After putting 3,500 troops on standby in the event of a ‘no deal’ Brexit and barges instructed to reserve place for ’emergency supplies’, Theresa May and her government are taking their “Project Fear” – the campaign of doomsaying warnings and threats designed to push MPs to vote for May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement – to the next level by reviving fears about violence in Northern Ireland.
According to the Guardian, some 1,000 police officers from England and Scotland are beginning preparations and training for a possible deployment to Northern Ireland in case a ‘no deal’ Brexit forces the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the EU – the only land border between an EU state and the UK.
Avoiding the return of the hard border has been one of the most contentious issues in the Brexit withdrawal deal negotiation – avoiding the return of the border was the aim of the controversial “Irish Backstop”. The plan is being put in place after the Police Service of Northern Ireland requested reinforcements to deal with any trouble that arises from a hard border. The training for officers from English forces and Police Scotland is expected to begin this month.
the report comes as Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar insisted that no revisions to May’s Brexit plan would be made, and other EU leaders rebuffed May’s latest attempt at reopening negotiations, quashing rumors that a breakthrough might have been possible. Burning the candle at the other end, the DUP rebuffed May’s attempt to win their votes for her plan, setting back hopes that she and her chief whip might be able to drum up the votes for her deal to pass during a scheduled Jan. 14 “meaningful vote.”
The officers were requested to cover the possibility of widespread public disorder should a hard border return.
The size of the request is nearly double the size of the number requested during Ireland’s “Marching Season”, when the possibility of violence between Catholics and Protestants is at its highest.
Still, some MPs were quick to dismiss a ‘no deal’ Brexit as highly unlikely, with one MP called fears about the return of a hard border “nonsense propaganda.”
In remarks rejecting the government’s latest overtures to the DUP, the party’s Nigel Dodds said fears of a hard border were “nonsense propaganda,” adding: “With this clarity emerging in London, Dublin and Brussels, there is evidently no need for this aspect of the withdrawal agreement.”
Still, with only 85 days left until Brexit Day, May’s ability to pass her deal is far from assured. And despite all the chatter about a ‘Plan B’, a delay or a second referendum, no workable alternative has materialized.
Jeff Gundlach’s $47.2 billion DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund notched a 1.8% gain in 2018, making it the best performer among the world’s ten largest bond funds, according to Bloomberg.
The fund, which focuses on mortgage-backed securities, beat 97% of bond funds tracked by Morningstar during what was a brutal year for bond investors (and equity investors, and risk parity, and macro, and…). By comparison, the Barclays Aggregate Total Return Bond Index returned 0.1%. Since launching the fund in 2010, Gundlach’s Total Return fund has reaped average annual returns of 5.9%, compared with 3.2% for the Barclays US Agg.
Gundlach has earned an annual average of 5.9 percent, compared with 3.2 percent for the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Index.
As of Nov. 30, the fund invested in more than 2,200 securities, including 26% of its portfolio in non-agency mortgage-backed securities, 25% in collateralized mortgage obligations, 22% in agency pass-throughs and 8% in commercial MBS. Meanwhile, Gundlach had no exposure to corporate debt (which badly underperformed after yields fell to record tights early in the year) and only 3.4% of his AUM in Treasuries.
These were the top-five performing funds (per Bloomberg):
DoubleLine Total Return Bond (DBLTX): $47.2 billion (1.75%)
Lord Abbett Short Duration Income (LLDYX): $41.7 billion (1.43%)
Following the plunge in US stocks, which saw all major indexes close at their lows driven by an abysmal manufacturing ISM print, a 10% plunge in Apple and a tumbling airline sector following ugly guidance by Delta, Asian stocks predictably opened sharply lower, with Japan tumbling in its first trading day of 2019 as fears about a recession in the world’s largest economy hit a fever pitch.
The Nikkei 225 tumbled 2.7%, falling deeper into a bear market, as traders returned from an extended new-year break, led by Apple suppliers and a delayed reaction to yesterday’s flash crash in the USDJPY which has failed to recoup all losses.
The scramble for safety has sent traders out of equities and into government debt, with the yield on the 10Y JGB tumbling to -4.5%, the lowest since November 2016.
With S&P futures modestly lower, extending their Thursday selloff, Australian stocks also fell and Chinese futures pointed to a weaker start. Meanwhile, the global flight to safety has dragged 10Y Treasury yields even lower, touching a session low near an 11-month low, at 2.5447%.
Meanwhile, with the dollar tumbling, not only did the PBOC set the yuan stronger at 6.8658, vs 6.8631 yesterday while draining 160BN yuan in open market operations, but with fewer safe havens, the soaring demand for safety pushed gold futures surging over $5 higher, rising above $1,300 for the first time since early June.
The silver lining? There still have not been any notable flash crashes.
“”The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”
– C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowed President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el-Sisi’s dictatorship banned the sale of high-visibility vests to prevent copycat rallies in Egypt, corporate media has predictably worked overtime trying to demonize the spontaneous and mostly leaderless working class movement in the hopes it will not spread elsewhere.
