Modern air travel gives us almost unlimited possibilities for getting around.
Whether you are acting on your wanderlust to explore new and exotic destinations, hopping to a familiar island for a well-deserved vacation, or jetsetting to London in the comfort of business class, the modern airline industry can get you almost anywhere you need to go.
But, as Visual Capitalists’ Jeff Desjardins notes, while flying allows us to have unique experiences, it’s often the case that we are all coming and going from many of the same popular destinations. As a result, the world’s busiest air routes have hundreds of flights per day connecting important city pairs together.
Ranking City Pairs
Today’s chart pulls data from OAG, which has compiled a detailed report ranking the busiest domestic and international air routes from around the globe.
It’s worth noting that the data is over the period of March 2018 to February 2019, and it excludes carriers that operate fewer than 500 routes per year.
Let’s dive in to see which city pairs have the most air travel between them.
Domestic Routes
Domestic routes are far more popular than international routes globally. According to the report, there are 15 domestic routes that have more operating flights per year than any international route anywhere.
Here’s a look at the top 10 domestic routes:
The busiest domestic route might be a surprise, unless you are familiar with Asian geography.
With almost 80,000 annual flights, the 300-mile hop between Seoul and Jeju Island in South Korea is the busiest air route in the world by a large margin. Overall, there are seven carriers competing on it each day, with over 200 daily flights available between them.
What makes Jeju so popular?
Known as the “Hawaii of South Korea”, this volcanic island is an extremely popular vacation destination within the country, and it hosts roughly 15 million guests per year.
International Routes
On an international basis, the busiest route has almost 50,000 fewer flights per year than the Jeju-Seoul city pair listed above. Not surprisingly, this route – and many other top international routes – are also located in the Asia Pacific region.
The short hop between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur takes only one hour, and it connects two major Southeast Asian commercial hubs. The route has 41 flights per day between eight airlines, making it one of the most competitive routes globally.
The busiest international route outside of the Asia Pacific is between Toronto and New York (LaGuardia) with 17,038 annual flights. Interestingly, it only has three competing carriers – the lowest of any of the top 10 routes.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Gnygkd Tyler Durden
Earlier today, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Trump Administration on nearly all the disputed issues in the California “sanctuary state” case. The ruling is an important victory for federalism in the ongoing legal struggle between Trump and various “blue” sanctuary jurisdictions. This case is the latest in a long line of Trump administration defeats in sanctuary cases that have helped make constitutional federalism great again. The implications go well beyond the specific context of immigration.
Like the earlier trial court ruling in the same case, the Ninth Circuit decision emphasizes the important constitutional principle that the federal government cannot compel states to help it enforce federal law. It also adopts an appropriately narrow view of the doctrine that forbids state policies “discriminating” against the federal government and those who deal with it.
The administration filed a lawsuit challenging three recent California laws: Senate Bill 54, which restricts state and local officials from sharing information about immigrants within the state, with federal agencies; Assembly Bill 103, which requires the state attorney general to inspect any facility in the state where immigrants are detained by federal agents while awaiting immigration court dates or deportation; and Assembly Bill 450, which forbids private employers from cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and audits unless such cooperation is mandated by a court order or a specific federal law, and requires employers to give notice to employees of any federal immigration-related inspections of employment records.
The federal government claimed that all three bills conflict with federal law and are therefore “preempted,” and that many parts of them also violate the doctrine of “intergovernmental immunity,” which bars states from “discriminating” against the federal government or “those with whom it deals.” In July 2018, a federal district judge ruled in favor of California on two of the three laws in question.
Today’s ruling largely follows the reasoning of the district court decision. It too upholds Senate Bill 54 because it does not actually conflict with any federal law. The Trump administration claims that SB 54 violates federal law because it conflicts with 8 U.S.C. Section 1373, a controversial federal law mandating that “a Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” The Ninth Circuit, like the district court, concludes that SB 54 does not violate Section 1373. Thus, it does not reach the question of whether Section 1373 is unconstitutional because it violates Supreme Court precedent ruling that the Tenth Amendment bans federal “commandeering” of state governments to help enforce federal law. Numerous other recent court decisions have concluded that Section 1373 is unconstitutional on that basis, particularly since the Supreme Court’s May 2018 ruling in Murphy v. NCAA strengthened the case against Section 1373.
