With the US Treasury launching May’s coupon issuance with today’s sale of $38 billion in 3Y notes, traders were wondering amid today’s sharp equity selloff, if we would see a flight to safety in the primary Treasury market.
We did not, and in fact the just concluded sale of $38 billion in 3Y paper was about as ugly an auction as we have seen in years.
Starting at the top, the high yield of 2.248% was the lowest since January 2018. However, more concerning is that the stop out tailed the 2.241% When Issued by 0.7bps, printing at 2.248%. This was the 3rd consecutive tailing auction, the 13tht ail in the last 14 auctions, and also the biggest tail since May 2017.
The internals were just as disappointing: the bid to cover slumped to 2.48, down from 2.49 last month and the lowest since January. However it was the Indirect takedown that was the most surprising, printing at 37.9%, a sharp drop from 42.7% last month, below the 46.6% 6-auction average, and the lowest since November 2014. And with Dealers taking down 42%, the highest since last October, this left Directs with a whopping 20.0% the highest since September 2014.
Overall, a disappointing auction, and doubly so when considering that buyers should have had no problem rushing into the relative safety of short-term paper, especially if the Fed is expected to cut rates in the coming year.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2vKUesw Tyler Durden
U.S. farmers are defaulting and missing payments at alarming rates, forcing regional banks to restructure and refinance existing loans, according to Bloomberg. Regional banks, although still considered “healthy” for the most part, are requiring farmers to post increased collateral to “boost their defenses” against additional looming losses and default risks, further depressing US farm production while putting even more loans in danger of default.
According to a report by First Midwest Bank, past-due agricultural loans have soared 287% in 2018 vs the prior year. Additionally, cases handled by the Iowa Mediation Service involving farmers unable to make payments. jumped 20%. In six Midwest states, farmer bankruptcies rose 30% to 103 in 2018. This has caused banks like Farmers National Bank in Prophetstown, Illinois to restructure more loans in order to keep growers solvent while at the same time limiting their own risk.
Don Vogel, the bank’s president and chief executive officer said: “when you’re a rural community bank, if you’re not involved in agriculture, you probably don’t have a future.” Farmer loans make up 79% of his bank’s portfolio and include “probably three generations” of farmers. He continued: “It is a long rough patch and it’s probably going to last longer. There’s not one little thing that you can neglect during these times.”
According to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, conditions that prompted lenders to ask for more collateral were up 2.5% in Q4 2018. Meanwhile, the average interest rate on farm operating loans moved up to 6.07%, the highest level since Q2 2010.
As discussed recently, Farmers’ income has continued to slide and is down 11% since 2010 while, over the same period, expenses have risen 31% as a result of crop prices falling and the continued trade war with China. Floods in the midwest have also acted as headwinds for some growers, leaving others with delays and useless flooded supplies.
Steve Myers, a senior vice president at Busey Bank in LeRoy, Illinois, said he’s seeing more farmland sold, though the selling isn’t yet “rampant”. He commented: “…it signals a warning sign of sorts. The warning shots are valid. The warning shots are here.”
Kiley Fleming, executive director of the Iowa Mediation Service, said that state laws provide borrowers the option to mediate with creditors before foreclosures. Often times, this can lead to selling machinery or restructuring loans, instead of foreclosure.
While she says her days have gotten longer, she also says that her team has been able to find resolutions 80% of the time.
The problem for the banks is that many farmers aren’t in a position to refinance, so they instead wind up selling assets. This has led to North American farm tractor inventories jumping 8% over the past year, to record highs, in March. Fleming has also tried to get Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, to push new legislation to help farmers forced into bankruptcy.
Chris Kalkowski, vice president of agribusiness banking at First National Bank of Omaha said:
“Banks are working with their customers, trying to figure out how to keep them going. If you need liquidity, the advice is being given, you’re going to have to create it by doing something. And a lot of the time, that turns out to be selling some assets.”
Senator Chuck Grassley is already taking “steps to try and help”. Grassley, along with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a bill that would help farmers reorganize by raising the Chapter 12 operating debt cap to $10 million from about $4.2 million. Grassley said: “Even if the trade war ends, with this oversupply of corn and soybeans and wheat, we’re still going to have low prices.”
