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America’s Adversaries Are Buying Gold Like A Nuke Is Going Off Tomorrow

Having tested $1300 numerous times over the past few years, gold has broken dramatically higher in the last month, hitting 6-year highs as President Trump rhetoric around the world raises tensions and increases the odds of WWIII.

The surge in the precious metal has accompanied a collapse in bond yields around the world and a record level of negative-yielding debt…

And while Gold volatility is soaring…

Demand remains abundant, as Goldman details in its latest note, raising its outlook for gold, countries with “geopolitical tensions with the US” are buying everything:

Central bank demand is gaining momentum and we now expect 2019 purchases to reach 750 tonnes vs 650 tonnes last year. Visible gold purchases YTD are running at 211 tonnes until April vs 117 tonnes over the same period last year (see Exhibit 11).

Importantly, China just raised its gold purchasing pace from 10 tonnes per month to 15 tonnes for April and May as it aims to diversify its reserve holdings. 

With the Fed and ECB now both likely easing monetary policy, more CBs may decide to add gold to their portfolios as they did between 2008 and 2012 (see Exhibit 12).

Also, just recently, trade tensions between India and the US have begun to escalate as India retaliated with tariffs on US goods in response to US steel tariffs. Rising tensions with the US often create upside potential to a country’s gold purchases

Additionally, in case you thought the move was exhausted, Goldman notes that there is about to a pick up in demand as Russia purchases tend to be strongest in Q3…

And finally, Goldman notes that good economic news and bad economic news could both be positive for the precious metal at this point in the cycle.

If DM growth fails to pick up in the second half, gold has substantial upside potential

If DM growth continues to underperform, there is room for a much more substantial build in ETF positions. Last time we were in a similar environment was in 2016. DM growth back then was as weak as it is now and both the Fed and the ECB turned more dovish.

But back then the push into ETFs was significantly higher than it is currently… we think that current low growth makes owning gold appealing from a diversification perspective.

And Goldman notes that an improvement in global economic growth is not necessarily bearish for gold.

Our economists expect the bulk of the acceleration in GDP growth to come from ex-US and EM countries in particular. This should support gold through the “wealth” channel. Importantly, a reduced US growth outperformance points to a weakening of the dollar, which should boost the dollar purchasing power of the world ex-US (see Exhibit 7). In addition to this, gold is starting to build momentum in the local currencies of its two biggest consumers, India and China.

And the momentum gold prices built in the first half of 2019 can lead to an increase in EM retail gold demand in the second half.

Goldman concludes, we believe that gold continues to offer significant diversification value with substantial upside if DM growth continues to underperform… or, as we noted above, global tensions continue to rise.

As we noted previously, combined Russia and China Treasury holdings are at their lowest since June 2010 as China and Russia’s gold holdings have soared…

De-dollarization?

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FxoJHL Tyler Durden

Beto O’Rourke: Tax the Non-Military Rich to Pay for Veterans

On Monday, sixth-place Democratic presidential contender Beto O’Rourke unveiled a big new plan to pay for the health care of U.S. military veterans, while attempting to transform the Veterans Affairs medical system from bureaucratic morass to health care trailblazer.

The plan’s two key elements will surprise no one paying attention to the Democratic presidential race: end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tax the rich (in this case, defined as those earning more than $200,000 a year in adjusted gross income). The twist: The proposed “war tax” would “be levied on households without current members of the Armed Forces or veterans of the Armed Forces.”

“This new tax would serve as a reminder of the incredible sacrifice made by those who serve and their families,” reads the campaign’s write-up (which, incidentally, refers to O’Rourke as “Beto” throughout). “Over the next few decades, the costs related to health care and disability compensation for the ‘forever wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are projected to be nearly a trillion dollars. Today, these services—ones which we have promised to veterans and ones which they are owed—are subject to fiscal battles in Washington. They should not be.”