The media oligopoly initially attempted to ignore the insurrection altogether, but when forced to reckon with the yellow vests they maligned the incendiary marchers using horseshoe theory to suggest a confluence between far left and far right supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. To the surprise of no one, mainstream pundits have also stoked fears of ‘Russian interference’ behind the unrest. We can assume that if the safety vests were ready-made off the assembly line of NGOs like the raised fist flags of Serbia’s OTPOR! movement, the presstitutes would be telling a different story.
It turned out that a crisis was not averted but merely postponed when Macron defeated his demagogue opponent Le Pen in the 2017 French election. While it is true that the gilets jaunes were partly impelled by an increase on fuel prices, contrary to the prevailing narrative their official demands are not limited to a carbon tax. They also consist of explicit ultimatums to increase the minimum wage, improve the standard of living, and an end to austerity, among other legitimate grievances. Since taking office, Macron has declared war on trade unions while pushing through enormous tax breaks for the wealthy (like himself) — it was just a matter of time until the French people had enough of the country’s privatization. It is only a shock to the oblivious establishment why the former Rothschild banker-turned-politician, who addressed the nation seated at a gold desk while Paris was ablaze, is suddenly in jeopardy of losing power. The status quo’s incognizance is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette who during the 18th century when told the peasants had no bread famously replied, “let them eat cake” as the masses starved under her husband Louis XIV.
While the media’s conspicuous blackout of coverage is partly to blame, the deafening silence from across the Atlantic in the United States is really because of the lack of class consciousness on its political left. With the exception of Occupy Wall Street, the American left has been so preoccupied with an endless race to the bottom in the two party ‘culture wars’ it is unable to comprehend an upheaval undivided by the contaminants of identity politics. A political opposition that isn’t fractured on social issues is simply unimaginable. Not to say the masses in France are exempt from the internal contradictions of the working class, but the fetishization of lifestyle politics in the U.S. has truly become its weakness. We will have to wait and see whether the yellow vests transform into a global movement or arrive in America, but for now the seeming lack of solidarity stateside equates to a complicity with Macron’s agenda.
It serves as a reminder of the historically revisionist understanding of French politics in the U.S. that is long-established. The middle class dominated left-wing in America ascribes to a historical reinterpretation of the French Revolution that is a large contributor of its aversion to transformative praxis in favor of incrementalism. The late Italian Marxist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo, who died in June of this year, offered the most thorough understanding of its misreading of history in seminal works such as War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century. The liberal rereading of the French Revolution is the ideological basis for its rejection of the revolutionary tradition from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks that has neutralized the modern left to this day.
According to its revised history, the inevitable outcome of comprehensive systemic change is Robespierre’s so-called ‘Reign of Terror’, or the ‘purges’ of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. In its view, what began with the Locke and Montesquieu-influenced reforms of the constitutional monarchy was ‘hijacked’ by the radical Jacobin and sans-culotte factions. Losurdo explains that counter-revolutionaries eager to discredit the image of rebellion overemphasize its violence and bloodshed, and never properly contextualize it as self-defense against the real reign of terror by the ruling class. The idea behind this recasting of history is to conflate revolutionary politics with Nazi Germany whose racially-motivated genocide was truly the inheritor of the legacy of European colonialism, not the ancestry of the Jacobins or the Russian Revolution.
Maximilien Robespierre’s real crime in the eyes of bourgeois historians was attempting to fulfill the egalitarian ideals of republicanism by transferring political power from the aristocracy and nouveaux riche directly into the hands of the working class, just as the Paris Commune did nearly 80 years later. It is for this reason he subsequently became one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned figures in world history, perhaps one day to be absolved. The U.S. reaction to the yellow vests is a continuation of the denial and suppression of the class conflict inherent in the French Revolution which continues to seethe beneath the surfaces of capitalism today.
In today’s political climate, it is easy to forget that there have been periods where the American left was actually engaged with the crisis of global capitalism. In what seems like aeons ago, the anti-globalization movement in the wake of NAFTA culminated in huge protests in Seattle in 1999 which saw nearly 50,000 march against the World Trade Organization. Following the 2008 financial collapse, it briefly reemerged in the Occupy movement which was also swiftly put down by corporate-state repression. Currently, the political space once inhabited by the anti-globalization left has been supplanted by the ‘anti-globalist’ rhetoric mostly associated with right-wing populism.
Globalism and globalization may have qualitatively different meanings, but they nevertheless are interrelated. Although it is shortsighted, there are core accuracies in the former’s narrative that should be acknowledged. The idea of a shadowy world government isn’t exclusively adhered to by anti-establishment conservatives and it is right to suspect there is a worldwide cabal of secretive billionaire power brokers controlling events behind the scenes. There is indeed a ‘new world order’ with zero regard for the sovereignty of nation states, just as there is a ‘deep state.’ However, it is a ruling class not of paranoiac imagination but real life, and a right-wing billionaire like Robert Mercer is as much a globalist as George Soros.
