argue, somewhat reasonably, that Warren’s agenda is more aspirational than practical, that it’s a sellable political vision, not legislative text, and that even if Democrats somehow sweep Congress and the White House next year, it’s unlikely to pass in full, or even in large part. 

Looked at this way, the Warren agenda (and in a different way, the Sanders agenda) is a kind of joke, a pin-up board of preposterously big-ticket proposals that rely on made-up numbers to pay for made-up programs that, like most games of make-believe, haven’t been precision engineered to function in reality, because they aren’t really expected to ever become law. There is a sense in which Warren, like her SNL counterpart, isn’t sweating the size of the numbers involved because, well, it’s all pretend. 

Yet there is another sense in which the fanciful ambitions of Warren’s agenda aren’t funny at all, but something rather more terrifying. Because even if they do not represent a politically likely outcome, they do represent a very real worldview, a belief that the government both can and should be operating at a size and scale far beyond any precedent in the nation’s history. The best way to understand Warren’s tax agenda, then, may not be as a series of large numbers, but as a wholesale transformation of American life. 

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Raise Taxes by $26 Trillion 

One of the challenges presented by the leftward turn in the Democratic presidential primary race is effectively capturing the scale of the tax and spending proposals the leading candidates have put forth. The numbers regularly stretch into the trillions, or even multiple tens of trillions. To put that in contrast, a decade ago, early drafts of the health law that became Obamacare were viewed as pushing the boundaries of political acceptability because they ran just over $1 trillion over a decade. A trillion dollars! Even for Washington, that was a lot of money, an expansion of the size of government large enough to give some Democrats pause. 

Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) says his Medicare for All plan would cost $30 or $40 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has proposed $2.75 trillion worth of education policy reforms, and her notion that she could implement a single-payer health care system with just—”just”—$20 trillion in new federal spending is viewed by many as unrealistically low. 

There is an element of unreality to these ideas, a sense in which they are meant as symbols and signifiers rather than practical, concrete agenda items. As Kate McKinnon’s parody version of Elizabeth Warren said on Saturday Night Live this weekend, responding to a question about Medicare for All’s enormous price tag, “When the numbers are this big, they’re just pretend.” 

And yet—these are, in fact, real and nominally serious proposals from actual candidates who are actually running for president. So it is worth putting them in perspective, not only on their own, but in context with each other. 

Sanders has proposed a whopping $97.5 trillion worth of new government spending over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl. To pay for all that spending, Sanders would presumably give speeches about how we don’t need to pay for all that spending. But he would also raise taxes by about $23 trillion over the same time frame. The federal government expects to raise roughly $3.6 trillion in tax revenue this year, and spend about $1 trillion more than that (hence our trillion-dollar budget deficit). The Sanders agenda, if enacted in full, would dramatically increase the tax burden Americans are expected to shoulder, and, at the same time, add about $90 trillion to federal deficits. The Sanders agenda manages to simultaneously be absurdly, almost comically unrealistic and economically catastrophic. 

And then there is Warren and her plans, many of which involve raising taxes. Warren has not proposed quite as much new spending as Sanders, but she has proposed even more in the way of new taxation. All together, Warren would raise taxes by $26.3 trillion, according to a new report by Nicole Kaeding of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Warren would supplement that by freeing up some currently untaxed dollars for taxation and increasing tax enforcement, which she claims would raise another $2.3 trillion. If Warren somehow managed to pass her entire wish list, the result would be a 63 percent increase in expected federal revenues over the next 10 years, according to Kaeding. 

Over that same time, total individual and corporate income tax revenues are projected to be about $26.8 trillion. “In other words,” Kaeding writes, “the total revenue effects of Warren’s proposals would be similar to a plan in which every individual and corporate tax bill was doubled outright.” Warren’s plans would amount to a historically unprecedented increase in the size and scale of government. 

Naturally, there are various technical problems with Warren’s plans that the headline numbers don’t fully capture. Her wealth tax almost certainly wouldn’t raise as much money as she hopes. The grab bag of taxes she has proposed were not designed to function in tandem, and the complex interactions between them would probably lower total revenue, which would lead to larger deficits without offsetting spending cuts. Warren has plans for all sorts of new taxes, but not for how to make them all work together. 

Wonky quibbles aside, however, it is valuable to simply consider the bigger picture. The foundation of Warren’s candidacy is her vast policy agenda—her plans for everything. But enacting each and every one of her plans would result, at minimum, in a profound transformation of the American economy, pulling tens of trillions of dollars out of the private sector and putting that money under the control of the federal government. The full Warren agenda would empower bureaucrats and politicians, and it would almost certainly drag down the nation’s economy, affecting jobs and livelihoods for millions of Americans, many of whom would not be billionaires or even millionaires. And while Warren claims not to tax the middle class directly, she only avoids doing so through tortured workarounds that would inevitably hit middle-class paychecks. 

One might argue, somewhat reasonably, that Warren’s agenda is more aspirational than practical, that it’s a sellable political vision, not legislative text, and that even if Democrats somehow sweep Congress and the White House next year, it’s unlikely to pass in full, or even in large part. 

Looked at this way, the Warren agenda (and in a different way, the Sanders agenda) is a kind of joke, a pin-up board of preposterously big-ticket proposals that rely on made-up numbers to pay for made-up programs that, like most games of make-believe, haven’t been precision engineered to function in reality, because they aren’t really expected to ever become law. There is a sense in which Warren, like her SNL counterpart, isn’t sweating the size of the numbers involved because, well, it’s all pretend. 

Yet there is another sense in which the fanciful ambitions of Warren’s agenda aren’t funny at all, but something rather more terrifying. Because even if they do not represent a politically likely outcome, they do represent a very real worldview, a belief that the government both can and should be operating at a size and scale far beyond any precedent in the nation’s history. The best way to understand Warren’s tax agenda, then, may not be as a series of large numbers, but as a wholesale transformation of American life. 

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Pound Tumbles After Two BOE Members Unexpectedly Vote For Rate Cut

Pound Tumbles After Two BOE Members Unexpectedly Vote For Rate Cut

While the BOE kept rates unchanged at 0.75% as expected, two surprise dissents appeared as Michael Saunders and Jonathan Haskel wanted to lower the benchmark by a quarter point with consensus looking for a unanimous decision. The dissenting duo – which cited threats to the outlook and signs of a turn in the labor market – represented the first votes for looser policy since 2016.

While Saunders had been mentioned as a possible dissenter this month, Haskel’s vote for a cut is a surprise.