Meanwhile, as discussed last week, personal income for farmers is down 25% this year, the sharpest decline since the first three months of 2016, but the banks are holding their own – for now. The future looks bleak, however. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City predicted last month that farmland prices could keep falling, a divergence from what normally happens during a downturn, when farm prices usually hold their value and become attractive collateral.
Becky King, director of the agricultural lending group at First Midwest concluded: “This would be, in many cases, the fourth or the fifth year where these profitability issues are occurring, depending on the farm. The bank isn’t seeing more foreclosures, but it is seeing more stress.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Vj6TBW Tyler Durden
The deployment of American military assets to the Middle East continues to ramp up following national security advisor John Bolton’s Sunday night statements warning the US is prepared to send “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime”.
Citing “possible attack by Iran” against US troops in the region, four B-52 bombers are now on their way to the Middle East as part of Sunday’s announced USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group deployment.
Two of the bombers are expected to leave Tuesday from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, arriving at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Wednesday, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.
B-52H Stratofortress, via The National Interest
The White House house had previously warned of “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran, for which Bolton said the US was prepared to use “unrelenting force”..
“The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces,” Bolton said previously as part of his Sunday statements.
On Monday Axios published a report by Israeli correspondent Barak Ravid which identified Israel as behind the intelligence warning the White House appears to be basing its information on.
“Israel passed information on an alleged Iranian plot to attack U.S. interests in the Gulf to the U.S. before national security adviser John Bolton threatened Iran with ‘unrelenting force’ last night, senior Israeli officials told me,” Ravid wrote in the Axios report.
Though many indicators suggest the deployment of the nuclear-powered USS Abraham Lincoln carrier to the Middle East CENTCOM region had already been scheduled prior to Bolton’s Sunday claim that it was being sent on a mission to help secure US assets from Iranian attack, the carrier appears to be quickly moving toward the Persian Gulf.
The USS Abraham Lincoln has filed with Egypt for permission to go through the Suez Canal and is expected to transit in the next 48-72 hours, Martin reports. The aircraft carrier was scheduled to go to the Gulf anyway but is now going one to two weeks early.
The report notes further that CENTCOM is expected to request more foces, including Patriot anti-missile batteries, in order to patrol and secure American forces locations in the region, including in Iraq, Syria, and the UAE.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2V6EnP7 Tyler Durden
Five Arizona House Democrats who have repeatedly denied that there is a crisis at the border have asked acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan to help with the flood of immigrants at the southern border by appointing a “federal crisis coordinator.”
In a Monday letter to McAleenan, the Democrats suggested that the Trump administration’s border security policies were setting up “a range of other catastrophic issues,” according to The Hill.
Arizona Democratic Reps. Ruben Gallego, Raúl Grijalva, Ann Kirkpatrick, Greg Stanton and Tom O’Halleran wrote that the administration’s measures to use Defense Department funds, build a wall, cut aid to Central America and threaten to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border “will create a range of other catastrophic issues and fail to address this humanitarian crisis in any way.” –The Hill
“This humanitarian crisis requires a humanitarian response,” reads the letter. “To that end, we believe that you should immediately increase communication and coordination among federal, state, local, and tribal governments as well as non-governmental stakeholders to promote the well-being and safety of migrant families, process asylum claims quicker, efficiently use federal and non-federal resources, and ensure that DHS [Department of Homeland Security] can meet its national security mission.”
On April 16, the city of Yuma, AZ declared an emergencyover the influex of migrants, however according to the Arizona Mirror the town has yet to receive meaningful funding from state or federal agencies.
Wait, what border crisis?
Many of the same Democrats who signed the letter have repeatedly denied that there is a crisis at the border, only to eventually call it a “humanitarian crisis” created by President Trump.
Making Nogales look like a war zone doesn’t mean there is a crisis at the border.
To say it louder for the people in the back: the only crisis at the border is the one created by the Trump Administration’s policies. This wire needs to go. https://t.co/op5KevMHUs
Forcing Nogales to serve as a photo opp for the President’s manufactured crisis is completely ridiculous. I stand with the City of Nogales and their resolution condemning the concertina wire at the border. I sent a letter to DHS and DOD demanding that this wire come down. pic.twitter.com/aWPLADPtJx
Last August, Gallego encouraged US government officials to disobey orders from the sitting president in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
If you are a US government official and you are deporting Americans be warned. When the worm turns you will not be safe because you were just following orders. You do not have to take part in illegal acts ordered by this President’s administration. https://t.co/BLq48HRkbH
Last month, Rep. Kirkpatrick – one of the Arizona Democrats asking DHS to appoint a crisis coordinator – said: “a border wall doesn’t solve anything.”