Ever since capitalism emerged it has always been global. The current economic crisis is its latest cyclical downturn, impoverishing and alienating working people whose increasing hardship is what has led to the trending rejection of the EU. Imperialism has exported capital leading to the destruction of jobs in the home sectors of Western nations while outsourcing them to the third world. Over time, deep disgruntlement among the working class has grown toward an economic system that is clearly rigged against them, where the skewed distribution of capital gains and widespread tax evasion on the part of big business is camouflaged as buoyant economic growth. When it came crashing down in the last recession, the financial institutions responsible were bailed out using tax payer money instead of facing any consequences. Such grotesque unfairness has only been amplified by the austerity further transferring the burden from the 1% to the poor.
Before the gilets jaunes, the U.K.’s Brexit referendum in 2016 laid bare these deep class divisions within the European Union. One of the most significant events in the continent since WWII, it has ultimately threatened to reshape the Occident’s status in the post-war order as a whole. Brexit manifested out of divisions within Britain’s political parties, especially the Torys, which had been plagued for years by internal dispute over the EU. Those in power were blind to the warning signs of discontent toward a world economy in crisis and were shocked by the plebiscite in which the working class defied the powers that be against all odds with more than half voting to leave.
In general, well-to-do Brits were hard remainers while those suffering most severely from the destruction of industry, unemployment and austerity overwhelmingly chose to leave in what was described as a “peasants revolt” by the media. The value of the pound sterling quickly plunged and not long after the status of the United Kingdom as a whole came into question as Britain found itself at odds with Scotland’s unanimous decision to remain. Brexit tugged at the bonds holding the EU together and suddenly the collective standing clout of its member states is at stake in a potential breakup of the entire bloc.
Euroscepticism is also by no means a distinctly British phenomenon, as distrust has soared in countries hit the hardest by neoliberalism like Greece (80%), with Spain and France not far behind. In fact, before there was Brexit there was fear among the elite of a ‘Grexit.’ In response to its unprecedented debt crisis manufactured by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Greek people elected the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, to a majority of legislative seats to the Hellenic Parliament during its 2015 bailout referendum. Unfortunately, the synthetic alliance turned out to be anything but radical and a trojan horse of the establishment. SYRIZA was elected on its promise to rescind the terms of Greek membership in the EU, but shortly after taking office it betrayed its constituency and agreed to the troika’s mass privatization. Even its former finance minister Yanis Varousfakis admitted that SYRIZA was a controlled opposition and auxiliary of the Soros Foundation.
Apart from suffering collective amnesia regarding the EU’s neoliberal policies, apparently the modern left is also in serious need of a history lesson regarding the federation’s fascist origins. It has been truly puzzling to see self-proclaimed progressives mourning Britain’s decision to withdraw from a continental union that was historically masterminded by former fifth columnists of Nazi Germany. It was in the aftermath of WWII’s devastation that the 1951 Treaty of Paris established the nucleus of the EU in the European Coal and Steel Community, a cooperative union formed by France, Italy, West Germany, and the three Benelux states (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands). The Europe Declaration charter stated:
“By the signature of this Treaty, the involved parties give proof of their determination to create the first supranational institution and that thus they are laying the true foundation of an organized Europe. This Europe remains open to all European countries that have freedom of choice. We profoundly hope that other countries will join us in our common endeavor.”
The idea of forming a “supranational” union was conceived by the French statesman Robert Schuman, who during the outbreak of WWII served as the Under-Secretary of State for Refugees in the Reynaud government. When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, Schuman by all accounts willingly voted to grant absolute dictatorial powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain to become Head of State of the newly formed Vichy government, the puppet regime that ruled Nazi-occupied France until the Allied invasion in 1944. By doing so, he retained his position in parliament, though he later chose to resign. Following the war, like all Vichy collaborators Schuman was initially charged with the offense of indignité nationale (“national unworthiness”) and stripped of his civil rights as a traitor.
More than 4,000 alleged quislings were summarily executed following Operation Overlord and the Normandy landings, but the future EU designer was fortunate enough to have friends in high places. Schuman’s clemency was granted by none other than General Charles de Gaulle himself, the leader of the resistance during the war and future French President. Instantly, Schuman’s turncoat reputation was rehabilitated and his wartime activity whitewashed. Even though he had knowingly voted full authority to Pétain, the retention of his post in the Vichy government was veneered to have occurred somehow without his knowledge or consent.
Marshal Pétain meets with Adolf Hitler in 1940.
Schuman is officially regarded as one of the eleven men who were ‘founding fathers’ of what later became the EU. One of the other major figures that contributed to the federal integration of the continent was Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Nuremberg Trials may have tried and executed most of the top leadership of the Nazi Party, but the post-war government that became West Germany was saturated with former Third Reich officials. Despite the purported post-war ‘denazification’ policy inscribed in the Potsdam agreement, many figures who had directly participated in the Holocaust were appointed to high positions in Adenauer’s administration and never prosecuted for their atrocities.