“If global growth fails to stabilize, or if Brexit uncertainty remains entrenched, monetary policy may need to reinforce the expected recovery,” the BOE warned in the summary of the meeting. The BOE also cautioned that if the risks don’t materialize, their previous guidance that limited and gradual hikes may be needed still stands.

Haskel and Saunders dissented on the basis that downside risks to the Bank’s projections have emanated from a softer global outlook and more persistent Brexit uncertainties affecting corporate and household spending. However, this stance was out-voted by the broader view that there is currently not enough data points available to assess the impact of the aforementioned concerns held by those wishing for a rate reduction, as RanSquawk notes.

In response to the surprising dissenters, the pound dove sharply and hit the lowest level in more than a week, dropping as much as 0.3% to 1.2818, the lowest since Oct. 29, as much as 60 pips from the intraday high of 1.2878. Separately, Gilts pared declines and curve steepens as money markets price 19bps of BOE rate cuts in December 2020 versus 15bps on Wednesday.

The comments showed that the BOE is shifting closer to other central banks which have already cut interest rates this year. Still, signs of easing in the China-U.S. trade tensions on Thursday could be good news for the global economy and mean less chance of a worse scenario emerging.

In the re-branded Monetary Policy Report, officials also cut their forecasts for growth and inflation. The projections highlight the impact of the global slowdown, with external factors accounting for most of the downgrade.  Some other highlights from the BOE statement, courtesy of RanSquawk:

  • Rate guidance: Monetary policy could respond in either direction to changes in the economic outlook in order to ensure a sustainable return of inflation to the 2% target. If global growth fails to stabilise or Brexit uncertainties remain entrenched, monetary policy may need to reinforce the expected recovery in UK GDP growth and inflation. If these risks do not materialise and the economy recovers broadly in line with the MPC’s projections, monetary policy could be tightened at a gradual pace and to a limited extent. Note, the MPC have removed guidance on the event of a no-deal Brexit.
  • Brexit: As a result of the UK and EU striking a deal on the WA and Political declaration and extension to A50, the perceived likelihood of a no deal Brexit has fallen markedly.
  • Underlying assumptions of projections: Projections are based on the assumption of an orderly transition to a deep free trade agreement between the UK and the EU. The assumptions conclude no tariffs on UK-EU trade, whilst customs checks on UK-EU trade are introduced, some services trade would be subject to greater barriers, regulatory barriers with the EU are likely to gradually increase, the UK replicates a substantial proportion of EU trade agreements with non-EU countries. Full details can be found on Table 1, page 12 of the MPR.
  • Domestic growth: UK GDP has slowed materially this year and reflects weaker global growth, driven by trade protectionism and Brexit-related uncertainties. The agreements struck between the UK and EU are expected to remove some of the uncertainty facing businesses and households and as such, the MPC expects growth to pick up in 2020.
  • Inflation: Inflationary pressures are expected to lessen in the near term. Inflation is expected to fall to around 1.25% by the spring, owing to the temporary effect of falls in regulated energy and water prices. In the second half of the MPC’s forecast period, however, domestic inflationary pressures are expected to build before rising to slightly above 2% at the end of the forecast period.

Elsewhere, one key aspect of the minutes release was the Bank’s updated view on Brexit which underpinned the accompanying projections in the MPR. Policymakers noted that as a result of the UK and EU striking a deal on the WA, Political declaration and extension to A50, the perceived likelihood of a no deal Brexit has fallen markedly. As such, the MPC now assume an orderly transition to a deep free trade agreement between the UK and the EU. With this in mind, the MPC opted to remove guidance on what action would be taken in the event of a no deal Brexit, whilst reiterating their mantra to respond in either direction to ensure “a sustainable return of inflation to the 2% target”.

Furthermore, the Bank reassured markets once again that a period of “entrenched uncertainty” could be a cause to act, however, if these risks do not materialise and the economy recovers broadly in line with the MPC’s projections, “monetary policy could be tightened at a gradual pace and to a limited extent”. Overall, the latest communication from the Bank suggests less concern over the possibility of a no deal Brexit, given the increased clarity on the potential path for the UK and EU’s future trading relationship, however, a further prolongation of the Brexit process could see the BoE provide the UK economy with further monetary loosening.

In terms of the MPC’s assessment of the UK economy as detailed in the accompanying Monetary Policy Report, the Banks messaging was somewhat muddled after opting to abandon direct comparisons for their quarterly projections with the August report given the dichotomy between market pricing and their assessment of the economy (market placed a lot more focus on the prospect of a no deal, whereas the Bank now does not envisage this). The Bank provided adjusted previous’ for quarterly projections, however, opted to not included any adjusted previous’ for the annual figures (to the bemusement of the journalists at the press conferences).

As such, any comparison between the Banks view in November and August is difficult with the MPC trying to guide market expectations more towards the overall contents of the latest MPR rather than a contrast to the August QIR. In terms of what the November MPR tells us, the MPC expected UK GDP to pick up from 1.0% this year to 1.6% by the end of 2020, 1.8% in Q4 2021 and hit 2.1% by the end of the forecast period. The perceived trend of growth is predicated on the assumption of a reduction in uncertainty, albeit investment spending is held back by slower global growth.

* * *

The U.K. is headed for a general election in December, and the country’s deadline to leave the EU has been postponed until Jan. 31. While Brexit is dominating the economic outlook, there’s also no escaping the slowdown in global growth.

The BOE devoted a whole section to trade protectionism and the global outlook. The trade dispute between the U.S and China has caused a fundamental shift in policy after a 50-year trend towards liberalization, boosted uncertainty and weighed on growth, the BOE said.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 11/07/2019 – 07:22

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Business Finance

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Nobody Knows What Television Is Anymore

I have a confession to make. It’s 2019, and I don’t know what television is anymore.

Oh, sure, I know what a television—the physical object, the thing you order from Amazon after checking it out at Best Buy—is. I am even reasonably comfortable with the notion of shows or series, those half-hour and one-hour productions that come in sequential, chapter-like installments, much like they did 30 or 40 years ago when a handful of broadcast networks ruled the airwaves and pay cable channels such as HBO and Cinemax were still niche services for well-off movie nuts and people too embarrassed to rent softcore porn at video stores. (Remember those?)

But television? As a concept? As a means of cultural connection, a system for mass entertainment? A way of organizing the world, or at least the weekday hours after dinner and before bedtime? I have no idea what that is. It’s too vague, too sprawling, too unwieldy, too individualized and demographic-specific. Yes, there are still broadcast stations, and if you stick an antenna on your window, you can still tune into them over the air. It’s like connecting to some ancient cellular network that only has four apps, all of which are basically the same. But when was the last time you watched something that way? Even street people and survivalists have 5G now.