The war tax would apply only to future conflicts, and only to those explicitly authorized by Congress. (O’Rourke has been a consistent critic, through Democratic and Republican administrations, of unconstitutional executive branch war-making.) As for the current needs of vets, “Beto would propose that Congress invest $1 out of every $2 dollars saved [by ending the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq]—estimated at nearly $200 billion to vets, and at least $400 billion in total savings—in programs that benefit those who served.”

The plan contains things to like, things to dislike, and things that make you go hmmm. On the positive side, baked right into it is a righteous critique of Forever War. “Eighteen years into the war in Afghanistan, and nearly three decades after our first engagement in Iraq, the time has come to cancel the blank check for endless war and to ensure that any future engagements are the result of a national conversation about our security interests and duly authorized by Congress.”

This is familiar territory for the toothsome Texan. As I wrote in December:

O’Rourke was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is a withering critic of both the Iraq and Libya interventions (“two incredibly ill-conceived regime change wars?”), opposed bombing Syria, and has consistently called on Congress to end the open-ended post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (“blank check for endless war“) and reassert its war-declaration powers. “Troubling, unconstitutional, to be at war in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen & Somalia, in addition to Afghanistan, w/out informed authorization,” he tweeted in 2017. “Why do we have such a hard time admitting the West’s role and culpability in the problems in the Middle East?” he wrote in 2016.

I also appreciate the gesture, increasingly rare in the Democratic conversation, of having some big new spending proposal paid for. “We’re running $1 trillion annual deficits and we cannot continue to spend ourselves into ruin,” O’Rourke said in 2012, and he’s right. Though I wish the 2019 version shared his predecessor’s willingness to, you know, actually cut spending.

Less promising to my admittedly cynical ears is O’Rourke’s vision of “moderniz[ing] the VA by increasing transparency and accountability” and “addressing staffing shortages,” while “positioning the VA to drive an industry-wide digital health care revolution.” It’s not clear to me that the widespread problems with the centrally planned government health care system can be fixed by better central planning, and O’Rourke’s faith in government-spurred “standardization of electronic health care data” may well be misplaced.

There’s some granular and sensible-sounding stuff in there about allowing V.A. doctors to prescribe medical cannabis, and O’Rourke is right to sound the alarm about veterans’ suicide rates. But the plan includes some microscopic level of detail—”reverse boot camps” for returning veterans! “Instruct VA to publicize their efforts to combat sexual harassment at their facilities and metrics for success to ensure accountability”!—that will get lost in chatter about war-taxing the non-military rich.

Though as the Houston Chronicle points out, these are the weeds O’Rourke knows best. “The plan for veterans recalls some of his biggest legislative victories while serving in Congress from 2012 to 2018,” Texas’s largest newspaper wrote. “Possibly his hallmark legislative accomplishment was a bill expanding mental health care for military veterans even if they received a less-than-honorable discharge, an idea that was an outgrowth of El Paso having one of the highest suicide rates for veterans in the nation.”

The plan, coming on the heels of O’Rourke’s big immigration policy heave, also reverses a number of Trump administration policies, such as the transgender troop ban.

Heading into this week’s presidential debates, O’Rourke is polling at around 3.5 percent nationwide, down from an average of 8.3 percent in March. In the critical early state of Iowa, where he has staked his visit-every-county style of campaigning on, the former congressman is also polling at around 3.5 percent.

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10 Charts That Capture The Market’s Confused Zeitgeist

In lieu of his traditional morning commentary, and while preparing for the key meeting this week, Nomura’s derivatives guru decided to pass-along a few charts “which capture the current market zeitgeist” along with the conclusion that the overall “output still speaks to the investors positioned for the end-of-cycle “Slow-flation” narrative: Long Global DM Bonds / Rates, Under-positioned for Equities rally and now tilting “Short Dollar” via tactical Longs developing in Gold, Commods and even Bitcoin.”

Of course, with the US economic expansion just 6 days away from being the longest on record (unless the NBER decides in the next few months that the recession started some time in Q2), it is not difficult to see why end-cycle trades dominate – both on Wall Street and the Fed, which is doing everything in its power to extend the weakest recovery on record my at least a few months, even if it is kicking and screaming.