The Ninth Circuit ruling does emphasize that the anti-commandeering rule is an important factor in its relatively narrow interpretation of federal immigration law, so as to uphold SB 54:
The United States’ primary argument against SB 54 is that it forces federal authorities to expend greater resources to enforce immigration laws, but that would be the case regardless of SB 54, since California would still retain the ability to “decline to administer the federal program.” NewYork [v. United States], 505 U.S. at 177. As the Supreme Court recently rearticulated in Murphy, under the anticommandeering rule, “Congress cannot issue direct orders to state legislatures…”
SB 54 may well frustrate the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts. However, whatever the wisdom of the underlying policy adopted by California, that frustration is permissible, because California has the right, pursuant to the anticommandeering rule, to refrain from assisting with federal efforts. The United States stresses that… Congress expected cooperation between states and federal immigration authorities…. But when questions of federalism are involved, we must distinguish between expectations and requirements. In this context, the federal government was free to expect as much as it wanted, but it could not require California’s cooperation without running afoul of the Tenth Amendment.
This reasoning has obvious implications for other situations where states might wish to refuse to help the federal government enforce federal law.
The Ninth Circuit also upholds AB 103 state inspections of federal immigration detention facilities on much the same basis as the district court: the inspections do not “discriminate” against the federal government because they are much the same as those that California requires for other prisons within the state.
On SB 450, the Court of Appeals did not consider the one issue where the district court ruled in favor of the federal government: instituting an injunction against the part of the law that bars employers from voluntarily consenting to ICE raids. The case before the Ninth Circuit was an appeal by the United States against those parts of the district court ruling that went against it, so it does not raise the one issue on which the federal government won in the trial court.
The Ninth Circuit did reaffirm the district court’s ruling that SB 450’s worker notification requirement is constitutional. It emphasized that the requirement does not “discriminate” against the federal government because it does not treat its agents less favorably than similarly situated private parties:
The Supreme Court has clarified that a state “does not discriminate against the Federal Government and those with whom it deals unless it treats someone else better than it treats them.” Washington, 460 U.S. at 544–45. AB 450 does not treat the federal government worse than anyone else; indeed, it does not regulate federal operations at all. Accordingly, the district court correctly concluded that AB 450’s employee-notice provisions do not violate the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.
The Ninth Circuit did rule against California on one small issue where the trial court went the other way. It struck down a provision of AB 103 that required inspections of the circumstances of the detainees apprehension and transfer to the facility in question. Unlike the rest of AB 103, “[t]his is a novel requirement, apparently distinct from any other inspection requirements imposed by California law,” and therefore qualifies as discrimination against the federal government, violating the doctrine of “intergovernmental immunity.”
I think this part of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling is wrong because ICE apprehension and detention of immigrants is not truly analogous to the detention of other kinds of prisoners, including those arrested by state law enforcement. The criticism I made against the district court’s ruling on AB 450 applies here too. There is no meaningful state (or private) analogue to federal-government detention of suspected illegal immigrants for deportation, because no private or state agency has the power to deport people with only minimal due process, often so little that the government routinely detains and deports large numbers of people who are actually US citizens.
Like the district court decision this case largely upholds, the Ninth Circuit ruling only addresses the federal government’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the three state laws. But, in both cases, the court’s ruling prefigures the likely outcome of a final judgment on the merits.
The Ninth Circuit sanctuary state ruling is the latest in a long line of federal court decisions ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to force sanctuary jurisdictions to cooperate with federal enforcement priorities. I review those cases and their significance in my forthcoming Texas Law Review article on Trump-era sanctuary state litigation, and its broader significance.
Some experts, myself included, initially believed that the sanctuary state case presented the most difficult issues of all the Trump-era sanctuary cases, and could well wind up in the Supreme Court. I still think it is the closest of the lot, but I think it is less likely to get taken up by the Supreme Court than before. The fact that an ideologically disparate group of judges have all ruled against the administration on most of the issues in the case suggests that there may be less disagreement on these issues in the judiciary than I expected.
It is significant that Trump’s repeated defeats in sanctuary cases have come at the hands of both Republican and Democratic federal judges. Today’s ruling is no exception. Judge Milan Smith, Jr. author of the Ninth Circuit opinion, is a Republican George W. Bush appointee. The district court judge who ruled against the administration on most issues in this case is also a GOP appointee. The other two judges on the Ninth Circuit panel are Democratic Obama appointees. When it comes to sanctuary cities, if not some other issues, Chief Justice John Roberts was right to say “[w]e do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
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Americans are increasingly living in fear of the opposing political party. While the elites laugh and continue to enslave the populace even further because of this fear, Americans increasingly embrace their chains while asking them to be shortened, and all while dehumanizing those on a different plantation.
The fact is, none of us are free. We are all slaves to the same master – the political elites. The only way to be free is to accept it and attempt to free others in the process. So far, the government has not had to put literal chains on anyone because most Americans are mental slaves. If you own the mind, you won’t need to enslave the body. This is causing problems in problems in our society, however, as many fear those who think differently than they do while giving a pass to the ones actually at fault for their dissatisfaction.