These days, television—whatever it is—is on your phone, on your PlayStation, on YouTube, on your laptop, and even, sometimes, on your actual television, the big thing you bought from Amazon. TV is increasingly indistinct from the world of big-budget Hollywood feature films and also from big tech, which now makes shows, the things you watch, in order to sell phones, watches, diapers, plush toys, and lunch boxes. On occasion, TV even seems to be melding with video games and vice versa. You can consume as much of it as you want, from virtually any place you can imagine, on anything that has a screen. TV is everything now, and everywhere, an amorphous cultural and commercial blob backed by billions in tech and media spending. Its cultural dominance is unchecked by anything except your own time, and it is increasingly tailored to your unique interests and obsessions.

Yes, I’m talking about Netflix, the streaming video goliath that introduced us to binge-watching, and Stranger Things, and binge-watching Stranger Things. But I’m also talking about the elephant stampede of high-profile streaming video services set to launch in coming months—which include Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, and something called Quibi—as well as existing services, from the recognizable (Amazon Prime Video, Hulu) to under-the-radar offerings from the likes of Vudu, Crackle, Facebook Watch, and Vizio’s WatchFree. Television, to use a reference that somehow made the leap from the days of broadcast dominance to the social media present, has not just jumped the shark. It is the shark. It is chewing up everything in its path. And the streaming era has only just begun.

ALL YOUR FRIENDS

In the olden days, before the internet, before smartphones, when a television (the object) was something you had to buy at a store, it was easy enough to understand what TV was: three networks broadcasting shows—scripted dramas about police and lawyers, laugh-track comedies about dopey dads and housewife moms, deadly earnest news programming, and only slightly less earnest comedy talk—that felt more or less the same. Television producers pandered, not necessarily to the lowest common denominator but to the widest. Airtime was limited, so their goal was to produce material that would serve everyone, or as close as they could get. Television defined the American median. It was something we could all talk about together.

There was a comforting sense of homogeneity to the TV of this era. It didn’t ask too much of you, and it was always there when you needed it, a friendly and familiar presence. It wasn’t designed to be great; it was designed to be consistently fine.

The apotheosis of this style of television was the long-running, insanely popular 1990s sitcom Friends, a show that literalized the idea of what television was in its title. Friends was a show about a bunch of attractive and mildly glamorous but essentially ordinary white people hanging out and talking about their lives. It was a show you could watch and engage with but also one that you could just have on as background noise, with the characters’ idealized, fictional, not-too-difficult lives serving as the backdrop to your own. That was television’s reason for being: to keep ordinary people company in their own homes.

All of this was, one way or another, sanctioned by the government. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), our national censor, kept tabs on broadcast content, deciding which words were acceptable and which weren’t and ensuring that your TV friends wouldn’t use foul language. The lines of acceptability shifted gradually over time, and politicians occasionally complained about the coarsening of the culture, which mostly meant griping about the plot of Murphy Brown or the presence of uncovered butt cheeks on NYPD Blue. Television was understood as a system for the transmission of common cultural values, and, as a result, it remained fairly tame.

Cable brought a new edge to the medium. Ad-supported networks like Comedy Central and A&E offered niche programming to self-selected audiences. HBO’s subscription service, freed from FCC paternalism, could show blood and bare breasts and let characters say any flippity-flappin’ words they wanted. But even as cable wormed its way into more and more homes in the 1980s and 1990s, it remained a lesser venue, a dumping ground for reruns and inexpensive programming, with high-quality originals few and far between.

And then, at the turn of the 21st century, that changed. The Shield, Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad—even a remake of Battlestar Galactica—demonstrated not only that cable channels could compete with big broadcast networks on original programming but that they could produce elevated material that appealed to both critics and small but intensely devoted viewerships who weren’t well-served by existing shows. The new TV wasn’t designed to be fine for everyone. It was designed to be great for a targeted few.

Suddenly, everybody with a video camera and a distribution platform wanted in. Cable networks from The History Channel to TV Land to USA began devoting more resources to scripted original programming. It wasn’t too long before Netflix, a DVD-by-mail company that later launched a streaming service—think HBO in the ’80s, but on demand—joined the original content game too.

Unlike broadcast networks, which had to rely on imperfect audience surveys and Nielsen ratings, Netflix had direct access to viewership data, meaning it knew exactly what subscribers were watching, and when, and how often. The company had three major revelations.

The first was that television-style content, which on both cable and broadcast had always been delivered on a specific schedule, in a linear sequence over the space of weeks, could be divorced from time. Netflix not only allowed viewers to watch its shows whenever they wanted, it posted entire seasons online at once and then encouraged viewers to “binge-watch,” or consume the whole thing all in one go. Appointment TV, in which you regularly dated a show you liked, was no more; Netflix was TV as a series of intense one-night stands.

The second revelation was that TV could be portable. Netflix was an app, not a channel, which meant you could watch it on your computer, on your phone, in your car, and possibly even on your refrigerator. Netflix shows came to you, wherever you were. The service was platform agnostic.

Finally, Netflix realized that demand for new scripted content was practically infinite and began producing accordingly. In 2013, the year Netflix committed itself fully to originals, the total number of scripted series produced annually across all of Hollywood jumped by 17 percent.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fewer than 50 original scripted television series were produced each year. In 2008, there were more than 200. By 2018, the number was just shy of 500, and streaming networks were the biggest producers. Netflix, which will reportedly spend $15 billion on content this year, wasn’t competing with ABC and NBC and CBS. It wasn’t even really competing with HBO. It was competing with the entire rest of one’s life, with 24 hours of things to do that aren’t watching Netflix. CEO Reed Hastings said in 2017, “We actually compete with sleep.” Then he added, perhaps not entirely kidding, “And we’re winning!”

THROUGH A BLACK MIRROR

It was around this point that television began to lose its definition. After all, what was TV if not a thing that came into your home at a specific time, on a recurring schedule? What was television if not something you watched on a television? Netflix and its early competitors had broken the fundamental laws of the television universe.