One such war criminal was the former Ministry of the Interior and drafter of the Nuremberg race statutes, Hans Globke, who became Adenauer’s right hand man as his Secretary of State and Chief of Staff. Adenauer also successfully lobbied the Allies to free most of the Wehrmacht war criminals in their custody, winning the support of then U.S. General and future President Dwight Eisenhower. By 1951, motivated by the desire to quickly rearm and integrate West Germany into NATO in the new Cold War, the policy of denazification was prematurely ended and countless offenders were allowed to reenter branches of government, military and public service. Their crimes against humanity took a backseat to the greater imperialist priority of rearmament against East Germany and the Soviets.
In the years following WWII, there was also concern among the elite of anti-Americanism growing in Western Europe. The annual Bilderberg Group conference was established in 1954 by Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, himself a former Reiter-SS Corps and Nazi Party member, to promote ‘Atlanticism’ and facilitate cooperation between American and European leaders. Invitations to the Bilderberg club meetings were extended to only the most exclusive paragons in politics, academia, the media, industry, and finance. In 2009, WikiLeaks revealed that it was at the infamous assembly where the hidden agenda of the European Coal and Steel Community, later the EU, was set:
“E. European Unity: The discussion on this subject revealed general support for the idea of European integration and unification among the participants from the six countries of the European Coal and Steel Community, and a recognition of the urgency of the problem. While members of the group held different views as to the method by which a common market could be set up, there was a general recognition of the dangers inherent in the present divided markets of Europe and the pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market. That the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community had definitely decided to establish a common market and that experts were now working this out was felt to be a most encouraging step forward and it was hoped that other countries would subsequently join it.”
Prince Bernard presides over the first annual Bilderberg meeting in 1954.
At the 1955 conference, the rudimentary idea for a European currency or what became the Eurozone was even discussed, three years before the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community, without the public’s knowledge:
“A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority.”
The mysterious Bilderberg gatherings are still held to this day under notorious secrecy and are frequently the subject of wild speculation. One can imagine a topic behind the scenes at this year’s meeting would be how to address the growth of anti-EU ‘populism’ and uprisings like the gilet jaunes. Hitlerite expansionism had been carried out on the Führer’s vision for a European federation in the Third Reich — in many respects, the EU is a rebranded realization of his plans for empire-building. How ironic that liberals are clinging to a multinational political union founded by fascist colluders while the same economic bloc is being opposed by today’s far right after its new Islamophobic facelift.
While nationalism may have played an instrumental role in Brexit, there is a manufactured hysteria hatched by the establishment which successfully reduced the complex range of reasons for the Leave EU vote to racism and flag-waving. They are now repeating this pattern by overstating the presence of the far right among the yellow vests. Such delirium not only demonizes workers but coercively repositions the left into supporting something it otherwise shouldn’t — the EU and by default its laissez-faire policies — thereby driving the masses further into the arms of the same far right. Echoes of this can be seen in the U.S. with the vapid response to journalist Angela Nagle’s recent article about the immigration crisis on the southern border. The faux-left built a straw man in their attack on Nagle, who dared to acknowledge that the establishment only really wants ‘open borders’ for an endless supply of low-wage labor from regions in the global south destabilized by U.S. militarism and trade liberalization. Aligning itself with the hollow, symbolic gestures of centrists has only deteriorated the standards of the left participating in such vacuousness and dragged down to the level of liberals.
There is no doubt Brexit and Trump pushed the xenophobia button and could not have come about without it. However, such criticism means nothing when it comes from moral posturers who claim to “stand with refugees” while supporting the very ‘humanitarian’ interventionist policies displacing them. Nativism was not the sole reason the majority voted to leave the EU and many working class minorities also were Brexiters. Of course their fellow workers and migrants are not the true cause of their misery. After all, it was not just chattel slaves who came to the U.S. unwillingly but European immigrants fleeing continental wars and starvation as well — the crisis in the EU today is no different.
Fundamentally, migrants seek asylum on Europe’s doorstep because of NATO’s imperial expansion and the unexpected arrival of Brexit has threatened to weaken the EU’s military arm. Already desperate to reinvent itself and a new enemy in Russia despite its functional obsolescence, the shock of the referendum has inconveniently undermined NATO’s ability to pressure Moscow and Beijing, a step forward for mitigating world peace in the long run and a silver lining to its outcome. It is the task of the left to reject the EU’s neoliberal project while transmitting the message that capital, not refugees, is the cause of the plight of the masses. It is also necessary to have faith in the people, something cynical liberals lack. Racism may historically be the achilles heel of the working class but underlying Brexit, the election of Trump, and the yellow vests is the spirit of defiance in working people, albeit one of political confusion in need of guidance.
If the yellow vests are today’s sans-culottes, like those which became the revolutionary partisans in the French Revolution, they will eventually need a Jacobin Club. Relatively progressive but ultimately reformist figures like Mélenchon are no such spearhead and will only lead them down the same dead end of SYRIZA. The absence of any such vanguard has forced the working class to take matters into their own hands in the interim. If history is any guide, the gilets jaunes will be stamped out until a new cadre takes the reins whose objective is, as Lenin said,“not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.” We also cannot fall into ideological fantasies that we live in permanent revolutionary circumstances or that a spontaneous uprising can become comprehensive simply because of ingenious leadership. Nevertheless, as Mao Tse-Tung wrote, “a single spark can start a prairie fire” and hopefully the yellow vests are that flame.