.@realdonaldtrump should listen to the Congressmembers who actually represent border communities. Our districts and our country reap huge economic benefits when we address the real issues that affect our border—a border wall doesn’t solve anything. https://t.co/ajploRpxLz
— Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (@RepKirkpatrick) April 5, 2019
Except that walls work…
In 2013, Israel completed a 143-mile fence with Egypt that cost around $2.9 million per mile – which resulted in a 99% decrease in illegal immigration that even Politifact deemed true.
President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea 🇮🇱🇺🇸
Meanwhile, “Bulgaria erected a barrier on its Turkish perimeter in 2013. That year’s 11,000 illegal crossings dropped to 4,000 in 2014 — down 63.6 percent,” according to National Review, which adds “Just as British Gibraltar dangles from Spain’s underside, Spanish Ceuta and Melilla surf atop Morocco. Multiple fences and barriers there sliced 2014’s 2,100 arrests at the Spanish-territorial/Moroccan frontier to 2015’s 100 — down 95.2 percent.”
Back in the US, the Border Patrol reported a 93.7% decrease in San Diego county border crossings between 1992, when a border wall was installed, and 2017. The apprehension rate dropped from around 560,000 to 26,086.
And as the National Review noted in January:
• A barrier between the Tucson, Ariz., sector and Nogales, Mexico, was erected in 2000. That year’s 616,346 arrests plunged to 38,657 in FY 2017 — down 93.7 percent.
• A fence installed at the border between Yuma, Arizona, and Los Algondones, Mexico brought apprehensions from 138,438 in FY 2005 to 12,847 in FY 2017 — down 90.7 percent.
“Crime has significantly decreased in the Yuma area,” then–acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke wrote in USA Today in August 2017, “and smugglers now look for other less difficult areas of the border to cross — often areas without fencing.”
• A 150-mile barrier between Israel and southern Egypt cut the number of illegal-alien entrants from 17,000 in 2011 to 43 in 2013, after the fence’s completion, Israel’s Ministry of the Interior states — down 99.7 percent.
And now, Arizona Democrats who mocked the notion of a border crisis, then called it Trump’s ‘manufactured humanitarian crisis,’ are now asking his administration for help – with the southern border.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Lqy2OZ Tyler Durden
When trading, it always helps to have a grounding in the forest as you try to navigate through the trees.
Having been away for a couple of days, it looks like there is a pretty reasonable understanding out there of the big picture, but traders have been busy repeatedly slamming, or being slammed, into every obstacle along the way. It hasn’t made for pretty reading and, even less so, watching. The markets have not distinguished themselves as sound bites have taken over once again as the primary mover of prices. Noise and data-dependency aren’t the same thing.
It is obvious that things are out of whack when foreign exchange markets trade like they are the adults in the room. They have been unambiguously unimpressed with the goings-on. And prices have settled into a no-man’s land area, not sure which narrative to buy. Perhaps, “none of the above” is entirely appropriate and hence, we sit.
Fixed income markets are solidly in the “something just doesn’t feel right” camp. Whether numbers come out strong or weak. Whether central bankers, depending on the day and setting, are tougher or weaker. There is an unrelenting bid for paper. Rate cut pricing may be pushed out or brought forward, but it remains the base case scenario.
Ten-year U.S. Treasuries made one feeble attempt over the last month to get above 2.60% and are now approaching important support. German yields have slipped back below zero. No matter how many green shoots analysts claim to see. And while I’m not sure it is advice I would follow, there are calls out there for Chinese yields to retest Fibonacci levels we were assured wouldn’t be seen again.
Commodities trade like everyone has them, keeps trying to buy and can’t believe the price action. The tariff up or down saga aside, the second half of year resurgence story notwithstanding, these assets haven’t been behaving as if animal spirits are anywhere to be seen. If you like them, this is in fact a buy zone. But that has been said numerous times on this move down. The Bloomberg Commodity Index below 80 is either a great opportunity or a warning sign. The fact that it isn’t at all clear seems entirely appropriate.