The new television didn’t just mean more TV. It meant a different kind of TV. It meant shows that didn’t cater to the median viewer and that, in many cases, asked more from their audiences than casual background appreciation. That’s how Netflix ended up with shows as varied as BoJack Horseman, an animated dramedy about a talking horse dealing with depression, and The Crown, a big-budget costume drama about British monarchs, and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, a 10-episode prequel to the 1982 Jim Henson cult fantasy film with an all-puppet cast. And it’s how the streamer ended up with Daybreak, a forthcoming series starring Matthew Broderick set in Glendale, California, about post-apocalyptic teen gangs that the company describes as “part samurai saga, part endearing coming-of-age story, and part Battle Royale.” It’s like Fortnite meets Ferris Bueller.

This is weird territory. The boom in scripted television has been a boon for concepts that are unusual, offbeat, and downright wacky. As Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, told New York magazine in 2018, “Nothing is too niche.”

Yet in its own way, Netflix is pursuing a median strategy—not with any one show, but with the totality of its programming. The idea isn’t to appeal to everyone all at once but to appeal to everyone in fragments and pieces, serving one narrow interest at a time. That’s why, in addition to investing heavily in scripted series, Netflix is backing feature films at nearly every budget level, from genre fare that has gone out of fashion at major studios (romantic comedies, teen sci-fi adventures) to big-budget Oscar hopefuls like Alfonso Cuarón’s Best Picture–nominated Roma and the forthcoming Martin Scorsese crime epic The Irishman, which stars Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci. The company put up $200 million for Red Notice, an action thriller featuring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. Ten Netflix films are scheduled to debut theatrically before the end of the year.

Netflix is also experimenting with more-novel formats, as in Bandersnatch, a Black Mirror special designed as an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story. It’s a video game disguised as a movie based on a television series owned by a tech company that makes more TV than any actual TV network. That’s what television is today.

WHY JEFF BEZOS IS SPENDING $250 MILLION ON LORD OF THE RINGS

Netflix isn’t the only one breaking rules and busting budgets. Amazon Prime Video has been churning out high-quality scripted shows for years, often splashing out huge sums for well-known properties and talent. The company lured Julia Roberts, once the biggest female movie star on the planet, onto the small screen for Homecoming, a half-hour drama based on a podcast about a military conspiracy. It spent $250 million for the rights to make a television series based on Lord of the Rings. Amazon gives the services away as part of a package deal with Amazon Prime, which entitles subscribers to free two-day shipping on many of the products the company sells.

Why is Amazon paying Julia Roberts to appear on television and making a Lord of the Rings show? Partly because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, which means he doesn’t need a reason. Partly because he’s a nerd. (Bezos, a known sci-fi fan, also had his company acquire the rights to the intrasolar space epic The Expanse after it was canceled on its original home, the cable network SyFy.)

But mostly because Amazon wants to sell you more dog food. Or toilet paper. Or Virginia Postrel books. Or batteries or bottles of passion fruit concentrate or actual televisions (after you demo them at Best Buy). It doesn’t matter, really. Amazon, which, like Netflix, has a mass of data on its users’ habits, has long known that Prime subscribers spend far more than nonsubscribers, so it is laying out $6 billion for video content this year to make that subscription more enticing. It’s just another perk, like flat-fee grocery delivery.

Amazon is also in the content business for the simple reason that it is a tech company with money. This similarly explains the existence of Facebook Watch, a service that, despite its relatively low profile, claimed 75 million daily viewers for such shows as Sorry for Your Loss, starring Elizabeth Olsen as a young widow, and Sacred Lies, about an ex-cult member. Facebook is in the spending-time-on-Facebook business, and TV shows give people a new way to spend time. Tinder, the popular dating app, recently announced Swipe Night, a four-episode, choose-your-own-adventure “series” that is part video game, part soap opera, designed to serve as a first-date activity. Why Netflix and chill when you can Tinder and hook up?

This also helps justify the existence of Apple TV+, a new service debuting in November with an array of heavyweight titles, including new shows from A-list creators Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams. The Morning Show, a glossy insider drama about a morning talk program, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell, cost a reported $15 million per episode—the same as the final season of HBO’s fantasy epic Game of Thrones.

Apple has money, and it is trying to figure out its future in a world where everyone who wants an iPhone already has one. So it’s making television…about television.

At the September event where it announced the launch date of its new service, Apple also announced a major new foray into mobile video games, including Beyond a Steel Sky, a sequel to a cult favorite 1994 adventure game featuring design work by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. In some loose sense this is television too, a lavishly produced, partially scripted thing you watch on a screen, the goal of which is to capture your attention (and perhaps sell you another screen).

And then there is Disney. Like Apple, it has money. And like Netflix, it’s in the business of producing entertainment for both the small and the big screens. (As of this summer, four of 2019’s top five domestic box-office hits were Disney films.) But Disney also has theme parks, and plush toys, and T-shirts, and lunch boxes, all of which are adorned with its characters. And Disney’s movies, especially those set in the world of Marvel Comics characters (Iron Man, Captain America, and the rest of the Avengers), have increasingly taken the form of big-budget, big-screen shows—serialized, multi-character, episodic programming about friends who hang out, work together, and just happen to have superpowers. Disney’s new streaming service will feature several series based on those same heroes, with stories that connect to the larger cinematic plotline, joining TV and movies more closely than we’ve ever seen before.

MURDER HOUSE FLIP IS A REAL SHOW

Have you heard of Quibi? You will. Launching in April 2020, it’s the brainchild of former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, who raised more than $1 billion for a channel devoted to making short-form content designed to be watched on mobile devices. Among other projects, Quibi is planning a phone-sized remake of The Fugitive, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and a “true-crime home renovation series” called Murder House Flip.

Or maybe you won’t hear about it. No one knows which of these services will become the next Netflix and which will become the next Pets.com. Indeed, among the front-runners for failure is Netflix itself. Despite a massive customer base and associated revenues, the streaming giant burns enormous amounts of cash on its content and has recently missed subscriber growth targets. And it faces stiff competition from the new services being launched by Apple and Disney, both of which will initially cost less than a typical Netflix subscription.

The problem for Netflix is that creating and selling access to shows is its core business. If you don’t subscribe, it doesn’t make money.

For Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and to some extent Disney, TV shows are a secondary product. Sure, they’ll take your money every month. But Amazon only needs you to buy trash bags, and Apple only needs you to buy iPhones, and Disney just needs you (or your child) to love Star Wars and to buy lunch boxes and theme park tickets accordingly. Since you already love Star Wars, own an iPhone, and need trash bags, Disney, Apple, and Amazon are probably going to be OK.

A BILLION DOLLARS FOR BIG BANG THEORY?

This is the reality of the streaming era: There is a lot of television. And there is going to be a lot more of it—much, much more than anyone can ever watch. It will be weirder and less constrained by time or platform or format conventions than ever before.