Extreme partisanship has infected both democrats and republicans to the point of no return.According to Oregon Live, more than 40 percent of Americans say they are surrounded by “downright evil” and they’re referring to their fellow Americans who happen to belong to a different political party. This division and fear keep the elite wealthy, powerful, and increasingly authoritarian. While we fight each other, we can’t be bothered to actually take on the behemoth monster that is responsible for all this fear and division in the first place.
A recent academic paper by political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, presented at the National Capital Area Political Science Association conference in January, concludes that the extreme partisanship of recent decades has made millions of Americans intellectually insular and emotionally numb. As a result, these hyper-partisans – and, to be clear, all of this goes for members of both major parties – feel little or no sympathy “in response to deaths and injuries of political opponents.” Some even show “explicit support for partisan violence.” –Oregon Live
The key component to all of this fear is ensuring the public stays divided by dehumanizing each other. This makes violence against each other suddenly “acceptable” to those stuck and enslaved by the system. A key reason for this “moral disengagement” is that partisanship in the cable-TV and social-media age has proven exceptionally good at dehumanizing one’s ideological opponents. Kalmoe and Mason’s unpublished paper found that about one in five Americans believe that those on the other side of the partisan divide “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”
The portion of hyper-partisan Americans is worrisome even for those not on the political spectrum. Morality no longer matters if another human being is not seen as a human being. Kalmoe and Mason’s work indicates that the nature of this uptick in extreme partisanship provides people with the “psychological distancing” that allows them to rationalize physical violence and discrimination against others.
Instead of accepting that it is ALWAYS morally wrong to initiate force or violence against another human being for ANY REASON, Americans have rationalized such violence and theft as taxation or police brutality in order to justify their own political violence. This type of path is leading our society down a very dangerous path.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IrzWwt Tyler Durden
Six months after Canada became the first country in the developed world to legalize marijuana, legal sales of dried cannabis flower went up in smoke as consumers shifted to illicit markets.
A marijuana shortage left the industry in shock earlier this year and caused concerns that Canadian cannabis producers were not properly structured to handle the massive demand from the Canadian marketplace.
As a result, a majority of marijuana sales in the country — approximately $5 billion — were transacted on the black market, compared to $2 billion in legal sales, according to new government data from January 2019.
Pot smoking Canadians purchased 6,671 kilograms of legal cannabis in February, down 9% from January, and the lowest amount since October when 6,415 kilograms were sold, according to Health Canada.
While the legal cannabis market has been hit with supply chain bottlenecks and overpricing, the black market continued to flourish into 2Q.
Canadians paid 57% on average more for legal cannabis than they did from their drug dealer, according to the data.
Since October [the month when pot became legal], consumers purchasing legal cannabis paid $7.47 per gram on average, compared with buyers on the black market who paid an average $4.70 per gram.
Industry experts believe the illicit cannabis market will continue to expand by offering affordable weed to all.
“As long as that price differential exists, there will likely be a black market – because people will go to where they can get a deal,” Rosalie Wynoch, a policy analyst at the CD Howe Institute, a conservative think tank, told the Guardian. “The government was aware that it wouldn’t fully displace the black market on day one.”
A recent survey of 500 pot smokers conducted by BMO Capital Markets found that 35% of all respondents indicated they have purchased legal cannabis. BMO’s survey responses also suggest that muted legal sales were due to supply shortages and overpricing.
Ahead of legalization last October, Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, emphasized that legal pot would eliminate the black market. Unfortunately, Trudeau has been terribly mistaken as the illicit market continues to expand.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VSaVNW Tyler Durden
Now that Mueller’s $40 million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of its original purpose (to retire Trump), perhaps the ruling class can return without interruption to the business of destroying the world with ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes. A few more CIA-organized blackouts in Venezuela (it’s a simple trick if one follows the Agency’s “Freedom Fighter’s Manual”), and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet another neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a semblance of transparency in their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman, they forthrightly admit, is in their countries’ oil reserves. And Russians better respect the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they know what’s good for them. Crude as they may be, Trump’s men tell it like it is. And when Bolton speaks of “the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law,” he is of course referring to US-backed coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes, assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy.
That the US is not already formally at war with Russia (even with NATO forces all along its borders) has only to do with the latter’s nuclear arsenal deterrent. Since World War II, a period some describe as a “a period of unprecedented peace,” the US war machine has wiped out some 20 million people, including more than 1 million in Iraq since 2003, engaged in regime change of at least 36 governments, intervened in at least 82 foreign elections, including Russia (1996), planned more than 50 assassinations of foreign leaders, and bombed over 30 countries. This is documented here and here.