So, without furhter ado, here are – as McElligott calls them – the goods:

1. Bitcoin: bitcoin is a play on escaping “negative yielding debt”, as global central banks tilt back to “easing” and currency devaluation in 2019.

 

2. Gold: this best way to “short the USD” is the most inversely-correlated asset to US short-term real yields in the past 20 years.

 

3. Fund Performance: Performance beta across assets/factors shows continued de-risking into the 1 Month move higher from macro, equities L/S and mutual funds (percentiles since 2003).

 

4. Positioning: The latest CFTC data shows asset manager “long” vs leverage fund “short” in US equity futures YTD:

 

5. Hedge fund faith in stocks (or lack thereof): The equity long/short hedge-fund universe “beta to the S&P” is testing multi-year lows, in the 2.3% percentile since 2003 as nobody believes this fake rally.

It’s just “beta to the market”, but also “beta to the beta factor” which is at 2015 lows, as a red on “long defensives/low vol”, and “short cyclicals/value.”

 

6. “Slowflation“: For those seeking the expression of “slowflation” in equities, look no further than “long defensives” and “secular growth” against underweight “cyclicals”, a relationship that has caused funds great pain in recent months.

 

7. Factor exposure: US stocks factor behavior is indicative of the same as per 1Y performance of “growth”, “momentum” and “quality/high cash” versus “value” and various “high beta” risk factors:

 

8. Risk-Impairity: Nomura quants’ risk-parity model allocation shows extent of govt bond allocation (leverage deployment) against the ongoing reduction in equities exposure as the outlier.

 

9. Duration im-parity: Nomura’s risk-parity model shows that gross-exposure to global DM bonds remains near new highs since 2011.

 

10. Risk Pars don’t like equity risk: While risk parity funds are all ine DM bonds, they seem loathe to go heavy into us stocks, as the following chart shows: risk-par exposure to US equities is at a 28 month low.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2X4aUpS Tyler Durden

“Empty Shelves & Massive Job Cuts” Loom As Zimbabwe Abandons USDollar… Again

After a decade of dollarization to escape from the hyperinflationary hell of Mugabe’s money-printing, Zimbabwe has implicitly re-introduced the ZimDollar as the nation’s sole legal tender – banning the use of currencies such as the USDollar and South African Rand in favor of its so-called RTGS dollar.

As a reminder, Zimbabwe abandoned its own dollar in 2009 after years of hyperinflation had destroyed trust in the local unit, but, after a hoped-for economic turnaround, promised by new Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, is yet to materialise,

As Reuters reports, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said in a video posted on Twitter

“The march towards full currency reform is part of our transitional stabilisation programme…This move is really beginning to restore full monetary policy.”

Additionally, the central bank also hiked its overnight lending rate to 50% from 15% as a part of a set of measures to protect the RTGS dollar introduced in February.

Jee-A Van Der Linde, an economist at South Africa-based NKC African Economics warned that banning the use of currencies such as the U.S. dollar and South African rand could create panic since Zimbabwe did not have large foreign-currency reserves to back the RTGS dollar. There was nothing standing in the way of the Zimbabwean central bank printing money as it had done in the past, he added.

Van Der Linde is not alone in his skepticism, as TechZim reports, local audit firm, Grant Thornton has provided a Commentary of yesterday’s reintroduction of the Zimbabwean Dollar which noted some inadequacies. With the introduction of SI 142 of 2019, and reading between the lines below are some of our comments with regards to the SI:

a) The instrument has all hallmarks of a hastily concocted measure to stop the downward spiral of the RTGS dollar against other currencies. Whether it will have any such effect remains to be seen.

b) Challenges in companies to restock – we envisage that with no foreign currency earnings and obtaining them on the legal market still an issue to be addressed, there is bound to be challenges for companies to restock especially if the current inventory was acquired in USD. This might, at the end of the day, lead to empty shelves and massive job cuts as companies try to streamline their costs.

c) No mention of penalties for those trading in foreign currency – the SI does not state any repercussions on companies who continue to trade in foreign currency.

d) No law prohibiting sale of goods/services or drafting of contracts in foreign currency– there is no law in Zimbabwe that requires prices to be marked up in legal tender or accounts to be drawn up in legal tender. Similarly, if parties agree that a debt should be repaid in foreign currency, then the debtor is obliged to do so. The reason being there is no law in Zimbabwe which invalidates a contract that stipulates payment must be made in foreign currency.