The benefits for consumers are obvious: an endless supply of high-quality filmed entertainment, some of it truly great, much of it pretty good, none of it subject to federal prudishness. By displacing the broadcast networks as the primary outlet for scripted series, the streaming boom takes the FCC out of the content production process, reducing its power as a censor.

At least for now, these services are not expensive. Apple TV+ will cost $5 per month and be free for the first year if you purchase any Apple device. Disney’s opening price is $6.99 per month. Even following several rounds of price increases, Netflix’s standard plan is just $12.99 per month. HBO Max, which will bundle HBO originals with other content from Warner-Media, the company that owns the cable network, is expected to be the most expensive at $15–$17 per month. That’s comparable to the cost of adding HBO to a cable subscription, while delivering an even greater wealth of content.

Speaking of cable subscriptions, the streaming boom threatens to render them obsolete—sort of. In the ’90s and ’00s, politicians and regulators regularly pushed to require cable companies to offer their services a la carte—allowing customers to buy only the channels they want. This was thought to be family-friendly (you could block channels you deem inappropriate for kids) as well as a way to save money (no more larded-up cable packages). Unbundling was a political imperative.

Streaming services accomplished this without legislation or regulation. Netflix offers a kid-friendly variant and password protection for adult accounts. Cord cutters can skip the cable TV package and pick their favorite streaming options. Yet the coming glut of services means that an ambitious unbundler who wants access to everything could end up paying, in total, about the same amount he previously did for cable, especially once prices inevitably rise. And the underlying internet service itself is still provided by a cable or phone company.

So this is what television is now: a system designed to maximize entertainment optionality, to ensure that not only is there always something you could watch, but there’s always something you—specifically, individually, uniquely you—actually want to watch. Television, that old vehicle for the transmission of common culture, has become a tool for choosing and expressing what makes each one of us singular.

The quirks of the concepts, the variety of the delivery systems, the emphasis on serving ever-tinier niche audiences, and the sheer volume of material being produced might seem overwhelming. But all this is designed to produce a world in which there is something to appeal to every obscure interest, every microdemographic, every autonomous and idiosyncratic individual. The ultimate niche audience is just one person. We’re not quite there yet. But the streaming era moves us closer.

And yet neither is the common culture dead. In September, Netflix agreed to pay $500 million for the rights to that classic of network-era television, Seinfeld. The same week, WarnerMedia agreed to pay a reported $1 billion for The Big Bang Theory, one of the longest-running and most successful network shows of the last two decades, which will air exclusively on HBO Max. Just a few months prior, the company agreed to pay $425 million to take over the rights—from Netflix—to another classic show: Friends. 

Whatever television is today, and whatever it eventually becomes, it’s still what television used to be, too.

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Nobody Knows What Television Is Anymore

I have a confession to make. It’s 2019, and I don’t know what television is anymore.

Oh, sure, I know what a television—the physical object, the thing you order from Amazon after checking it out at Best Buy—is. I am even reasonably comfortable with the notion of shows or series, those half-hour and one-hour productions that come in sequential, chapter-like installments, much like they did 30 or 40 years ago when a handful of broadcast networks ruled the airwaves and pay cable channels such as HBO and Cinemax were still niche services for well-off movie nuts and people too embarrassed to rent softcore porn at video stores. (Remember those?)

But television? As a concept? As a means of cultural connection, a system for mass entertainment? A way of organizing the world, or at least the weekday hours after dinner and before bedtime? I have no idea what that is. It’s too vague, too sprawling, too unwieldy, too individualized and demographic-specific. Yes, there are still broadcast stations, and if you stick an antenna on your window, you can still tune into them over the air. It’s like connecting to some ancient cellular network that only has four apps, all of which are basically the same. But when was the last time you watched something that way? Even street people and survivalists have 5G now.

These days, television—whatever it is—is on your phone, on your PlayStation, on YouTube, on your laptop, and even, sometimes, on your actual television, the big thing you bought from Amazon. TV is increasingly indistinct from the world of big-budget Hollywood feature films and also from big tech, which now makes shows, the things you watch, in order to sell phones, watches, diapers, plush toys, and lunch boxes. On occasion, TV even seems to be melding with video games and vice versa. You can consume as much of it as you want, from virtually any place you can imagine, on anything that has a screen. TV is everything now, and everywhere, an amorphous cultural and commercial blob backed by billions in tech and media spending. Its cultural dominance is unchecked by anything except your own time, and it is increasingly tailored to your unique interests and obsessions.

Yes, I’m talking about Netflix, the streaming video goliath that introduced us to binge-watching, and Stranger Things, and binge-watching Stranger Things. But I’m also talking about the elephant stampede of high-profile streaming video services set to launch in coming months—which include Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, and something called Quibi—as well as existing services, from the recognizable (Amazon Prime Video, Hulu) to under-the-radar offerings from the likes of Vudu, Crackle, Facebook Watch, and Vizio’s WatchFree. Television, to use a reference that somehow made the leap from the days of broadcast dominance to the social media present, has not just jumped the shark. It is the shark. It is chewing up everything in its path. And the streaming era has only just begun.

ALL YOUR FRIENDS

In the olden days, before the internet, before smartphones, when a television (the object) was something you had to buy at a store, it was easy enough to understand what TV was: three networks broadcasting shows—scripted dramas about police and lawyers, laugh-track comedies about dopey dads and housewife moms, deadly earnest news programming, and only slightly less earnest comedy talk—that felt more or less the same. Television producers pandered, not necessarily to the lowest common denominator but to the widest. Airtime was limited, so their goal was to produce material that would serve everyone, or as close as they could get. Television defined the American median. It was something we could all talk about together.

There was a comforting sense of homogeneity to the TV of this era. It didn’t ask too much of you, and it was always there when you needed it, a friendly and familiar presence. It wasn’t designed to be great; it was designed to be consistently fine.

The apotheosis of this style of television was the long-running, insanely popular 1990s sitcom Friends, a show that literalized the idea of what television was in its title. Friends was a show about a bunch of attractive and mildly glamorous but essentially ordinary white people hanging out and talking about their lives. It was a show you could watch and engage with but also one that you could just have on as background noise, with the characters’ idealized, fictional, not-too-difficult lives serving as the backdrop to your own. That was television’s reason for being: to keep ordinary people company in their own homes.

