What It’s Like To Be a Workplace Harassment Trainer in the #MeToo Era: New at Reason

Many of the changes brought by #MeToo are long overdue. More vulnerable people now know that they have the right to say “no” forcefully and have a reasonable expectation that they will be taken seriously when they report misconduct. Only now are there finally enough strong, capable women in positions of power—in politics and in the corporate world—to take complaints seriously and make changes stick.

But with headway comes the potential for abuse. Without proper protections in place, a minor accusation can cause unnecessarily life-ruining fallout, writes ArLyne Diamond, a workplace harrassment trainer in California.

View this article.

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NYSE Suspends Trading Of Amazon, Alphabet For Rest Of Day

Reuters reports that The New York Stock Exchange says trading suspended in Amazon (AMZN), Booking Holdings (BKNG), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Zion Oil & Gas (ZNWAA) for the rest of the trading day due to a “price scale code issue.”

AMZN, GOOGL prices are fading on the headlines (trading on other exchanges)…

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Macron Tells Trump To Reject Nationalism; Says France Will Not Leave Iran Deal

Speaking before a joint meeting of Congress on Tuesday, French president Emmanuel Macron reiterated that Paris wants to work on a new nuclear deal with Iran, which as we discussed earlier prompted confusion and anger among his European allies, and that France is not going to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was signed in 2015 by president Obama and remains his landmark foreign policy achievement.

“France will not leave the JCPOA because we’ve signed it,” Macron said. “We can work on a more comprehensive deal.”

Macron’s vow followed statement from the US State Department and EU foreign police chief Federica Mogherini, who reiterated their commitment to the agreement.  On Tuesday, Macron prompted a drop in the price of oil, when during a joint presser with Donald Trump he urged the US president not to “tear apart” the current deal, instead advising to build on it to develop a broader deal. He noted that Paris wanted to work on a new nuclear deal with Iran that would include international players like Russia and Turkey.

Macron has pushed for a new approach that would see the United States and Europe agree to block any Iranian nuclear activity until 2025 and beyond, address Iran’s ballistic missile program and generate conditions for a political solution to contain Iran in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

As a reminder, oil has surged in recent weeks over concerns that should Trump tear up the Iran Nuclear deal, that as much as 1 million barrels of Iranian exports would be eliminated from the market as a result of trade sanctions. It is also the reason why Europe – which has found a cheap source of oil in Tehran – has been fighting hard to preserve the deal.

Trump, who has consistently criticized the 2015 deal and called the accord, which stipulates the gradual lifting of anti-Tehran sanctions in exchange for Iran maintaining the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, the “worst deal ever”, last October, Trump refused to re-certify the nuclear deal, accusing Tehran of violating the spirit of the agreement.

“Whatever the decision of the United States will be, we will not leave the floor to the actions of rogues. We will not leave the floor to this conflict of powers in the Middle East,” Macron told Congress. “I think we can work together to build this comprehensive deal for the whole region, for our people, because I think it fairly addresses our concerns.”

In remarks on Tuesday, Trump said that “nobody knows what I’m going to do on Iran deal” until the deadline on May 12. Not even he.

Separately, Macron also urged the IS to reject narrow nationalism and engage the world, telling U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday that modern economic and security challenges must be a shared responsibility. 

During the same Congressional address, Macron said that isolationism and nationalism were “a tempting remedy for our fears.” But he said international engagement was the only solution. “This requires — more than ever — the United States’ involvement as your role was decisive for creating and guarding today’s free world. The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism. You are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it,” he said.

Trump has yet to respond.

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Shocker! American Steel Prices Spiked in April.

In the days and weeks after President Donald Trump slapped 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, it was widely reported that American steel-consuming companies were bracing for higher prices. Some said they were already seeing those higher prices reflected in contracts to purchase steel from suppliers, but no one was sure how significant those price increases would turn out to be.