And then there were equities. The asset that squeals in pain or with joy over each revolving trade comment. The most popular parlor game out there is to add up how much “wealth” was created or destroyed with each utterance. In truth, while there has been some added intra-day volatility, they have done nothing wrong. Even the VIX Index hasn’t been able to properly feign fright
Can they go down? Sure. But the puts exist. And they come from all sorts of sources. It’s a mistake to focus too narrowly on the Fed. Even if that is a good place to start. There isn’t a central bank in the world that doesn’t keep close tabs. The PBOC announced a targeted reserve requirement on Monday and very few observers thought the exact timing was a coincidence.
More importantly, there was a story out over the weekend about Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. When the equity markets were getting hammered at the end of last year, they were busy loading up for their stock portfolio. Their counterparts must have sure had an interesting insight into market dynamics. The fund made a tidy $84 billion in the first quarter of this year courtesy of the rebound. Their best ever.
Traders seem to have a pretty good idea of what they believe. Now it is all about timing. And deciding if you can afford to ignore the man behind the curtain.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JpVdGj Tyler Durden
Multiple local news organizations are reporting that a gunman equipped with helmet and a GoPro camera has taken five people hostage inside a convenience store in Toulouse, France.
BREAKING: 5 people have been taken hostage by an armed person at a store in Toulouse, France. pic.twitter.com/KR7nC1Skgg
— Breaking News Global (@BreakingNAlerts) May 7, 2019
Police have reportedly arrived on scene at the store, which appears to be located on a relatively quiet street.
The US labor market continues to grow at a blistering pace.
After the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) reported record prints for virtually every notable labor market series for January, followed by a modest slowdown in February, there was another impressive higher across most labor market indicators in March. According to the BLS, after an upward revision to the February job openings from 7.087MM to 7.142MM, in March this number surged by a whopping 346K to 7.488 million, the fourth highest number of job openings on record.
According to the BLS, the number of job openings increased for total private (+363,000) and was little changed for government. Job openings increased in a number of industries, with the largest increases in transportation, warehousing, and utilities (+87,000), construction (+73,000), and real estate and rental and leasing (+57,000). Job openings decreased in federal government (-15,000).
More notably, February was the 13th consecutive month in which there were more job openings then unemployed workers: in fact, considering that according to the payrolls report there were 7.488 MM unemployed workers, there was a record 1.664 million more job openings than unemployed workers, (how accurate, or politically-biased the BLS data is, is another matter entirely).
In other words, in an economy in which there was a perfect match between worker skills and employer needs, there would be zero unemployed people at this moment (of course, that is not the case.)
And yet, there was some disappointing aspects to the report: while job openings soared, the number of hires declined for a second consecutive month, dropping by 35K, to 5.660 million, following a 134K drop in February, and the lowest since last March. The hires level hires level was little changed for total private and fell for government.
According to the historical correlation between the number of hires and the 12 month cumulative job change, the pace of hiring right now is precisely where it should be relative to the cumulative change in hiring.
At the same time, another adverse trend emerged in the so-called “take this job and shove it indicator” , i.e., the total level of quits, which shows worker confidence that they can leave their current job and find a better paying job elsewhere, it also declined for a second consecutive month, dropping by 38K to 3.490MM.
Putting this all in context:
Job openings have increased since a low in July 2009. They returned to the prerecession level in April 2014 and surpassed the prerecession peak in August 2014. There were 7.5 million open jobs on the last business day of March 2019.
Hires have increased since a low in June 2009 and have surpassed prerecession levels. In March 2019, there were 5.7 million hires.
Quits have increased since a low in August 2009 and have surpassed prerecession levels. In March 2019, there were 3.4 million quits.
For most of the JOLTS history, the number of hires (measured throughout the month) has exceeded the number of job openings (measured only on the last business day of the month). Since January 2015, however, this relationship has reversed with job openings outnumbering hires in all months.
At the end of the most recent recession in June 2009, there were 1.1 million more hires throughout the month than there were job openings on the last business day of the month. In March 2019, there were 1.8 million fewer hires than job openings.
And visually:
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JnTXUs Tyler Durden
New analysis by academics from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), part of the University of Oxford, predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within fifty years, a trend that will have grave implications for how we treat our digital heritage in the future.
The analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world’s largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century.
“These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all this data, how should it be managed in the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past,” said lead author Carl Öhman, a doctoral candidate at the OII.