All of this was, one way or another, sanctioned by the government. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), our national censor, kept tabs on broadcast content, deciding which words were acceptable and which weren’t and ensuring that your TV friends wouldn’t use foul language. The lines of acceptability shifted gradually over time, and politicians occasionally complained about the coarsening of the culture, which mostly meant griping about the plot of Murphy Brown or the presence of uncovered butt cheeks on NYPD Blue. Television was understood as a system for the transmission of common cultural values, and, as a result, it remained fairly tame.

Cable brought a new edge to the medium. Ad-supported networks like Comedy Central and A&E offered niche programming to self-selected audiences. HBO’s subscription service, freed from FCC paternalism, could show blood and bare breasts and let characters say any flippity-flappin’ words they wanted. But even as cable wormed its way into more and more homes in the 1980s and 1990s, it remained a lesser venue, a dumping ground for reruns and inexpensive programming, with high-quality originals few and far between.

And then, at the turn of the 21st century, that changed. The Shield, Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad—even a remake of Battlestar Galactica—demonstrated not only that cable channels could compete with big broadcast networks on original programming but that they could produce elevated material that appealed to both critics and small but intensely devoted viewerships who weren’t well-served by existing shows. The new TV wasn’t designed to be fine for everyone. It was designed to be great for a targeted few.

Suddenly, everybody with a video camera and a distribution platform wanted in. Cable networks from The History Channel to TV Land to USA began devoting more resources to scripted original programming. It wasn’t too long before Netflix, a DVD-by-mail company that later launched a streaming service—think HBO in the ’80s, but on demand—joined the original content game too.

Unlike broadcast networks, which had to rely on imperfect audience surveys and Nielsen ratings, Netflix had direct access to viewership data, meaning it knew exactly what subscribers were watching, and when, and how often. The company had three major revelations.

The first was that television-style content, which on both cable and broadcast had always been delivered on a specific schedule, in a linear sequence over the space of weeks, could be divorced from time. Netflix not only allowed viewers to watch its shows whenever they wanted, it posted entire seasons online at once and then encouraged viewers to “binge-watch,” or consume the whole thing all in one go. Appointment TV, in which you regularly dated a show you liked, was no more; Netflix was TV as a series of intense one-night stands.

The second revelation was that TV could be portable. Netflix was an app, not a channel, which meant you could watch it on your computer, on your phone, in your car, and possibly even on your refrigerator. Netflix shows came to you, wherever you were. The service was platform agnostic.

Finally, Netflix realized that demand for new scripted content was practically infinite and began producing accordingly. In 2013, the year Netflix committed itself fully to originals, the total number of scripted series produced annually across all of Hollywood jumped by 17 percent.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fewer than 50 original scripted television series were produced each year. In 2008, there were more than 200. By 2018, the number was just shy of 500, and streaming networks were the biggest producers. Netflix, which will reportedly spend $15 billion on content this year, wasn’t competing with ABC and NBC and CBS. It wasn’t even really competing with HBO. It was competing with the entire rest of one’s life, with 24 hours of things to do that aren’t watching Netflix. CEO Reed Hastings said in 2017, “We actually compete with sleep.” Then he added, perhaps not entirely kidding, “And we’re winning!”

THROUGH A BLACK MIRROR

It was around this point that television began to lose its definition. After all, what was TV if not a thing that came into your home at a specific time, on a recurring schedule? What was television if not something you watched on a television? Netflix and its early competitors had broken the fundamental laws of the television universe.

The new television didn’t just mean more TV. It meant a different kind of TV. It meant shows that didn’t cater to the median viewer and that, in many cases, asked more from their audiences than casual background appreciation. That’s how Netflix ended up with shows as varied as BoJack Horseman, an animated dramedy about a talking horse dealing with depression, and The Crown, a big-budget costume drama about British monarchs, and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, a 10-episode prequel to the 1982 Jim Henson cult fantasy film with an all-puppet cast. And it’s how the streamer ended up with Daybreak, a forthcoming series starring Matthew Broderick set in Glendale, California, about post-apocalyptic teen gangs that the company describes as “part samurai saga, part endearing coming-of-age story, and part Battle Royale.” It’s like Fortnite meets Ferris Bueller.

This is weird territory. The boom in scripted television has been a boon for concepts that are unusual, offbeat, and downright wacky. As Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, told New York magazine in 2018, “Nothing is too niche.”

Yet in its own way, Netflix is pursuing a median strategy—not with any one show, but with the totality of its programming. The idea isn’t to appeal to everyone all at once but to appeal to everyone in fragments and pieces, serving one narrow interest at a time. That’s why, in addition to investing heavily in scripted series, Netflix is backing feature films at nearly every budget level, from genre fare that has gone out of fashion at major studios (romantic comedies, teen sci-fi adventures) to big-budget Oscar hopefuls like Alfonso Cuarón’s Best Picture–nominated Roma and the forthcoming Martin Scorsese crime epic The Irishman, which stars Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci. The company put up $200 million for Red Notice, an action thriller featuring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. Ten Netflix films are scheduled to debut theatrically before the end of the year.

Netflix is also experimenting with more-novel formats, as in Bandersnatch, a Black Mirror special designed as an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story. It’s a video game disguised as a movie based on a television series owned by a tech company that makes more TV than any actual TV network. That’s what television is today.

WHY JEFF BEZOS IS SPENDING $250 MILLION ON LORD OF THE RINGS

Netflix isn’t the only one breaking rules and busting budgets. Amazon Prime Video has been churning out high-quality scripted shows for years, often splashing out huge sums for well-known properties and talent. The company lured Julia Roberts, once the biggest female movie star on the planet, onto the small screen for Homecoming, a half-hour drama based on a podcast about a military conspiracy. It spent $250 million for the rights to make a television series based on Lord of the Rings. Amazon gives the services away as part of a package deal with Amazon Prime, which entitles subscribers to free two-day shipping on many of the products the company sells.

Why is Amazon paying Julia Roberts to appear on television and making a Lord of the Rings show? Partly because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, which means he doesn’t need a reason. Partly because he’s a nerd. (Bezos, a known sci-fi fan, also had his company acquire the rights to the intrasolar space epic The Expanse after it was canceled on its original home, the cable network SyFy.)

But mostly because Amazon wants to sell you more dog food. Or toilet paper. Or Virginia Postrel books. Or batteries or bottles of passion fruit concentrate or actual televisions (after you demo them at Best Buy). It doesn’t matter, really. Amazon, which, like Netflix, has a mass of data on its users’ habits, has long known that Prime subscribers spend far more than nonsubscribers, so it is laying out $6 billion for video content this year to make that subscription more enticing. It’s just another perk, like flat-fee grocery delivery.