Now, a little more than six weeks since the tariff announcement, we have a better picture of the consequences of Trump’s trade policy. It looks like this:

This chart—published by SteelBenchmarker, a firm that tracks the price of the commodity across different markets—shows the average price (in dollars per metric tonne) of hot-rolled band (HRB), one of the most commonly used types of steel. The dark blue line represents the United States’ average price, while the light blue represents the price of steel produced in Western Europe, the red line represents China, and the pink line shows what SteelBenchmarker refers to as the “World Export” market: steel produced in other places, including Japan and South Korea.

The chart is notable because it shows how American-made steel has fluctuated in price relative to foreign-made alternative supplies. It’s pretty plain that American steel historically has been a bit more expensive than steel made anywhere else in the world, but also that the price of American steel typically follows the same ebbs and flows as other markets. That’s because steel is a globally traded commodity and price fluctuations in one place are going to affect pretty much everyone equally.

Until the last few weeks. American HRB steel has skyrocketed in price while steel made in other markets has experienced only a slight uptick.

The same is true for cold rolled coil (CRC), another common form of raw steel. According to SteelBenchmarkers, American CRC steel has seen a dramatic increase in recent weeks and is now priced more than 50 percent higher than Chinese or European options:

Is this good news for American steel manufacturers? Well, they are now able to charge higher prices for their product. But steelmaking is a relatively small part of the American economy. According to 2015 Census data, steel mills employed about 140,000 Americans and added about $36 billion to the economy that year, but steel-consuming industries employed more than 6.5 million Americans and added $1 trillion to the economy.

As a result, a large sector of the American economy—businesses that consume steel to make everything from beer kegs to automobiles—are stuck with a difficult choice. Buy cheaper foreign steel and pay 25 percent import taxes to the federal government, or turn to American suppliers and get stuck with a significantly higher purchase price.

“We see hot rolled steel up on average 30 percent on foreign and domestic pricing. No one is leaving prices 30 percent below an artificial market price,” says Mike Schmitt, CEO of The Metalworking Group, an Ohio-based parts manufacturer.

Schmitt says he’s also worried about American steel producers being able to keep up with demand. One large order from a domestic mill has been delayed several times already. “We don’t even have a firm date,” he says, “but it will be at least 6 weeks late.”

It’s not easy to bring additional steel production facilities online, so increasing supply (to reduce prices, or at least to ensure everyone is getting the steel they need) is not a immediately available remedy.

It’s also worth noting that Trump’s steel tariff applies only to steel in a raw or unprocessed form. American businesses that turn raw steel into, say, steel wheels for use on trucks and RVs have to pay higher prices for their supplies, but a foreign competitor that makes steel wheels and ships them to the United States does not. A trade policy that was intended to protect some American businesses from foreign competition ends up giving other foreign businesses a huge advantage over American ones.

That’s exactly what’s happened to Americana Development, Inc., which employs about 400 people in three states making steel wheels for trucks, RVs, garden equipment, and the like. Jeffrey Pizzola, the company’s COO, tells Bloomberg that his company is paying 25 percent more for steel, something that creates “an unfair price advantage for Chinese companies that sell finished steel wheels” into the United States. Unless something changes, Pizzola warns that his company will have to reduce staffing or production.

They likely won’t be alone. A projection released by the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based pro-trade think tank, says Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cause 146,000 net job losses—five jobs lost for every job gained. Even protectionist think tanks like the Coalition for a Prosperous America project a net decline in American jobs as a result of tariffs. The only point of disagreement seems to be how bad things will get.

Tariffs don’t merely misalign economic incentives. They screw with political incentives too. Faced with what it sees as “unfair price competition” from China as a result of American tariffs, Americana Development is one of several companies now petitioning the U.S. Trade Representative to impose more tariffs on imported goods.

“All we’re asking is that the table be leveled and the field balanced so the competition is fair,” Pizzola tells Bloomberg.

There is an economic cost to protectionism, and it is spelled out plainly in the price of hot-rolled steel. The moral cost is more difficult to calculate.

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Inflation Is Here.. Get Used To It!

Via Global Macro Monitor,

I stopped to grab a burger in Marin County today and was kind of shocked to see the following posted on the front door…

That is a pretty steep starting wage for non-skilled labor, and $5.00 more than the California minimum wage.