The RTGS dollar has been hitting new lows on the black market in recent days, and as Reuters adds, inflation raced to 97.85% in May, eroding salaries and savings and causing Zimbabweans to fear a return to the hyperinflation era a decade ago.

Source

Get long wheelbarrows!!

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FwMlw1 Tyler Durden

Beto O’Rourke: Tax the Non-Military Rich to Pay for Veterans

On Monday, sixth-place Democratic presidential contender Beto O’Rourke unveiled a big new plan to pay for the health care of U.S. military veterans, while attempting to transform the Veterans Affairs medical system from bureaucratic morass to health care trailblazer.

The plan’s two key elements will surprise no one paying attention to the Democratic presidential race: end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tax the rich (in this case, defined as those earning more than $200,000 a year in adjusted gross income). The twist: The proposed “war tax” would “be levied on households without current members of the Armed Forces or veterans of the Armed Forces.”

“This new tax would serve as a reminder of the incredible sacrifice made by those who serve and their families,” reads the campaign’s write-up (which, incidentally, refers to O’Rourke as “Beto” throughout). “Over the next few decades, the costs related to health care and disability compensation for the ‘forever wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are projected to be nearly a trillion dollars. Today, these services—ones which we have promised to veterans and ones which they are owed—are subject to fiscal battles in Washington. They should not be.”

The war tax would apply only to future conflicts, and only to those explicitly authorized by Congress. (O’Rourke has been a consistent critic, through Democratic and Republican administrations, of unconstitutional executive branch war-making.) As for the current needs of vets, “Beto would propose that Congress invest $1 out of every $2 dollars saved [by ending the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq]—estimated at nearly $200 billion to vets, and at least $400 billion in total savings—in programs that benefit those who served.”

The plan contains things to like, things to dislike, and things that make you go hmmm. On the positive side, baked right into it is a righteous critique of Forever War. “Eighteen years into the war in Afghanistan, and nearly three decades after our first engagement in Iraq, the time has come to cancel the blank check for endless war and to ensure that any future engagements are the result of a national conversation about our security interests and duly authorized by Congress.”

This is familiar territory for the toothsome Texan. As I wrote in December:

O’Rourke was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is a withering critic of both the Iraq and Libya interventions (“two incredibly ill-conceived regime change wars?”), opposed bombing Syria, and has consistently called on Congress to end the open-ended post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (“blank check for endless war“) and reassert its war-declaration powers. “Troubling, unconstitutional, to be at war in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen & Somalia, in addition to Afghanistan, w/out informed authorization,” he tweeted in 2017. “Why do we have such a hard time admitting the West’s role and culpability in the problems in the Middle East?” he wrote in 2016.

I also appreciate the gesture, increasingly rare in the Democratic conversation, of having some big new spending proposal paid for. “We’re running $1 trillion annual deficits and we cannot continue to spend ourselves into ruin,” O’Rourke said in 2012, and he’s right. Though I wish the 2019 version shared his predecessor’s willingness to, you know, actually cut spending.

Less promising to my admittedly cynical ears is O’Rourke’s vision of “moderniz[ing] the VA by increasing transparency and accountability” and “addressing staffing shortages,” while “positioning the VA to drive an industry-wide digital health care revolution.” It’s not clear to me that the widespread problems with the centrally planned government health care system can be fixed by better central planning, and O’Rourke’s faith in government-spurred “standardization of electronic health care data” may well be misplaced.