Amazon is also in the content business for the simple reason that it is a tech company with money. This similarly explains the existence of Facebook Watch, a service that, despite its relatively low profile, claimed 75 million daily viewers for such shows as Sorry for Your Loss, starring Elizabeth Olsen as a young widow, and Sacred Lies, about an ex-cult member. Facebook is in the spending-time-on-Facebook business, and TV shows give people a new way to spend time. Tinder, the popular dating app, recently announced Swipe Night, a four-episode, choose-your-own-adventure “series” that is part video game, part soap opera, designed to serve as a first-date activity. Why Netflix and chill when you can Tinder and hook up?

This also helps justify the existence of Apple TV+, a new service debuting in November with an array of heavyweight titles, including new shows from A-list creators Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams. The Morning Show, a glossy insider drama about a morning talk program, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell, cost a reported $15 million per episode—the same as the final season of HBO’s fantasy epic Game of Thrones.

Apple has money, and it is trying to figure out its future in a world where everyone who wants an iPhone already has one. So it’s making television…about television.

At the September event where it announced the launch date of its new service, Apple also announced a major new foray into mobile video games, including Beyond a Steel Sky, a sequel to a cult favorite 1994 adventure game featuring design work by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. In some loose sense this is television too, a lavishly produced, partially scripted thing you watch on a screen, the goal of which is to capture your attention (and perhaps sell you another screen).

And then there is Disney. Like Apple, it has money. And like Netflix, it’s in the business of producing entertainment for both the small and the big screens. (As of this summer, four of 2019’s top five domestic box-office hits were Disney films.) But Disney also has theme parks, and plush toys, and T-shirts, and lunch boxes, all of which are adorned with its characters. And Disney’s movies, especially those set in the world of Marvel Comics characters (Iron Man, Captain America, and the rest of the Avengers), have increasingly taken the form of big-budget, big-screen shows—serialized, multi-character, episodic programming about friends who hang out, work together, and just happen to have superpowers. Disney’s new streaming service will feature several series based on those same heroes, with stories that connect to the larger cinematic plotline, joining TV and movies more closely than we’ve ever seen before.

MURDER HOUSE FLIP IS A REAL SHOW

Have you heard of Quibi? You will. Launching in April 2020, it’s the brainchild of former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, who raised more than $1 billion for a channel devoted to making short-form content designed to be watched on mobile devices. Among other projects, Quibi is planning a phone-sized remake of The Fugitive, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and a “true-crime home renovation series” called Murder House Flip.

Or maybe you won’t hear about it. No one knows which of these services will become the next Netflix and which will become the next Pets.com. Indeed, among the front-runners for failure is Netflix itself. Despite a massive customer base and associated revenues, the streaming giant burns enormous amounts of cash on its content and has recently missed subscriber growth targets. And it faces stiff competition from the new services being launched by Apple and Disney, both of which will initially cost less than a typical Netflix subscription.

The problem for Netflix is that creating and selling access to shows is its core business. If you don’t subscribe, it doesn’t make money.

For Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and to some extent Disney, TV shows are a secondary product. Sure, they’ll take your money every month. But Amazon only needs you to buy trash bags, and Apple only needs you to buy iPhones, and Disney just needs you (or your child) to love Star Wars and to buy lunch boxes and theme park tickets accordingly. Since you already love Star Wars, own an iPhone, and need trash bags, Disney, Apple, and Amazon are probably going to be OK.

A BILLION DOLLARS FOR BIG BANG THEORY?

This is the reality of the streaming era: There is a lot of television. And there is going to be a lot more of it—much, much more than anyone can ever watch. It will be weirder and less constrained by time or platform or format conventions than ever before.

The benefits for consumers are obvious: an endless supply of high-quality filmed entertainment, some of it truly great, much of it pretty good, none of it subject to federal prudishness. By displacing the broadcast networks as the primary outlet for scripted series, the streaming boom takes the FCC out of the content production process, reducing its power as a censor.

At least for now, these services are not expensive. Apple TV+ will cost $5 per month and be free for the first year if you purchase any Apple device. Disney’s opening price is $6.99 per month. Even following several rounds of price increases, Netflix’s standard plan is just $12.99 per month. HBO Max, which will bundle HBO originals with other content from Warner-Media, the company that owns the cable network, is expected to be the most expensive at $15–$17 per month. That’s comparable to the cost of adding HBO to a cable subscription, while delivering an even greater wealth of content.

Speaking of cable subscriptions, the streaming boom threatens to render them obsolete—sort of. In the ’90s and ’00s, politicians and regulators regularly pushed to require cable companies to offer their services a la carte—allowing customers to buy only the channels they want. This was thought to be family-friendly (you could block channels you deem inappropriate for kids) as well as a way to save money (no more larded-up cable packages). Unbundling was a political imperative.

Streaming services accomplished this without legislation or regulation. Netflix offers a kid-friendly variant and password protection for adult accounts. Cord cutters can skip the cable TV package and pick their favorite streaming options. Yet the coming glut of services means that an ambitious unbundler who wants access to everything could end up paying, in total, about the same amount he previously did for cable, especially once prices inevitably rise. And the underlying internet service itself is still provided by a cable or phone company.

So this is what television is now: a system designed to maximize entertainment optionality, to ensure that not only is there always something you could watch, but there’s always something you—specifically, individually, uniquely you—actually want to watch. Television, that old vehicle for the transmission of common culture, has become a tool for choosing and expressing what makes each one of us singular.

The quirks of the concepts, the variety of the delivery systems, the emphasis on serving ever-tinier niche audiences, and the sheer volume of material being produced might seem overwhelming. But all this is designed to produce a world in which there is something to appeal to every obscure interest, every microdemographic, every autonomous and idiosyncratic individual. The ultimate niche audience is just one person. We’re not quite there yet. But the streaming era moves us closer.

And yet neither is the common culture dead. In September, Netflix agreed to pay $500 million for the rights to that classic of network-era television, Seinfeld. The same week, WarnerMedia agreed to pay a reported $1 billion for The Big Bang Theory, one of the longest-running and most successful network shows of the last two decades, which will air exclusively on HBO Max. Just a few months prior, the company agreed to pay $425 million to take over the rights—from Netflix—to another classic show: Friends. 

Whatever television is today, and whatever it eventually becomes, it’s still what television used to be, too.