In-N-Out does pay their employees well.  The private burger chain pays store managers an average yearly salary of more than $160,000 with no college degree or previous management experience required.   Facebook engineers soon to be flipping burgers.

Nonbinding

It is clear the minimum wage in California is nonbinding — that is irrelevant — and all the bluster about raising it would cause unemployment is just that, bluster.

During softer economic times, when the minimum wage is binding, the story changes.  Not now, however.

Passing It On

Nevertheless,  it did feel prices have risen for a burger, fries, and soda since the last time I was in an In-N-Out.  I think it cost me around $8.50 today.

Does anyone remember the days of a $.35 Big Mac?

Real Minimum Wage Higher 

Here is what is interesting about that $16.00 per hour offer.

In 1980, the minimum wage was $3.10 per hour, which equates to $9.94 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.    The minimum wage is $11.00 in California, so a slight increase in the real wage.

If In-N-Out is forced to pay almost 50 percent above that to attract decent burger flippers and the company can pass it on in higher prices,  inflation cometh is here, folks.

Other firms will have to pay higher wages to keep and attract their workers if In-N-Out is going to start bidding up the labor market.

We are happy for the entry-level workers, high school, and college kids that now have a higher return on their labor.   However, that is only half the story.

Many of the lower paid workers are not entry-level.

Some,  reemployed from much higher paying jobs, some are seniors who cannot afford retirement.

We suspect, though wages are raging at the lower end,  companies are laying off older expensive workers and hiring younger cheaper workers to keep labor costs in check, and is one reason why the official wage numbers are not spiking.   We are not certain on this and have to further research it.

Wealth Gap

We haven’t even discussed the pornographic income and wealth gaps,  and will leave that for another day.

But just imagine, if you will,  the inflationary pressures the economy would be experiencing if a decent chunk of the income and wealth generated over the past ten years actually had found its way to those with higher propensities to consume?

Wealth Without Production = Inflation 

If wealth without work is one of Ghandi’s  seven deadly sins, paper wealth without production that is consumed is surely inflationary.  Go no further than than the real estate market to confirm this thesis.

How ironic it is the global central banks that have printed trillions over the last decade to generate the asset inflation to stimulate demand to keep the global economy afloat have not suffered the inflationary consequences of their actions.  At least, not yet.

The rich have become richer and spend proportionally less, and the poor have become poorer and cannot spend more.

Inflation

Rents and housing prices are skyrocketing, though maybe not in Manhattan.

Food prices are rising.

Gas prices are spiking.

My Verizon bill suddenly spiked $150 per month with new surcharges, so off to Sprint.

Moreover, there is no labor to rebuild the housing market in our fire-ravaged county.

So, of course, there is no inflation.

And how the heck do you correctly measure inflation with dynamic pricing anyway?

Do you have any question the methodology the BLS will or is using?

The Disneyland resort raised prices over the weekend, several months before the park plans to unveil a remake of its boardwalk-themed area at the California Adventure Park.

The prices rose the highest for annual pass holders, up as much as 18%. Daily tickets rose nearly 9%. By comparison, the consumer price index rose 2.5% in the 12 months ending January 2017.

Daily tickets for the Anaheim theme parks vary in price, depending on daily demand.A one-day, one-park adult ticket for Disneyland or California Adventure remains $97 for low-demand days, such as weekdays in May.

A ticket for regular-demand days is $117, up from $110. The price of a ticket on peak-demand days is $135, up from $124.  – LA Times,  Feb 11, 2018

Spiking Bond Yields

Why would bond traders ever bid the 10-year over 3 percent?

Sometimes the crowded trades are right.   Higher deficits,  the Fed now a yuuge net Treasury seller, and foreign buyers on strike, and then higher inflation.

Flatter yield curve?

Good luck on that one unless the stock market suffers a 1987-like crash.

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How The Simpsons Fights Fake News: Podcast

In an age of bots, trolls, and “fake news,” we need to up our media-literacy game like never before, says Michael Socolow, a journalism professor at University of Maine and the author of Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, Socolow gives three easy rules that keep “smart people from spreading dumb ideas:” Don’t share news that doesn’t have substantiating links, be wary of stories that perfectly confirm your pre-existing biases, and (for god’s sake!) always ask yourself why you’re talking in the first place.