Despite unending US and US-supported assaults on Africa and western and central Asia, the authors who see postwar unprecedented peace argue that it’s Russia and China, not the US, that represent the real threats to peace and deserve to be treated as “outcasts.” That NATO has warships plying the Black Sea and making port calls at the ethnically Russian Ukraine city of Odessa and is conducting war games from Latvia to Bulgaria and Ukraine represents unprecedented peace? While NATO, which together has 20 times the military spending of Russia and includes member states along virtually the entire perimeter of Russia, in Western propaganda Russia is the aggressor.
Although the US corporate media may have missed the news, the rest of the world gets the fact that the greatest threat to peace on the planet is Uncle Sam. In 2013, a WIN/Gallup International poll of 66,000 people in 65 countries found that the US was considered by far the most dangerous state on earth (24% of respondents), while Russia didn’t even register statistically on that poll. In 2017, a Pew poll found the same perception of US power and that such a view had increased to 38% and had grown in 21 of 30 countries compared to 2013. Even America’s neighbors, Canada and Mexico, see the US as a major threat to their countries, worse than either China or Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) stenographers’ myopia in failing to cover this story is not an oversight. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate exposé fame, documented in 1977 the fact that from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the MSM (New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the rest) had regularly served as overseas informers for the CIA. It would be hard to believe that those ties are not still intact given the level of collaboration among the CIA, the MSM, and the Democratic Party in the Russiagate conspiracy drama.
Context is everything.
In blaming others for the instability of the Middle East, it is important to bear in mind that for 36 years since Reagan launched air attacks on Beirut and parts of Syria, the US, and its ally Israel, has been using the greater Middle East region as a testing ground for its weapons systems. This has meant repeated bombing and droning of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, and Sudan, and increased weapons sales to the region to assure continuous instability and profits. The US has “special forces” operating in two-thirds of the world’s countries and non-special forces stationed in three-quarters of them, altogether over 800 military bases and installations in as many as 130 countries (the Pentagon refuses to give the exact number). By comparison, apart from several bases in some of the former Soviet republics, Russia has a naval resupply facility in Vietnam and small temporary leased naval and airport stations in Syria. China opened a combined naval and army base in Djibouti in 2017 and an “unofficial military presence” in Tajikistan. There is nothing remotely close to equivalence.
We can expect a continuing outcasting of Russia, either under a second Trump presidency or, if the long dark shadow of the Clintons prevails, a Joe Biden White House. Biden claims without the benefit of evidence that currently “the Russian government is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy around the world,” as if the huge imbalance of military forces and the long history of US interventions against liberal democracies and socialist states were unknown or irrelevant. In his (and the establishment’s) heavy-handed uses of propaganda, Biden has learned well the tactics of Goebbels – repeat the lies often enough to make the imperial state appear as the victim.
With regard to a brazen assault on democracy, Biden might take a cue from Clinton, who knew how to capitalize on her power position by signing off on huge arms sales to the Saudis (e.g., a $29 billion sale of fighter jets to that country to be used against Yemen) and other Gulf States while securing tens of millions of dollars in donations from the sheikhs ($25 million from Saudi Arabia alone) to her private foundation, run by her husband. This is all the more contemptuous given that she acknowledged in 2013: “The Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons… clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region…and pretty indiscriminately – not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future.”
In other words, she knew the Saudis and other Gulf dictators were arming ISIS (ISIL) and other caliphate actors but continued to keep them as allies and patrons. She also took $800 thousand for her 2016 campaign (almost double what Trump received) and some $3 million for her private foundation from oil and gas companiesafter approving lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands. Part of the foundation staff’s business was to arrange meetings of top donors meetings with the then secretary of state. Following Clinton and Obama’s lead and without a second thought, Trump has authorized US energy companies to sell the Saudi monarchy nuclear power technology and assistance.
In foreign policy, indeed, it’s hard to see any meaningful difference between Republican and Democratic administrations. Obama and John Kerry sent Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nulandto Kiev’s Maidan to cheer on the 2014 coup, hand out sandwiches to protesters, and give marching orders to her ambassador there to arrange for Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and to “fuck the EU.” Poroshenko, a regular informer at the US embassy, as WikiLeaks revealed, was already in the bag for president. Biden was brought in to “midwife” and “help glue this thing” by pressuring the still-ruling Yanukovych to step down in favor of the US-designated coup leaders. Along the same lines, Trump’s then ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, joined Venezuelan protesters outside UN headquarters in New York, using a megaphone to publicly call for a coup against Maduro. “I will tell you,” she told the group, “the U.S. voice is going to be loud.”