When previously last year the United Nations began scrutinizing claims that China has interned one million of its ethnic Uighur Muslim in “re-education” camps, Beijing stridently denied such charges, but now months after Western media and human rights groups have carefully documented a network of Uighur prisons, some by satellite photos, China is attempting to shift the narrative to one of a positive “de-radicalization” program. Beijing now not only fully owns up to its system of forced labor camps, but as a Times (UK) report finds, is even parading groups of Muslims on state TV to extol the virtues of the system.
Stillframe of prior China Central Television footage extolling the virtues of its Chinese Muslim re-education camps.
The China Central Television broadcasts are but the latest in Beijing’s Orwellian efforts to not only form the minds of its citizens on the controversial subject, but to manage the world’s perception of the “disappeared” Muslims now rotting in what might best be described as Communists propaganda camps, per The Times:
Until recently China flatly rejected accusations that it forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs into what the US called re-education and indoctrination camps rife with “awful abuse”. The interviews on China Central Television appear to be the latest step by the government to acknowledge and justify what it describes as “vocational schools” in the Uighur province of Xinjiang. Beijing has said that the camps have helped to stop religious violence.
The Times report outlines some of the interviews, and the quotes appear carefully scripted, conveying how the Communist government wishes the public to perceive the program.
One restaurant owner who acknowledged spending time in a camp said he became more tolerant: “If I had let the religious extremism develop, I might have beaten non-Muslims who entered my restaurant,” the man identified as Abudu Saimaiti said. “In the worst case, I would not walk on public roads, take city buses or use the official currency, because they are provided by non-Muslims, who run this country.”
Speaking into the camera, the Chinese Muslim business owner added, “Through learning the law and the national policy, I have come to realize it’s a dead end for me, for my family and for my offspring, and my hometown will for ever be chaotic.”
Prior China Central Television (CCTV) footage from October, featured by Al Jazeera
The state TV program alternates between depicting joyful scenes among Muslim inmates expressing gratitude for their “rehabilitation” to young students testifying they were taught by Uighur leaders to “shun Chinese society’ and to believe that non-Muslims must be killed, according to a description by The Times.
Chinese officials have condemned Western accounts of the camps, recently telling the UN Human Rights Council for example that humanitarian concerns were “not factual” and are “politically driven” attacks. Other officials, such as head of the regional Xinjiang government, where most Uighurs in China are historically based, promoted the camps as a place to learn “vocational skills”.
China has also lately touted the program as behind a significant drop in terror-related attacks in the previously restive province.
Last summer the United Nations began taking note of the large number of cases in which prominent Uighur Chinese citizens and dissidents were being “disappeared”. A UN panel noted credible reports that more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China were held in a prison network that resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also called the system a race-based program which sent Muslim minorities into“political camps for indoctrination”.
For a variety of different reasons, there is a growing proportion of young adults that are living with their parents in the United States.
As of 2017, it’s estimated that 34.5% of young adults (18-34 years old) in the U.S live at home – one of the highest percentages in recent memory. How does this national average compare to individual states, and how does data break down further by age and gender over time?
Living at Home
Today’s interactive map comes to us from Overflow Data, and visualizes data at the state level, showing a wide range from 16% (D.C., North Dakota) to closer to 47% (New Jersey).
Here are the five states with the highest proportion of young adults living at home:
New Jersey is the surprising leader here, with 47.3% of young adults between 18-34 years living at home. This is at least partially a result of the state’s proximity to big cities like New York City and Philadelphia, in which young adults choose to commute instead of renting or buying places in those cities themselves.
With higher housing costs and rents, it’s also not surprising to see other states with large populations like California, Florida, and New York as being well represented at the top of the list.
Differences by Age
While figures are going up across the board, a particular subsegment (25-34 years old) stands out as rising to its highest point in at least 30 years.
Both men and women in this older millennial segment are starting to become more likely to stay at home:
There are many potential culprits for this trend, including social and economic factors.
It’s well-documented that millennials are marrying later, which is a traditional impetus for moving away from home. Today’s young adults are also putting off having kids until later in adulthood.
At the same time, on the economic front, higher housing prices and mounting student debt are two factors that are preventing young adults from having the necessary resources to move out as early as they might like.
What do you think is the major cause behind this trend, and do you think it will reverse?
The city of Los Angeles has unveiled an earthquake early warning app for Android and iOS smartphones, which can currently be downloaded from app stores.
Created under the oversight of Mayor Eric Garcetti and the city, ShakeAlertLA has been designed to tap into the US Geological Survey’s early warning system, which has been under development for several years. The app is designed to give users seconds (and perhaps even tens of seconds) of warning before shaking from an earthquake arrives at a user’s location.
“ShakeAlertLA sends you information when a 5.0 or greater earthquake happens in Los Angeles County, often before you feel shaking,” according to the app’s description.
The app, which is also available in Spanish, was built under a contract with AT&T. It was published quietly online on New Year’s Eve, and by Wednesday morning, users of social media had already found it and begun tweeting their excitement about the release of the app.