Socolow and Gillespie discuss past eras of moral panic and hysteria over new forms of media, such as the 1990s, when shows such as The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-head, and Mystery Science Theater 3K, were attacked as anti-social even as they provided viewers new tools to critically process information overload just as cable TV and the internet became ubiquitous.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Jeff Bezos Booed By Amazon Workers

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has made Amazon shareholders extremely wealthy and happy in recent years, but when it comes to Amazon’s 566,000 employees, it’s a vastly different matter. Last week, Amazon finally disclosed its workers’ median annual salary, which at a paltry $28,446 put Amazon on par with Hershey, slightly above retailer Home Depot, and almost ten times below the $240,430 median annual comp at Facebook, according to recent proxy filings.

This will hardly come as a surprise: after all, most of the roughly half-million blue-collar, part-time employees at Amazon don’t make six figures while spending their workdays writing code, and instead unload trucks, drive forklifts and walk miles collecting products to fill orders—all for around the same pay as workers in other companies’ warehouses. Due to their menial, repetitive task, they are also rapidly being replaced by robots.

Which explains why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was booed and received a hostile reception from his own workers, when he arrived in Berlin on April 24 to pick up an innovation award (mercifully, it wasn’t for making human workers obsolete.)

According to Bloomberg, around 350 Amazon workers, members of Germany’s powerful Ver.di trade union, gathered outside the office of tabloid publisher Axel Springer where the awards ceremony was taking place, carrying posters demanding to “Make Amazon Pay.”  The union has been pushing for higher pay for Amazon’s thousands of workers in the country for several years, claiming they receive lower wages than workers in other retail jobs. Amazon workers from other countries, including Poland and Italy, also traveled to Berlin to join the protest.

In a dramatic description of Amazon working conditions, Verdi boss Frank Bsirske said that “we have a boss who wants to impose American working conditions on the world and take us back to the 19th century.” Ver.di has for years been a constant thorn in Amazon’s side in Germany, organizing workers strikes to demand improved pay and working conditions according to Bloomberg.

One of the protesters at the event was Thomas Rigol, 37, who joined Amazon as a logistics worker in Leipzig in 2008. Rigol says he would like Bezos to give unions a say in the company, and increase profit sharing opportunities for workers.

“But mostly it’s about respect, which the simple workers aren’t getting from the upper management,” Rigol said. “Mr. Bezos is the richest man in the world and we are being patronized.”

The protest took a political turn, when Andrea Nahles, the new leader of Germany’s Social Democrats which is in coalition with the ruling CDU, turned up at the protest, and also had harsh words for Bezos, telling reporters that he didn’t deserve his prize since he treats his employees badly. Amazon employs some 16,000 people in Germany, its biggest market outside the US.

And confirming that Germany will do everything in its power to maximize Amazon’s tax receipts – if only in Germany – Nahles labeled Amazon, along with other big tech companies “world champions in tax avoidance” and told reporters that “this does not deserve a prize.”

Later, during a fireside chat with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on Tuesday evening, Bezos defended Amazon saying he was “very proud of our working conditions, and I’m very proud of the wages we pay,” including in Germany. It was not immediately clear if he discussed his unstated desire to replace all low-paid warehouse workers with zero-paid robots over the next several years.

Separately, when asked a question about whether he was concerned Trump would try to break up Amazon Bezos said he expects to be scrutinized. “The big tech companies have become large enough that they’re going to be inspected,” Bezos said. “It’s fine.” In other words, the world’s richest man is not all worried about the actions of the world’s most powerful man.

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Ex-UBS Trader Found Not Guilty Of Spoofing Precious Metals Markets

It’s no wonder Andre Flotron has such a big smile on his face…

As we detailed previously, following news coverage of the charging of five precious metals traders and three banks in January, Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Department of Justice documents reveal a global criminal cabal of 16 traders operating in at least four major financial institutions between 2008 and 2015 to defraud COMEX gold and silver futures markets.