“On a societal level, we have just begun asking these questions and we have a long way to go. The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind. But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage.”
Co-author David Watson, also a DPhil student at the OII, explained:“Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behaviour and culture been assembled in one place. Controlling this archive will, in a sense, be to control our history. It is therefore important that we ensure that access to these historical data is not limited to a single for-profit firm. It is also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history.”
The analysis sets up two potential extreme scenarios, arguing that the future trend will fall somewhere in between:
The first scenario assumes that no new users join as of 2018. Under these conditions, Asia’s share of dead users increases rapidly to account for nearly 44% of the total by the end of the century. Nearly half of those profiles come from India and Indonesia, which together account for just under 279 million Facebook mortalities by 2100.
The second scenario assumes that Facebook continues to grow by its current rate of 13% globally, every year, until each market reaches saturation. Under these conditions, Africa will make up a growing share of dead users. Nigeria, in particular, becomes a major hub in this scenario, accounting for over 6% of the total. By contrast, Western users will account for only a minority of users, with only the US making the top 10.
“The results should be interpreted not as a prediction of the future, but as a commentary on the current development, and an opportunity to shape what future we are headed towards,” explains Öhman. “But this has no bearing on our larger point that critical discussion of online death and its macroscopic implications is urgently needed. Facebook is merely an example of what awaits any platform with similar connectivity and global reach.”
Watson added:
“Facebook should invite historians, archivists, archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vast volume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away. This is not just about finding solutions that will be sustainable for the next couple of years, but possibly for many decades ahead.”
The predictions are based on data from the United Nations, which provide the expected number of mortalities and total populations for every country in the world distributed by age, and Facebook data scraped from the company’s Audience Insights feature. While the study notes that this self-reported dataset has several limitations, this provides the most comprehensive publicly available estimate of the network’s size and distribution.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2PQQhvr Tyler Durden
Picture this: a new Boeing plane embarks on a routine flight. Takeoff is achieved without incident, and the plane is smoothly slicing through the sky, when all of a sudden, a faulty sensor starts feeding erroneous data to the plane’s flight-control system. All of a sudden, the pilots are scrambling to revive the plane’s engines, but unable to overcome the strength of Boeing’s automated systems, the plane’s nose tips toward the ground, and the plane crashes into a field, injuring 120 people and killing 9.
It’s worth reminding readers that there are some discrepancies between this story and investigators’ accounts of the circumstances surrounding the fatal crashes of Lion Air flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302. That’s because the flight described above occurred roughly a decade earlier, in 2009, when Turkish Airlines flight 1951 crashed while attempting to land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
Like the recent string of crashes, the Turkish Airlines plane was also a Boeing 737 (albeit an older iteration). But the aerospace company’s reaction to that crash was much different than its reaction to Lion Air flight 610. Instead of doing nothing, like it did after the crash in October, Boeing sprung into action and instituted what Bloomberg described as a “life-saving fix” across thousands of 737s: It changed the throttle systems to cede more control to pilots, precluding the possibility that an erroneous sensor could trigger a cascading tragedy.
But in light of reports exposing Boeing’s apparent confusion about basic safety features like cockpit alerts, which some analysts have warned might have helped pilots during the two recent mass-casualty crashes identify the problem sooner, others are questioning why Boeing didn’t move to act more quickly to take similar steps after the Lion Air crash?
Some have questioned why Boeing appeared to make some of the same mistakes with the MAX 737 8, like relying on one sensor to feed data to its MCAS anti-stall system, that it did on the earlier model before the Turkish Air crash. Though Boeing has insisted that it’s not yet clear whether MCAS contributed to the two fatal crashes – which combined killed more than 350 – the preliminary results from both investigations have settled on something different (though Boeing has apparently equivocated on this subject of exactly how much responsibility it’s willing to accept for the MCAS misfire).
Boeing ended up changing that throttle system to prevent one erroneous altitude reading from cascading into tragedy, changes the US Federal Aviation Administration subsequently made mandatory.
Yet when the Max debuted in 2017 with a new flight-control feature to help pilots avoid a stall, it was designed to react to only one of the plane’s two “angle of attack” sensors that measure the jet’s incline. That proved deadly when malfunctioning sensors on jets operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines automatically commanded the noses of the planes down over and over, even though the other sensor showed it wasn’t necessary.