There’s some granular and sensible-sounding stuff in there about allowing V.A. doctors to prescribe medical cannabis, and O’Rourke is right to sound the alarm about veterans’ suicide rates. But the plan includes some microscopic level of detail—”reverse boot camps” for returning veterans! “Instruct VA to publicize their efforts to combat sexual harassment at their facilities and metrics for success to ensure accountability”!—that will get lost in chatter about war-taxing the non-military rich.

Though as the Houston Chronicle points out, these are the weeds O’Rourke knows best. “The plan for veterans recalls some of his biggest legislative victories while serving in Congress from 2012 to 2018,” Texas’s largest newspaper wrote. “Possibly his hallmark legislative accomplishment was a bill expanding mental health care for military veterans even if they received a less-than-honorable discharge, an idea that was an outgrowth of El Paso having one of the highest suicide rates for veterans in the nation.”

The plan, coming on the heels of O’Rourke’s big immigration policy heave, also reverses a number of Trump administration policies, such as the transgender troop ban.

Heading into this week’s presidential debates, O’Rourke is polling at around 3.5 percent nationwide, down from an average of 8.3 percent in March. In the critical early state of Iowa, where he has staked his visit-every-county style of campaigning on, the former congressman is also polling at around 3.5 percent.

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Fired Harvard Dean Ronald Sullivan: ‘Unchecked Emotion Has Replaced Thoughtful Reasoning on Campus’

Harvard University law professor Ronald Sullivan lost his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House after student-activists complained that his decision to represent Harvey Weinstein made campus an unsafe place for women. It did not matter to them that Sullivan had previously represented scores of controversial clients—including accused murderers and terrorists—and worked tirelessly to advocate for criminal justice reform.

Now Sullivan has penned an op-ed for The New York Times that criticizes the students for letting their feelings override reason, and the administration for bowing to their demands. He writes:

I am willing to believe that some students felt unsafe. But feelings alone should not drive university policy. Administrators must help students distinguish between feelings that have a rational basis and those that do not. In my case, Harvard missed an opportunity to help students do that.

I wish I could say that Harvard’s response in these matters is unique in higher education. Unfortunately, many universities have failed in this regard of late.

Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.

This must change. Until then, universities are doing a profound disservice to those who place their trust in us to educate them.

The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety.

Regrettably, Sullivan is exactly right: Too many elite institutions of higher education have given credence to the demands of a small number of activist students. As a result, campuses have become less friendly to free expression and due process in recent years. For more about why and how this trend took shape, order my brand new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.

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Fired Harvard Dean Ronald Sullivan: ‘Unchecked Emotion Has Replaced Thoughtful Reasoning on Campus’

Harvard University law professor Ronald Sullivan lost his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House after student-activists complained that his decision to represent Harvey Weinstein made campus an unsafe place for women. It did not matter to them that Sullivan had previously represented scores of controversial clients—including accused murderers and terrorists—and worked tirelessly to advocate for criminal justice reform.

Now Sullivan has penned an op-ed for The New York Times that criticizes the students for letting their feelings override reason, and the administration for bowing to their demands. He writes:

I am willing to believe that some students felt unsafe. But feelings alone should not drive university policy. Administrators must help students distinguish between feelings that have a rational basis and those that do not. In my case, Harvard missed an opportunity to help students do that.

I wish I could say that Harvard’s response in these matters is unique in higher education. Unfortunately, many universities have failed in this regard of late.

Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.

This must change. Until then, universities are doing a profound disservice to those who place their trust in us to educate them.

The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety.

Regrettably, Sullivan is exactly right: Too many elite institutions of higher education have given credence to the demands of a small number of activist students. As a result, campuses have become less friendly to free expression and due process in recent years. For more about why and how this trend took shape, order my brand new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.

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Detroit Police Arrested a City-Commissioned Artist Because He Didn’t Have a Permit

A Detroit artist hired to combat illegal graffiti was arrested by police officers over a misplaced permit.