Of the many examples published, one reveals a UBS AG precious metals trader known as “The Legend,” spoofed sell orders to push down the price of gold futures on September 6, 2011, the day the gold market attained, and commenced a lengthy retreat, from its historic peak of US $1,923.70.

Flotron, a Swiss citizen, worked at UBS in Stamford and then in Zurich. He was arrested in 2017 while visiting his girlfriend in New Jersey. As Bloomberg notes, prosecutors say Flotron manipulated markets by placing “trick” buy or sell orders, and quickly canceling them to either shift prices up or down.

He was charged with scheming to engage in the practice with a subordinate, whom he trained to “spoof,” and another trader over a period of about five years starting in 2008. Economic turmoil at the time led to historic rallies in the prices of precious metals, especially gold.

Witnesses for the government included the former trainee, Mike Chan, 35, who testified that he learned Flotron’s methods while the two were working at the Swiss bank’s Stamford, Connecticut, office in 2008. Chan said he sat next to Flotron and learned to spoof by watching over his shoulder.

Chan then took those skills and applied them when he was transferred to the bank’s Singapore office, where he engaged in a separate conspiracy with a former trader for Deutsche Bank AG.

So having got that background out of the way, the big news of the day is…

Bloomberg reports that Andre Flotron was found not guilty of scheming to manipulate futures markets through a practice known as spoofing.

Andre Flotron, 54, was cleared of wrongdoing by a federal jury in New Haven, Connecticut, on Wednesday of a single count of conspiracy to engage in commodities fraud.

Bloomberg reports that Flotron’s defense attorney Marc Mukasey said in closing arguments that the government’s case was “prosecution by statistics” through charts and graphs and relied on testimony from two former traders who cooperated in exchange for agreements that they wouldn’t be prosecuted, and couldn’t be trusted.

“You can’t take their word for anything,” Mukasey said, noting that neither cooperator told jurors they explicitly agreed to spoof with Flotron. The practice entailed placing and quickly canceling orders to shift prices up or down.

“They’ve got a motive to tell the story the government wants.”

He could have faced as long as 25 years in prison if convicted, but now he is free to go back to not-spoofing precious metals markets.

“We’re extremely pleased with the jury’s verdict,”  Mukasey said.

“Justice has been done.”

Nope – nothing to see here, move along average joes.

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This is Your Brain Thinking About the Drug War

During a rally in New Hampshire last month, President Trump promised that the federal government would “spend a lot of money” on a new anti-drug campaign that would scare kids “from ending up like the people in the commercials.”

We’ll make them “very, very bad commercials,” Trump told the crowd. “We’ll make them pretty unsavory situations.”

Yet research on the effectiveness of past anti-drug campaigns, including a 2014 meta-analysis of 19 studies, concluded that these efforts had little to no effect on use of illicit substances.

Isn’t it time to just say no?

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Bitcoin Tumbles Back Below $9,000 As Crypto Gets Clobbered

No obvious catalyst for the big drop this morning – aside from perhaps Chinese police seizing mining equipment in Tianjin – but Bitcoin Cash is plunging and Bitcoin is back below $9,000 as the entire crypto space is getting hit…

Bitcoin Cash is getting hit hardest today as AntPool’s efforts fail..

 

And Bitcoin is back below $9,000…

 

As CoinTelegraph reports,  police in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin have seized 600 computers used to mine Bitcoin, after abnormal electricity usage attracted the attention of the local power grid operator, CNBC reports April 25.

CNBC cites local media outlet Xinhua, which reported details from a local police officer saying that it was “largest power theft case in recent years,” and that “eight high-power fans” had also been seized.

Xinhua has not reported when the equipment was confiscated, but five people are reportedly under investigation and another has been detained.

Due to cheap electricity and hardware manufacture, China is a stalwart crypto mining superpower. A recent report showed that mining costs in China run to $3,172 per coin, which can offer miners a significant, if fluctuating, return.

In 2017, allegedly 50 to 70 percent of BTC mining took place in China. This January, however, news broke of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC)’s intent to toughen regional regulatory oversight and potentially restrict the power use of miners in future.

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