Both the Ukraine and Venezuela interventions are in part a grand strategy to isolate Russia. However, the orchestration of a new Cold War against Russia and to implicate Trump as a Kremlin puppet has failed, and the problem for Russiagate propagandists is how to keep the conspiracy theory alive now that Mueller’s unsuccessful hunt for 5thcolumnists is in the dustbin. The leading Russia scholar, Stephen Cohen, who has been professionally marginalized because of his skepticism toward the CIA narrative, sees the impact of a larger scandal – the corruption of the Democratic Party and its minions in the media that formed an alliance with the spooks. He asks: “what about the legions of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers, television producers, and other opinion-makers, and their eager media outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this unprecedented political scandal in American history…?”
Another question is, how would the mainstream media financially survive an ending of Russiagate, if indeed the media moguls allow it to end? This spectacular failure of the “fourth estate” in covering the Clinton and Democrats’ defeat in 2016 greatly weakened their trust status, which has been in quite steady decline since the 1970s, especially among Republicans. Democrats tend to look more favorably on the largely partisan liberal MSM for obvious reasons. However, as of December 2018, according to an IPSOS/Reuters poll, only 44% of Americans has much (16%) or some (28%) confidence in the MSM, compared to hardly any (48%). On whether MSM news organizations are more interested in making money than telling the truth, 59% agreed with the former assessment. No known organization has published findings on MSM trust since the completion of the Mueller debacle.
What is to be made politically of the Russia obsession? Russiagate, which Matt Taibbi calls “this generation’s WMD,” can be seen as serving three broad major purposes.
It has given the Democratic Party leadership and its partners in the CIA and MSM a cause célèbre inorder to salvage the status and image of the party and distract from its disastrous electoral defeats from 2008 to 2016. It thereby serves as an alternative reality to the widespread recognition that the ruling forces in the party have no genuine popular agenda and represent corporate, banking, neoliberal, and neoconservative militarist projects designed under Bill Clinton’s New Democrat agenda.
On foreign policy, Russiagate puts the Democrats to the right of the Republicans, similar to the way that John Kennedy in the 1960 campaign accused the Eisenhower (and VP Nixon) administration of weakening America’s defenses, which presently enables the energy and defense industries and their lobbyists to unduly influence the perception of international threats and flashpoints. Democrats in the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly for the 2019 $716 billion defense budget, over and above what even Trump requested. In 2018, five military contractors – Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon – provided key political leaders in both parties with $14.4 million in addition to $94 million spent on lobbying efforts that year. Oil & gas spent $89 million on the election campaign and $125 million on lobbying.
And, third, it serves to stifle the political left in and outside the party and the demands for progressive legislative changes activated by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and by newer members like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Where is the center of public political confidence these days? Certainly not with the mainstream media, which is even lower than that for Trump. Even in terms of its vaunted claims of press freedom, the US fares quite badly. Reporters Without Borders ranked the US number 45th worldwide (of 180 countries cited) in press freedom in its 2018 report. Tory-led Britain slid from 33rd in 2014 to 40th– only Italy and Greece were behind the UK among western European countries. And although Trump hasn’t helped with his attacks on the media (and more than reciprocated by the media’s extraordinarily hostile coverage of the president), the situation wasn’t much better under Obama, who threatened whistle blowers in the press with enforcing the 1917 Espionage Act. This is law that may be pressed against the journalist Julian Assange. There still exists no “shield law” guaranteeing journalists the right to protect their sources’ identities. Journalism students should be concerned for another reason as well:Newspaper employment between 2001 and 2016 has been cut by more than half, from 412,000 to 174,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
William Arkin, who quit NBC News as a political commentator last January, accused the station of peddling “ho-hum reporting” that “essentially condones” an endless US war presence in the Middle East and Africa. He also took the network to task for not reporting “the failures of the generals and national security leaders,” and essentially becoming “a defender of the government against Trump” and a “cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering.”
In his parting comments, he wrote: “I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically … be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war.… Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War?”
It may be whistling in the wind, but there are more important things to worry about than whether “the Russians” exposed the DNC’s perfidious behavior in 2016. It would be more worthwhile for Democrats to demand programs that eliminate child poverty, which is at 20% in the US, compared to an OECD average of 13%. It might also be useful to concentrate a bit more on the white working class and working poor that went to Trump in 2016, whose kids make up 31% of the child poverty bracket (black children are 24%, and Latino children are 36%).