For more than a year, the mayor has talked about providing an earthquake early warning app for Los Angeles residents, even as it seemed that making it a reality would be difficult.
But in October, Garcetti seemed optimistic that ShakeAlertLA would be unveiled by the end of 2018 if it passed initial testing among thousands of city employees. –LA Times
“By advancing earthquake early warning technology, we are making Los Angeles stronger, making Angelenos safer,” Garcetti told reporters in October. “And it’ll help save lives, most important, by giving people those precious seconds to stop elevators, to pull to the side of the road, to drop, cover and hold on.”
“All that will not happen the first day we launch,” Garcetti noted, “But together, with the private sector, we will build the software and the hardware that will allow us to be able to anticipate and react to an earthquake before we even feel it here.”
The system could soon be made available broadly across the state.
Josh Bashioum, founder of the Santa Monica company Early Warning Labs, which has been closely working with the USGS, said it hopes to release a beta version of its app, QuakeAlert, to as many as 100,000 test users across California soon.
So far, 90,000 people have signed up to be on the company’s wait list. That release will be kept on a test basis as experts determine whether there are any bottleneck delays in issuing push alerts. –LA Times
According to the Times, the early warning system will allow utilities to turn off large high-pressure fuel lines, and even stop trains.
Earthquake early warning systems work on a very simple principle: Seismic shaking moves at the speed of sound through rock – while modern communications systems are much faster. Earthquake sensors which detect a tremor starting at, say, the Salton Sea could sound the alarm in Los Angeles 150 miles away – providing residents with perhaps over a minute to prepare.
The system is not likely to be perfect, especially in its first few years of service. As residents of Japan, Mexico and other places that already have the alerts have learned, the system comes with false alarms and missed warnings. And early warnings probably won’t be possible for users at the epicenter of a quake.
Yet the early warning systems have had tremendous support in other countries because the benefits when the systems work far outweigh the disappointments. The system helped prevent deadly derailments of high-speed trains in Japan before shaking arrived from the magnitude 9.1 earthquake of 2011, for instance, signaling the trains to slow down. Memorably, the national Japanese broadcaster NHK aired an earthquake warning about 90 seconds before the strongest shaking arrived in Tokyo. –LA Times
his is the predictable path because it’s the only one that’s politically expedient and doesn’t cause much financial pain until it’s too late to stave off collapse.
While many fear a war between the nuclear powers or the breakdown of civil order, I tend to think the Crisis of 2023-26 is more likely to be financial in nature.
War and civil breakdown are certainly common enough in history, global/nuclear war has been avoided in recent history, largely because wars are typically launched by those who reckon they can win the war. Launching a nuclear strike against a nation with the ability to launch a counterstrike (from submarines, for example, and missiles that survived the first strike) guarantees the destruction of whatever concentrations of population and assets the attacker may have.
The breakdown of civil order has not occurred in developed-world nations for quite some time, as central states can marshal military forces to restore order and issue / borrow money to buy the compliance of the restive populace.
Financial crises, in contrast, remain a constant feature of the modern era, and developed-world nations are perhaps even more vulnerable to financial disorder than developing nations.
As I’ve often noted, systems tend to follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion followed by slower growth during maturity and culminating in stagnation, decline or collapse.
Successful economies generate a double-bind once they reach the stagnation-decline phase: the populace (and capital) both expect strong permanent growth as a birthright, and they see the previous boost-phase and maturity phase as evidence that the economy “should” continue delivering outsized returns on capital and widespread prosperity essentially forever.
They are willing to accept a temporary slowdown/decline as part of the process of prosperity, but their patience quickly runs out if outsized returns and general prosperity aren’t forthcoming.
The stagnation phase has many causes: a reduction in resources or depletion of soil/water resources; a sustained shortage of energy or a sharp rise in the cost of energy; stagnating productivity, and the rise of parasitic elites, insiders who feather their nests at the expense of the many.
All of these factors act as friction in the system, and eventually the system is unable to sustain the parasitic elites, high returns on capital and general prosperity.
Any political elite that delivers the bad news that prosperity is over risks being overthrown or voted out of office, and so the ruling elites seek to extend high returns on capital and general prosperity by any means available.
Since they are the parasitic elites, eliminating that source of friction is off the table. Restoring depleted soil/water/energy resources is not possible, and wresting control of others’ resources to exploit is problematic: using force might trigger a wider war, so buying others’resources is the safer answer.
Modern states create new currency by either digital “printing” or borrowing the money into existence. There is little political resistance to creating new money to buy others’ resources, generate high returns on capital and deliver direct transfers of cash to the populace via “make work” employment, social welfare, Universal Basic Income, etc.
You see the double-bind: the ruling class must deliver outsized returns on capital and general prosperity, and the only way they can do so is to create new money rather than new wealth, something that is beyond their power.
Depending on the wealth and productivity of the existing economy, the world may accept this new money as having value for a time. But as the need for more currency increases, ruling elites start to “print” or borrow new currency in excess of what the economy actually generates in income and value.
Eventually the world catches on to the stealth devaluation of the money, and trust in the value of the currency drops, slowly at first and then precipitously.