“When I read that the planes had two angle-of-attack sensors, I couldn’t think of a reason why they wouldn’t use both,” said Robert Canfield, an aeronautical engineering professor and technical director of the Virginia Tech Airworthiness Center.
Unsurprisingly, Boeing insists that the Turkish Airlines crash shouldn’t be compared with the most recent crashes.
Boeing says the Max disasters shouldn’t be compared to the Turkish Airlines crash and no evidence has emerged to indicate that the altitude sensor, known as a radio altimeter, failed on the Lion Air or Ethiopian planes. “These incidents address fundamentally different system inputs and phases of flight,” Charles Bickers, a Boeing spokesman, said in an email.
“The 737 MAX was certified in accordance with the identical FAA requirements and processes that have governed certification of previous new airplanes and derivatives,” he said. The FAA signed off on the Max’s flight control feature, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, he said.
“The FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during Max certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements,” he said.
But one former FAA investigator went so far as to argue that the Turkish Airlines crash ‘foreshadowed’ the risks of relying on an automated system.
“Several parallels can be drawn,” said Jeffrey Guzzetti, the former director of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Accident Investigation Division. Guzzetti added that Boeing should have learned the ‘single sensor lesson’ – that is, the dangers of linking automated flight control systems to a single sensor – after Turkish Airlines. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 had two angle-of-attack sensors, but only one was linked to MCAS.
To be sure, not all experts agree on the parallels between MCAS and the earlier 737’s automated throttle system.
Not all experts agree that the Turkish Airlines crash – in which investigators also cited multiple pilot missteps – should have been a warning to Boeing when designing MCAS. While all three involve so-called single-point failures, that’s where the similarities end, said John Cox, president of consulting company Safety Operating Systems who participated in dozens of airline accident investigation as a pilot union representative.
“I don’t think it’s a fair comparison to say that Boeing should have known from the Turkish 1951 accident that they should’ve designed something different in MCAS,” Cox said.
In the 2009 crash, the erroneous altimeter data led to just one related failure: dialing back the jet’s throttle to idle prematurely. In the 737 Max crashes, faulty angle-of-attack data triggered airspeed and altitude warnings and caused the control yoke to shake violently, a sign that the plane could be approaching a stall, Cox said. That’s because the angle-of-attack readings factor in to those other sensors, he said.
“I think the only comparison you can make is that increasingly, airplanes are using more complex systems and that complexity on occasion can come up with unexpected results,” Cox said. “That’s true for Lion Air, Ethiopian Airlines and Turkish Airlines 1951, but to go beyond that I think is a stretch.”
This is only the latest in a string of embarrassing reports suggesting that Boeing’s negligence during the testing of the 737 MAX 8 – combined with lax oversight by FAA – contributed to both crashes. This could be hugely problematic for Boeing as it tries to convince the FAA that its new software update will be enough.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2LufpJX Tyler Durden
Blocking payments to individuals or groups by financial service firms impedes freedom of speech in a free society, journalist Ben Swann has told RT, following reports that MasterCard is allegedly on course to censor the far-right.
The New York-based firm is reportedly being forced by left-leaning liberal activists to set up an internal “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”
“The problem is that everyone has their own views and, in a free society, the idea of a free society is that you are free to have your belief systems, as long as you’re not harming anyone else physically,” Swann told RT America.
“But your belief system belongs to you and you have the right be wrong. White supremacists have the right to be wrong.”
MasterCard is not the only holder of purse-strings that is mulling the selective banning of individuals from their services and funds. Patreon and PayPal have previously barred individuals from receiving payments using their platforms, due to their extreme views.
But unlike crowdfunding platforms, being cut off from one of the leading American multinational financial services corporations will, most likely, have a much greater impact on the financial stability of an individual or a group, especially after the US Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly blessed MasterCard’s undertaking.
By doing this, Swann believes the government granted “big corporations the ability to control what voices are heard.”
The issue with such an approach, the investigative journalist argues, would lead to a wider crackdown on financial payments to anyone who the government would see as unfavorable.
“The fact that the SEC has given a green light to this essentially says the SEC supports the idea of censoring these groups in order to freeze out essentially anyone you don’t agree with,” the journalist said.
“It is such a dystopian 1984 world view and yet we’re living through it right now,” the journalist observed.
Watch the entire interview below:
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WpZFZC Tyler Durden