And while they’re at it, they might try to change the fact that the US ranks 25thout of 29 industrialized countries in investments in early childhood education or the fact that the disgraceful American infant mortality rate at 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births is 50% higher than the OECD average (3.9%). Many of the parents of these less privileged children are serving long sentences in prison for non-violent crimes, the discarded citizens who form the highest incarceration rate in the world. Overall, the Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranked the US 18th out of 21 wealthy countries on measures of labor markets, poverty rates, safety nets, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. On the other hand, the US has more than 25% of the world’s 2,208 billionaires. This is American exceptionalism at its worst.
The corporate-run market system and the calamities it is bringing to the world depends on such distractions. As the New York Times journalist and defender of US global supremacy, Thomas Friedman, has noted, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” In his view, the system needs protecting, for which his “journalism” and most of the MSM are certainly doing their part.
Unless the rather soft left within the Democratic Party can somehow capture the public imagination, the Democrats’ political agenda, the MSM and their cohorts in the deep state will likely continue to report fake Russian conspiracies around the world.
Russiagate is a propaganda industry that keeps on giving. In the longue durée of American elections, the question is what discourse will dominate the next campaign – social justice and a rational foreign policy or more aggressive polemics about Russia aimed at a steady pathway to nuclear war?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KPWSaR Tyler Durden
As the American equity market roars back toward its all-time highs, a majority of the millennial generation is probably learning the true meaning of FOMO, because as study after study has showed, those who came of age immediately before, during and after the financial crisis were so scarred by the experience that they refused to ever buy in to the equity market. Overall, equity ownership among American adults remains 8% below its pre-crisis levels.
But while most would probably chalk millennials’ aversion to investing up to the fact that they don’t have any savings or income to spare, one recent study suggested that even if they had the money, they wouldn’t put it in stocks.
Lexington Law, a firm that offers services to help people fix their credit, asked 1,000 millennials how they would invest $10,000 if they had it to spare.
Nearly half – 46% – said they wouldn’t put the money in stocks.
Only one in three respondents said they would rely on a financial advisor, reflecting a distrust of financial ‘professionals’ that has lingered since the crash.
And although a slightly higher percentage of men than women said they would rely on their own advice, most expressed a lack of confidence in their investing acumen that was reflective of their lack of acumen.
As the study’s authors argued, this distrust in the financial system isn’t terribly surprising.
Considering the effects of the last market crash, it’s not terribly surprising that 46 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 said they wouldn’t invest in the stock market. Many of the financial institutions that played a role in the last recession continue to operate as investment banks today. Though employment and wages are up, the crisis hasn’t been forgotten.
We wonder if their attitudes would be different if Congress and the Fed didn’t step in to bail out banks and the wealthy while leaving average working Americans to shoulder the brunt of the consequences?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XjgxRM Tyler Durden
Six companies represent 37% of all the S&P 500’s value creation over the last 5 years: Amazon (10.1%), Apple (6.5%), Facebook (4.7%), Google (6.4%), Microsoft (7.8%), and Netflix (1.8%). And even though NFLX may look small, its increase in market value over the last 5 years is essentially the same as JP Morgan’s. US equity valuations reflect present and future Tech disruption. No other narrative need apply.
* * *
In our Markets section 2 nights ago we mentioned that Amazon is responsible for 6.7% of the S&P 500’s market value gain since November 2005. Amazon was added to the index in the that month, and since then:
The value of the companies in the S&P 500 has risen by $13,161 billion.
Amazon’s market cap has increased by $886 billion
Divide the two figures and you get 6.7%
That got us to thinking: how much have large Tech companies influenced the S&P 500 over just the last 5 years? Here are a few baseline numbers to start the analysis:
At the end of March 2014, the S&P 500 had a total value of $17,206,453 million.
At the end of March 2019, it was $24,760,982 million
The difference: $7,554.5 billion, or 43.9% higher
One technical note: the S&P 500 is +51.3% over this period with the difference due to stock buybacks.
So how much of that $7.6 trillion comes from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix? Here are the numbers:
Amazon: 10.1% of the market’s value gain over the last 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $157.4 billion
Market cap now: $917.6 billion
Difference: $760.2 billion
Apple: 6.5% of the market’s gains over the last 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $472.1 billion
Market cap now: $963.9 billion
Difference: $491.8 billion
Facebook: 4.7% of the market’s gains over the past 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $157.2 billion
Market cap now: $510.5 billion
Difference: $353.3 billion
Google: 6.4% of the market’s gains over the last 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $375.6 billion
Market cap now: $859.5 billion
Difference: $483.9 billion
Microsoft: 7.8% of the market’s gains over the last 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $343.0 billion
Market cap now: $934.2 billion
Difference: $591.2 billion
Netflix: 1.8% of the market’s total gains over the last 5 years:
Market cap Q1 2014: $21.6 billion
Market cap now: $154.9 billion
Difference: $133.3 billion
Pulling all this into 3 summary points:
#1: Netflix may not seem all that impressive at “just” $133 billion of added market cap, but that’s essentially what JP Morgan added to the S&P 500 over the same period. JPM’s market cap has increased by $139.1 billion in the last 5 years.