In developed economies, the ruling elites protect their own incomes and power, and those of capital, as the owners of capital are part of the ruling elite. The net result of this is rising income/wealth inequality as the few increase their share at the expense of the many. (Thomas Piketty characterized this process as a higher rate of return on capital than on labor.)
The political “solution” to stagnation and inequality is QE for the People:increased infrastructure and social welfare spending, benefits that are now costly being subsidized by the state (healthcare, higher education) and Universal Basic Income.
Proponents rarely (if ever) question the bloated cost structure of these protected industries, which benefit entrenched elites (i.e. parasitic elites) at the expense of the overall economy.
Proponents of QE for the People have convinced themselves that essentially unlimited sums of new money can be created and distributed without generating inflation, since all the newly created trillions will be boosting “aggregate demand,” i.e. more consumer demand for more of everything, including resources that are depleted/scarce.
This belief that creating and distributing trillions in new money isn’t inflationary is necessary to suppress the common-sense view that inflation is inevitable once money-creation (and broad distribution of the new money) kicks into high gear.
Since the ruling elites have no other choice, they will embrace QE for the People and generate new money with abandon.
I am guessing the political movement demanding QE for the People will come to power by 2021. The money creation will begin in earnest and a few years later, inflation will start rising, much to the surprise of proponents of QE for the People.
At that point the proponents and the ruling elites will be trapped: they won’t be able to withdraw all the benefits (“free money”) of QE for the People, nor can they reverse runaway inflation without drastically reducing the creation of currency.
Various politically expedient policies will be tried–wealth taxes, the issuance of a new currency, perhaps even a state cryptocurrency–but none of these can reverse the underlying dynamic.
The currency devalues and then collapses, along with the “wealth” that it represented.
This is the predictable path because it’s the only one that’s politically expedient and doesn’t cause much financial pain until it’s too late to stave off collapse.
This essay was drawn from Musings Report 52. The Musings Reports are sent weekly to patrons and subscribers ($50/year or $5/month).
As he has done every January for the last 34 years, Blackstone Vice Chairman and former Morgan Stanley Chief Economist Byron Wien on Thursday released his annual “10 Surprises” list for the year ahead (the release was accompanied by a brief appearance on CNBC to review his predictions for 2018, while offering some insight into his thought process for 2019).
After putting in an abysmal performance with his projections for 2017, Wien had a somewhat better showing in 2018, accurately predicting that US growth would improve, the Fed would hike rates four times, the dollar would finally “come to life” and North Korea would agree to suspend its nuclear weapons program. He also projected that the S&P 500 would endure a 10% correction before rebounding to 3,000, and that oil prices would top $80 a barrel – and although “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, we think it’s fair to acknowledge that Wien was at least half right.
Falling mostly in the realm of geopolitics, Wien’s less successful calls included projections that Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party would rise to power in the UK, and that Republicans would lose control of both Houses of Congress (though again here he was half right). Though he also fudged calls for Treasury yields to move toward 4% and for inflation and wage growth to accelerate beyond 3% while global growth also improved.
Unsurprisingly for the perennially bullish Wien, most of his projections for 2019 center around a rebound in US stocks, which he projected would rally 15% by year’s end, and that the US economy will avoid a recession as the Federal Reserve pauses its program of interest rate hikes (a projection that’s gaining popularity among the CNBC set and traders, who are pricing in a higher likelihood that the Fed will cut rates).
Growth stocks – including tech and biotech – help lead the market rally higher, while value disappoints (so essentially a replay of the first nine months of 2018).
The dollar will stabilize around end-2018 levels, while gold drops to $1,000/oz and the profit outlook for emerging markets brightens.
Wien is also calling for a second Brexit referendum, more indictments against members of the Trump Organization and the president’s inner circle (however, the scrutiny will trigger an exodus of Trump’s closest advisors, which is, in one sense, already happening).
For those who are unfamiliar with Wien’s methodology, his surprises list comprises events that investors assign 1-in-3 odds of happening, but that Wien thinks are more than 50% likely.
The weakening world economy encourages the Federal Reserve to stop raising the federal funds rate during the year. Inflation remains subdued and the 10-year Treasury yield stays below 3.5%. The yield curve remains positive.
Partly because of no further rate increases by the Federal Reserve and more attractive valuations as a result of the market decline at the end of 2018, the S&P 500 gains 15% for the year. Rallies and corrections occur but improved earnings enable equities to move higher in a reasonably benign interest rate environment.
Traditional drivers of GDP growth, capital spending and housing, make only modest gains in 2019. The expansion continues, however, because of consumer and government spending. A recession before 2021 seems unlikely.
The better tone in the financial markets discourages precious metal investors. Gold drops to $1,000 as the equity markets in the United States and elsewhere improve.
The profit outlook for emerging markets brightens and investor interest intensifies because the price earnings ratio is attractive compared to developed markets and historical levels. Continuous expansion of the middle class in the emerging markets provides the consumer buying thrust for earnings growth. China leads and the Shanghai composite rises 25%. The Brazil equity market also comes to life under the country’s new conservative leadership.