In 2017, the city began an art program called City Walls. The program aimed to cut down on illegal graffiti by teaming up with local artists and giving them permission to create murals throughout the city. The program was designed, in part, “to provide a positive cost benefit to the public via art versus the cost of blight remediation.”

Artist Sheefy McFly, whose real name is Tashif Turner, was hired as part of the initiative.

While working on his art on Wednesday, however, McFly ran into some trouble. The Detroit Free Press reports that two police officers approached McFly while he was in the middle of a days-long project. Officers mistook him for a vandal; McFly did not have his city-issued permit at the scene.

McFly attempted to explain to officers that he had permission to paint, but the situation escalated with the arrival of an estimated four or five police cars. A city official even appeared on the scene to corroborate McFly’s story. According to the police spokesperson, police determined arrested McFly for resisting, obstruction, and an outstanding traffic warrant.

He shared an impassioned post from his mother, noting the overaction from police simply because he was painting a mural. “He could have been KILLED over paint brushes and spray cans,” she wrote.

“Worst thing about it is they humiliated me dog. They treated me like a criminal in front of my artwork I did for my city pulled up [seven] Cars deep. They took me to jail [and] treated me like a felon. I’m just a Artist bro,” he tweeted of the incident.

McFly’s experience is more than a simple misunderstanding. It raises the question of how much government permission is enough government permission. Police remained undeterred because of a lack of paper despite the fact that McFly had a representative from the city speak up in his favor, who likely had very little reason to lie.

There’s also something to be said about the police response overall. The creation of art, even illegal art, is not deserving of an army of squad cars. Even more concerning is the way an attempt to explain to officers that a crime was not being committed rose to an obstruction charge. The way McFly was approached and his subsequent arrest were likely disproportionate responses to what was perceived as a low-level crime in action.

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Shale Pioneer: Fracking Is An “Unmitigated Disaster”

Authored by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

Fracking has been an “unmitigated disaster” for shale companies themselves, according to a prominent former shale executive.

“The shale gas revolution has frankly been an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor in the shale gas industry with very few limited exceptions,” Steve Schlotterbeck, former chief executive of EQT, a shale gas giant, said at a petrochemicals conference in Pittsburgh.

“In fact, I’m not aware of another case of a disruptive technological change that has done so much harm to the industry that created the change.”

He did not pull any punches.

“While hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits have accrued to hundreds of millions of people, the amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said.

“The industry is self-destructive.”

The message is not a new one. The shale industry has been burning through capital for years, posting mountains of red ink. One estimate from the Wall Street Journal found that over the past decade, the top 40 independent U.S. shale companies burned through $200 billion more than they earned. A 2017 estimate from the WSJ found $280 billion in negative cash flow between 2010 and 2017. It’s incredible when you think about it – despite the record levels of oil and gas production, the industry is in the hole by roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars.

The red ink has continued right up to the present, and the most recent downturn in oil prices could lead to more losses in the second quarter.

So, questionable economics is not exactly breaking news when it comes to shale. But the fact that a prominent former shale executive – who presided over one of the largest shale gas companies in the country – called out the industry face-to-face, raised some eyebrows, to say the least. “In a little more than a decade, most of these companies just destroyed a very large percentage of their companies’ value that they had at the beginning of the shale revolution,” Schlotterbeck said. “It’s frankly hard to imagine the scope of the value destruction that has occurred. And it continues.”

“Nearly every American has benefited from shale gas, with one big exception,” he said, “the shale gas investors.”’

The industry is at a bit of a crossroads with Wall Street losing faith and interest, finally recognizing the failed dreams of fracking. The Wall Street Journal reports that Pioneer Natural Resources, often cited as one of the strongest shale drillers in Texas, is largely giving up on growth and instead aiming to be a modest-sized driller that can hand money back to shareholders.

“We lost the growth investors,” Pioneer’s CEO Scott Sheffield said in a WSJ interview. “Now we’ve got to attract a whole other set of investors.”