Conclusion: disruption at global scale can add as much market value as a much larger but old-school business even if the latter is very well-run.
#2: In aggregate, these 6 companies are responsible for 37.3% of all the S&P’s incremental value creation over the last 5 years. Take out Netflix, and the remaining 5 are still 35.5%.
Conclusion: over a third of the S&P’s 44% value accretion in the last 5 years comes down to a handful of now-super cap tech disruptors. Without them, the S&P’s total value would only have compounded annually at 5.0% instead of 7.6%.
#3: The right question out of this analysis: what will be the source of the S&P’s value creation over the next 5 years (i.e. where is the next $3-5 trillion of market cap coming from)? Here’s how we handicap the odds:
65% chance it will be these same companies. They have the scale and scope to develop the next wave of disruptive technologies and get them to market.
30% chance it will be either new businesses (such as the raft of IPOs currently in the pipeline) or already public Tech companies with a break-through technology or platform. This is why investors are looking so hard at Uber, for example.
5% chance it will come from a strategic shift in non-Tech companies to incorporate disruptive business models at scale. The challenge here is the Innovator’s Dilemma – established businesses rarely burn their boats and strike off into the wilderness.
Final thought: remember that we only highlighted 6 disruptive Tech companies here and still got to 37% of all the value creation for US stocks over the last half decade. Add another dozen or two and we suspect we could get to well north of 50%. The US stock market, or at least the S&P 500, is inextricably tied to the present and future of disruptive technology. We don’t see that changing.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IuSjAG Tyler Durden
Mobile payment and cashless stores are popping up across the country, between stores like Amazon Go and payment options like Apple Pay. Using these services requires access to the banking system, namely a bank account and a credit card. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in 2017 FDIC survey showed that 6.5 percent of U.S. households were unbanked, meaning they lacked a checking or savings account, and an additional 18.7 percent of households were underbanked, meaning they had a checking or savings account but obtained financial products, like money orders or payday loans, outside of the banking system.
As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, some advocates and legislators worry that an increasingly cashless world will further disenfranchise America’s homeless and working poor, who may fall into these unbanked and underbanked categories. New Jersey and Massachusetts both have laws that prohibit stores from discriminating against customers choosing to use cash. Cities, like Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, D.C., and San Francisco, all have proposed or have laws regulating cashless stores.
Advocates of cashless stores point to the increased speed and ease of payment for customers, and the lower rates of theft that cashless places of business experience. Some cashless options, like Square Inc. and PayPal, offer payment services that don’t require a bank account. About 23 percent of respondents from CivicScience’s survey said they were all for or OK with a cashless society. Just under a tenth of respondents did not have an opinion on whether having a cashless society would be a good thing or not.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UH1J2x Tyler Durden
In my 2014 book, The Death of Money, I wrote, “The United States is Japan on a larger scale.” That was five years ago.
Last week, prominent economist Mohamed A. El-Erian, formerly CEO of PIMCO and now with Allianz, wrote, “With the return of Europe’s economic doldrums and signs of a coming growth slowdown in the United States, advanced economies could be at risk of falling into the same kind of long-term rut that has captured Japan.”
Better late than never! Welcome to the club, Mohamed.
Japan started its “lost decade” in the 1990s. Now their lost decade has dragged into three lost decades. The U.S. began its first lost decade in 2009 and is now entering its second lost decade with no end in sight.
What I referred to in 2014 and what El-Erian refers to today is that central bank policy in both countries has been completely ineffective at restoring long-term trend growth or solving the steady accumulation of unsustainable debt.
In Japan this problem began in the 1990s, and in the U.S. the problem began in 2009, but it’s the same problem with no clear solution.
The irony is that in the early 2000s, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke routinely criticized the Japanese for their inability to escape from recession, deflation and slow growth.
When the U.S. recession began during the global financial crisis of 2008, Bernanke promised that he would not make the same mistakes the Japanese made in the 1990s. Instead, he made every mistake the Japanese made, and the U.S. is stuck in the same place and will remain there until the Fed wakes up to its problems.
Bernanke thought that low interest rates and massive money printing would lead to lending and spending that would restore trend growth to 3.2% or higher.
But he ignored the role of velocity (speed of money turnover) and the unwillingness of banks to lend or individuals to borrow. When that happens, the Fed is pushing on a string — printing money with no result except asset bubbles.