March 29 comes and goes and there is no Brexit deal. Parliament fails to approve one and Theresa May, arguing that a change in leadership won’t help the situation, remains in office. A second referendum is held and the U.K. votes to remain.
The dollar stabilizes at year-end 2018 levels and stays there throughout the year. Because of concern about the economy, the Federal Reserve stops shrinking its balance sheet, which is interpreted negatively by currency traders. The flow of foreign capital into United States assets slows because of a softer monetary policy and a lack of need for new capital for business expansion.
The Mueller investigation results in indictments against members of the Trump Organization closest to the president but the evidence doesn’t support any direct action against Trump himself. Nevertheless, an exodus of Trump’s most trusted advisors results in a crisis in confidence that the administration has the people and the process to accomplish important goals.
Congress, however, with a Democratic majority, gets more done than expected, particularly on trade policy. Progress is made in preserving important parts of the Affordable Care Act and immigration policy.A federal infrastructure program to be implemented in 2020 is announced.
Growth stocks continue to provide leadership in the U.S. equity market. Technology and biotech do well as a result of continued strong earnings. Value stocks other than energy-related businesses disappoint because of the slowing economy.
Every year, Wien includes a few also-rans – surprises that didn’t make Wien’s top ten because he doesn’t believe they’re as relevant, or because they’re not, in Wien’s estimation, as probable.
Geopolitical tensions increase. Iran continues to destabilize the Middle East and Kim Jong Un fails to live up to his North Korea denuclearization promises. Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Advisor Bolton make statements indicating the United States may take pre-emptive action in both places, thereby causing one of several sharp market sell-offs. But in spite of hostile rhetoric, the United States does not go to war with anyone as we approach the 2020 election. Trump’s tough talk on some issues like trade works, however, and leads to successful diplomatic negotiations on national security.
In desperation China engages in ambitious infrastructure programs to bolster its economy. China grows at 6.5% real, but the increased debt causes concern around the world and has a negative impact on the renminbi.
China announces, “We want to be the world leaders in free trade.”It sends envoys around the globe to negotiate better bilateral trade terms in order to offset the losses from the ongoing U.S. disagreements. Joint ventures in which foreign companies control the majority share are initiated in all sectors, from industrials and autos to raw materials. As China’s influence around the world becomes greater, the U.S. further isolates itself.
The European Central Bank is forced to restart quantitative easing in response to a defiant Italy, a weakening Germany and Brexit.Thwarting expectations that Brexit would bring the rest of Europe closer together, Italy realizes that it can break all fiscal rules without any fear of punishment from the E.U. As a result, the Italian economy falls into recession, debt spreads surge and the ECB is forced to liquefy the system again.
We’ll check back in one year to see how bad well he did.
A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of endless military expansionism.
“January 4 is my last day at NBC News and I’d like to say goodbye to my friends, hopefully not for good,” begins an email titled ‘My goodbye letter to NBC’ sent to various contacts by William M Arkin, an award-winning journalist who has been associated with the network for 30 years.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve left NBC, but this time the parting is more bittersweet, the world and the state of journalism in tandem crisis,” the email continues. “My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.”
The lengthy email covers details about Arkin’s relationship with NBC and its staff, his opinions about the mainstream media’s refusal to adequately scrutinize and criticize the US war machine’s spectacular failures in the Middle East, how he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years”, the fact that his position as a civilian military analyst was unusual and “peculiar” in a media environment where that role is normally dominated by “THE GENERALS and former government officials,” and how he was “one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq” and remembers “fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”
“A scholar at heart, I also found myself an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers,” he writes.
Arkin makes clear that NBC is in no way the sole mass media offender in its refusal to question or criticize the normalization of endless warfare, but that he feels increasingly “out of sync” and “out of step” with the network’s unhesitating advancement of military interventionist narratives. He writes about how Robert Windrem, NBC News’ chief investigative producer, convinced him to join a new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential race. Arkin writes the following about his experience with the unit:
“I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
“I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.”
Arkin is no fan of Trump, calling him “an ignorant and incompetent impostor,” but describes his shock at NBC’s reflexive opposition to the president’s “bumbling intuitions” to get along with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, and his questioning of the US military’s involvement in Africa.
“I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? 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? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?”
“There’s a saying about consultants, that organizations hire them to hear exactly what they want to hear,” Arkin writes in the conclusion of his statement. “ I’m proud to say that NBC didn’t do that when it came to me. Similarly I can say that I’m proud that I’m not guilty of giving my employers what they wanted. Still, the things this and most organizations fear most — variability, disturbance, difference — those things that are also the primary drivers of creativity — are not really the things that I see valued in the reporting ranks.”
That’s about as charitably as it could possibly be said by a skeptical tongue. Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. It’s absolutely bizarre that it should be unusual for there to be a civilian analyst of the US war machine’s behaviors in the mainstream media who is skeptical of its failed policies and nonstop bloodshed, and it’s a crime that such voices are barely holding on to the fringes of the media stage. Such analysts should be extremely normal and commonplace, not rare and made to feel as though they don’t belong.
Click here to read William M Arkin’s full email, republished with permission.