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China Says US Has Agreed To Phase Out Tariffs 

China Says US Has Agreed To Phase Out Tariffs 

Followed by days of anxious speculation about the fate of the “Phase 1” trade deal, Bloomberg reported Thursday morning that the US and China had reached an informal deal on tariff reduction. The deal was structured to work in phases, with tariffs coming off gradually, according to a spokesman from China’s Ministry of Commerce.

If Washington confirms a deal, it could unleash another round of unbridled optimism across global markets (resulting in the “melt-up” that some have warned about) and alleviate fears of an imminent global recession.

The Commerce Ministry’s Gao Feng said negotiators have, over the past couple of weeks, agreed to the tariff reductions as progress is made.

“In the past two weeks, top negotiators had serious, constructive discussions and agreed to remove the additional tariffs in phases as progress is made on the agreement,” spokesman Gao Feng said Thursday.

“If China, U.S. reach a phase-one deal, both sides should roll back existing additional tariffs in the same proportion simultaneously based on the content of the agreement, which is an important condition for reaching the agreement,” Gao said.

Beijing’s No. 1 demand since the beginning of talks has been the reduction of American tariffs, which currently apply to the bulk of Chinese goods entering the US. And with November 2020 just one year away, it’s in President Trump’s best interest to do everything he can to avoid upsetting the economic apple cart.

Stocks around the world rallied, and US futures popped on the news.

Of course, all of this could easily prove premature; it’s still not exactly clear what was agreed upon.

“The question right now is what the two sides have actually agreed on – the market’s focus has shifted to how the US may react to China’s tariff remarks tonight or in coming days,” said Tommy Xie, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. “Investors are still cautious.”

In recent days, it started to look like the disagreement over where to hold the talks to finalize the agreement might blossom into a side-issue.

Proposed US locations for a Trump-Xi meeting that had been proposed by the White House, including Iowa and Alaska, have been ruled out, and those in charge of planning the summit are looking at locations in Europe and Asia.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen leaks about an imminent deal, only for talks to unravel at the last minute. Iris Pang, an economist at ING Bank, said she doubts the talks will progress quickly.

“I am skeptical on how fast the progress will be,” said Iris Pang, economist with ING Bank NV in Hong Kong. “How fast the roll back will be is critical to get material and long lasting positive sentiment for the market as well as for both economies.”

And with Beijing and the US set to hold a joint press conference to share information about a crackdown on fentanyl smuggling that disrupted a criminal network importing large quantities of the stuff.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 11/07/2019 – 05:30

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Italy’s Leftist Government Hands Out More Cash To Migrants Than Disabled Italians

Italy’s Leftist Government Hands Out More Cash To Migrants Than Disabled Italians

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Italy’s new leftist government is set to hand out more welfare cash to migrants than its own disabled citizens.

Recently released figures show that the state will allocate €50 million next year, €200 million in 2021, and €300 million in 2022 to the Disability and Self-Reliance Fund.

Given that two million out of three million disabled people in Italy rely on state benefits, this works out at just 54 cents per day in welfare, which isn’t even enough to live on a subsistence diet.

In contrast, migrants receive €20 euros a day, a figure that used to be even higher at €35 euros a day before Matteo Salvini reduced it.

According to Fabio Scaltritti of the Community San Benedetto al Porto in Alessandria, the question over handing money to migrants isn’t an economic issue, it’s an “ethical” necessity.

“The gap with the disabled continues to be truly absurd,” writes Luca Sablone.

“According to these data, Italians who unfortunately are disabled find themselves mocked by the refugees who arrive in our country.”

As we previously highlighted, when the leftist government was last in power during the height of the migrant crisis, some Italian citizens had their property requisitioned by the authorities and were forced to rent it out to migrants at rock bottom prices.

Looks like the bad old days are back now that Salvini is out of power.

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Tyler Durden

Thu, 11/07/2019 – 05:00

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‘Get Your Fracking Hands Off Me’: UK Cops Accused Of Groping Protesters

‘Get Your Fracking Hands Off Me’: UK Cops Accused Of Groping Protesters

UK police have been accused of sexually assaulting female anti-fracking protesters, including groping and exposing their their breasts while placing them under arrest, reports The Guardian.

“I’ve seen women have their tops, as they’ve been restrained or dragged, their tops are deliberately pulled up so that their breasts and bras are exposed … I’ve seen girls pulled by their hair, if they’ve got hair in ponytails and stuff like that,” said one 45-year-old female protester.

According to a report by a team of academics who studied three years of anti-fracking demonstrations, female protesters were treated more physically than male protesters.

“These tactics have been understood by protesters as an exercise of power and have left women feeling violated and frightened,” said researchers from Liverpool John Moores University, the University of York and the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

In addition to groping and humiliation, police regularly used violence and aggression to intimidate protesters.

Disabled and older protesters had also been subjected to violent policing, they said. They recorded testimonies from protesters who said police officers had shoved, pushed and dragged them.

“In some cases … this type of violence was said to take place on a daily basis and became a defining feature of the experience of protest,” they said.

“Some of these violent incidents have led to protesters reporting physical injuries, including severe bruising, broken bones and chronic pain.” –The Guardian

The researchers analyzed policing practices at protests across seven UK fracking sites since 2016 – conducing in-depth interviews with 31 activists.

“Many protesters outline marked differences in how men and women are policed, albeit both violently, with women protesters reporting being physically moved, carried and manhandled using specific restraint techniques,” they report. ” Broadly conceived, these techniques involve a much closer form of bodily contact between women protesters and male police officers, which, according to the testimonies we have collected, includes the use of groping and tactics such as the pulling of clothing to reveal women’s breasts.“

The researchers concluded that the heavy-handed police tactics were disproportionate and undermined the right to protest, and suggested “the use of violent police methods is not in response to violent behaviour by protesters or in response to acts of criminality.”

“In some instances, this reported violence has had an effect on the willingness and capacity of some protesters to engage in anti-fracking campaigns. This has serious consequences for rights to freedom of assembly and expression.”

While the protesters say their official complaints went uninvestigated, the National Police Chiefs’ Council took issue with the entire report – as the researchers didn’t contact them for their side of the story.

The report said that protesters who submitted official complaints to the police often found these were “dismissed without thorough investigation”, a claim rejected by the police as speculative.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on shale, gas and oil exploration, DCC Terry Woods, said: “The police service always welcome feedback concerning policing operations and we will always consider carefully issues raised with us.

“However, I feel there has been a missed opportunity to make this a more meaningful piece of research by not consulting the police for their side of the story, and limiting the research to the opinions of a small number of people with what appears to be a similar point of view. –The Guardian

 


Tyler Durden

Thu, 11/07/2019 – 04:15

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