The bottom line is that this extravaganza of zero rates and money printing worked to ease the panic and prop up the financial system. But it did nothing to restore growth to its long-term trend or to improve personal income at a pace that usually occurs in an economic expansion.
Now, after a 10-year expansion, policymakers are considering the implications of a new recession. There’s only one problem: Central banks have not removed the supports they put in place during the last recession.
Interest rates are up to 2.5%, but that’s far lower than the 5% rates that will be needed so the Fed can cut enough to cure the next recession. The Fed has reduced its balance sheet from $4.5 trillion to $3.8 trillion, but that’s still well above the $800 billion level that existed before QE1.
In short, the Fed (and other central banks) have only partly normalized and are far from being able to cure a new recession or panic if one arises tomorrow. It will takes years for the Fed to get interest rates and its balance sheet back to “normal.”
Until they do, the next recession may be impossible to get out of. The odds of avoiding a recession until the Fed normalizes are low.
In the meantime, get ready for more disinflation (or deflation) and slow growth. The central banks are stuck and there’s no way out.
They cannot escape the corner they have painted themselves into.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VTVbdp Tyler Durden
Houses in the exclusive Connecticut suburb of Greenwich, long known as an enclave for hedge fund managers, are now selling for significantly less lately, with one recent colonial house forced to the auction block. The property, located on the iconic Round Hill Road, is being sold in what would normally be unthinkable fashion for Greenwich: it’s being auctioned. It’s price tag used to be $3.795 million, but now the four-bedroom property will be sold for its reserve price of just $1.8 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Its seller, Isaac Hakim, was faced with a grim buyer strike reality and said it was time to move on. “We are ready to sell and I don’t want it to drag on,” he told the WSJ. Where is Hakim rushing to? Why Florida of course.
While these types of luxury home auctions frequently happen in other parts of the country, it’s rarely seen in a market like Greenwich which used to be a beacon for top players on Wall Street and still remains one of the richest towns in the United States.
But Greenwich now faces new challenges, as New Yorkers opt to live in the city and even some, like Hakim, relocating to Florida in search of a favorable tax environment. The bonuses that were used to prop up the real estate market from bankers are also starting to run dry while SALT limitations make owning a luxury house increasingly prohibitive.
This has forced a sharp repricing of the local real estate market as sellers are starting to accept less and owners that paid top dollar for their homes in the 2000s are embracing the need to make concessions if they want to sell. There were 45 properties in Greenwich priced at more than $5 million that had their prices reduced by 10% or more in the 12 months between April 2018 and March 2019.
Attorney Frank J. Gilbride II said one of his clients recently sold his home for $11.18 million after buying it for $14.7 million in 2007. He said: “We’re finding that the larger back country homes have not been selling recently, because the new buyers don’t want to maintain 10 acres of grass. A lot of sellers are taking hair cuts of $1 million or more just to move on.”
Some sellers have even resorted to renting out their homes. Brian Amen, an agent at Houlihan Lawrence, said one of his clients tried to sell his $3.65 million home for about a year, then lowered the price, and then decided just to lease it out in hopes that the market would improve down the road. Other prominent owners have taken far less for their house than they paid.
Iconic music executive Tommy Mottola sold his house for $14.875 million, or 25% of its original asking price. And hedge fund executive Ara D. Cohen sold his property for $17.5 million – half of what he was looking to get in 2015. The auctioning off of homes is likely to not help sentiment for projects in the area. In 2016, Starwood CEO Barry Sternlicht called Greenwich the worst housing market in the country. “You can’t give away a house in Greenwich,” he said. In retrospect he may have been right.
The reaction to the comment infuriated locals. Jonathan Miller, a New York appraiser said “the brokerage community went ballistic. Now, imagine trying to tell them you’re introducing the auction concept.”
Robin Kencel, who works for the city’s public relations campaign, has been trying to do damage control: “I don’t think it’s anything specific about Greenwich, it just speaks to that specific seller’s needs.”
Robin may want to take a look at these stats: the median price for a home in Greenwich dropped by an astounding 16.7% last year to $1.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2018. On the luxury end of the market, including the top 10% of sales, prices dropped even further by 18.8%. That trend has continued into the first quarter with estimates at median prices falling more than 25%.
The worst is yet to come, however, as the average time a luxury house sits on the market in Greenwich is 357 days from its most recent price adjustment, and as sellers become discourages, they will likely take even bigger discounts to sell their houses.
Somewhat surprisingly, the only segment of the market that’s performing well are smaller entry level homes that are close to the train station, which are being snapped up by a younger generation of buyers. Low price condos in the area now start at just $330,000.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UsT5zA Tyler Durden