Sheffield has decided to slash Pioneer’s workforce and slow down on the pace of drilling. Pioneer has been bedeviled by disappointing production from some of its wells and higher-than-expected costs.

But, as Schlotterbeck told the industry conference in Pittsburgh, the problem with fracking runs deep. While shale E&Ps have succeeded in boosting oil and gas production to levels that were unthinkable only a few years ago, prices have crashed precisely because of the surge of supply. And, because wells decline at a precipitous rate, capital-intensive drilling ultimately leaves companies on a spending treadmill.

Meanwhile, as the financial scrutiny increases on the industry, so does the public health impact. A new report that studied over 1,700 articles from peer-reviewed journals found harmful impacts on health and the environment. Specifically, 69 percent of the studies found potential or actual evidence of water contamination associated with fracking; 87 percent found air quality problems; and 84 percent found harm or potential harm on human health.

The health impacts have been a point of controversy for years, pitting the industry against local communities. The industry largely won the tug-of-war over fracking, beating back federal and state efforts to regulate it. However, the story is not over.

In many cases, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence pointing to serious health impacts, but peer-reviewed research takes time and has lagged behind the incredible rate of drilling. Now, the public health research is starting to catch up. Of the more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies looking at these issues, more than half have been published since 2016.

One need not be an opponent of fracking to recognize that this presents a threat to the industry. For instance, a spike of a rare form of cancer has cropped up in southwestern Pennsylvania recently. The causes are unclear, but some public health advocates and environmental groups are pointing the finger at shale gas drilling, and have called on the governor to stop issuing new drilling permits. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, said the request was “ridiculous.” The region is right at the heart of high levels of shale drilling, so any regulatory action coming in response the public health outcry could impact drilling operations. Time will tell.

In the meantime, poor financials are the largest drag on the shale sector.

“And at $2 even the mighty Marcellus does not make economic sense,” Steve Schlotterbeck, the former EQT executive said at the conference.

“There will be a reckoning and the only questions is whether it happens in a controlled manner or whether it comes as an unexpected shock to the system.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2X5dnkd Tyler Durden

Detroit Police Arrested a City-Commissioned Artist Because He Didn’t Have a Permit

A Detroit artist hired to combat illegal graffiti was arrested by police officers over a misplaced permit.

In 2017, the city began an art program called City Walls. The program aimed to cut down on illegal graffiti by teaming up with local artists and giving them permission to create murals throughout the city. The program was designed, in part, “to provide a positive cost benefit to the public via art versus the cost of blight remediation.”

Artist Sheefy McFly, whose real name is Tashif Turner, was hired as part of the initiative.

While working on his art on Wednesday, however, McFly ran into some trouble. The Detroit Free Press reports that two police officers approached McFly while he was in the middle of a days-long project. Officers mistook him for a vandal; McFly did not have his city-issued permit at the scene.

McFly attempted to explain to officers that he had permission to paint, but the situation escalated with the arrival of an estimated four or five police cars. A city official even appeared on the scene to corroborate McFly’s story. According to the police spokesperson, police determined arrested McFly for resisting, obstruction, and an outstanding traffic warrant.

He shared an impassioned post from his mother, noting the overaction from police simply because he was painting a mural. “He could have been KILLED over paint brushes and spray cans,” she wrote.

“Worst thing about it is they humiliated me dog. They treated me like a criminal in front of my artwork I did for my city pulled up [seven] Cars deep. They took me to jail [and] treated me like a felon. I’m just a Artist bro,” he tweeted of the incident.

McFly’s experience is more than a simple misunderstanding. It raises the question of how much government permission is enough government permission. Police remained undeterred because of a lack of paper despite the fact that McFly had a representative from the city speak up in his favor, who likely had very little reason to lie.

There’s also something to be said about the police response overall. The creation of art, even illegal art, is not deserving of an army of squad cars. Even more concerning is the way an attempt to explain to officers that a crime was not being committed rose to an obstruction charge. The way McFly was approached and his subsequent arrest were likely disproportionate responses to what was perceived as a low-level crime in action.

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