Category: zerohedge

Now that Deutsche Bank is directly competing with BofA in polling its clients, having launched its own fund manager survey a while back, DB credit strategist Jim Reid is preparing to publish the full results of the latest monthly survey in which he polled nearly 700 people. And ahead of publishing the full survey results, he highlighted what Wall Street professionals said they like and dislike most about WFH.

People could chose up to two options: an overwhelming 68% of Wall Street workers thought the lack of commute was the best WFH factor. That was nearly double the 35% who said they liked seeing more of their family!

In terms of what people hated, it’s a lack of in-person team interaction (71%) and a lack of divide between work and home life (49%) that were well ahead.

As Reid concludes, “if companies are desperate to get people back to the office it seems investment into research into a teleporter would be a good move as commuting is by far the biggest bugbear!”

We will present more results on WFH and market-related answers, when Deutsche publishes the full poll on Monday.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

It never ceases to amaze me how tone deaf those with power are.  

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in serious trouble for the first time in his political career.  He’s a man staring at a massive electoral problem coming this fall.

Erdogan is currently presiding over an economy in complete freefall. With recent reports of food riots over government handouts of potatoes and onions the news only seems to be getting worse there on the eve of national elections.

Turkey is emblematic of what happens to a country systemically mismanaged because of its geopolitical importance. A man like Erdogan is able to maintain power because he’s constantly schmoozing both sides of the Bosporus to get subsidies to fuel his personal ambitions.

This is part of the reason why Turkey has the largest army in NATO while the private economy has the worst foreign capital liabilities position of any major emerging market.

And it looks like Erdogan may have finally overplayed his hand too many times in the last year.

He has made multiple major missteps on the geopolitical stage, attempting to assert Turkey as a regional powerhouse only to be thwarted at every turn by Russia.  Be it Libya, Cyprus, Syria, Azerbaijan, or Iraq Putin has outplayed Erdogan at every turn.

With each of these setbacks his gambits become more and more desperate.  And he is egged on by the U.S. and the EU to make these gambits as he hides behind the shield of Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Anyone else who wasn’t so strategically important who made this many major geopolitical and military blunders would have already been overthrown. But now it looks like he’s run his full course.

This puts him in the position of thinking he can play Russia off the U.S. to his advantage and then turn around and play the U.S. off Russia for his advantage.  In all instances he only sees the upside and never the down.

His real weakness is Turkey’s foreign currency deficit which cannot be serviced nor is there any incentive for it to resolve itself because Erdogan constantly bites the hand that feeds him.  China and Russia are more than wealthy enough to have helped Erdogan balance Turkey’s books since the U.S. first attacked him financially in 2018.

I wrote about this extensively at the time.   

But Erdogan always turns on the person who last helped him thinking he’s a bigger player than he is. 

And now with President Biden acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, one of the few things Turkey and Israel have agreed on for decades, Erdogan is being told he’s no longer needed by the U.S. Erdogan has maintained power through aggressive nationalist domestic policy. His Neo-Ottoman ambitions played well at home for nearly two decades but with the Turkish economy now hollowed out by his adventurism and mismanagement of the Lira he’s is serious trouble politically in a way he hasn’t ever been.

There’s many angles here to Biden’s Armenian Genocide move here. It’s a clear rebuke of Israel while the U.S. and Iran are in deep negotiations about bringing back the JCPOA, which have made significant progress. Remember, the WEF and Europe want the JCPOA, Israel does not. And this week’s fireworks between Iran and Israel point to a dangerous future the closer we get to its reinstatement and Iran rejoining the global economy.

This leaves Turkey with almost no friends anymore as it is clear the JCPOA is supposed to be the carrot to Iran while maximum isolation stick is transferred to Russia. This is a very high-stakes game which is as much a power play by Europe against Israel and the U.K. as it is anything else.

And that leaves Turkey with a decision to make.

Today, Turkey’s foreign debt position is only marginally better than it was in 2018 and got worse over 2020.  Deleveraging in dollar terms improved and then it got worse once the Fed went back to the zero-bound after the Coronapocalypse and Erdogan let go of control of Turkey’s Central Bank.

source: tradingeconomics.com

If you are playing a game this big and understand the rules of it at the level Erdogan does, then I cannot understand why he let the Bank of Turkey reverse course after his scathing attacks on the IMF in 2018, which, to be fair were spot on and, in my opinion, the right course of action for Turkey to free itself from the vaster powers.  

But it didn’t work out that way and the situation in Turkey today is worse than it was in 2018 because now he can no longer count on Putin and/or Xi to bail him out.  All of the major powers are now tired of him and his game and are allowing him the big fall from grace.

This is why the lira is imploding and it’s why Erdogan is trying to save himself by backing the U.S.’s play in Ukraine and announcing the banning of bitcoin for payment services in Turkey. 

I’m sure the WEF and the Biden administration are happy with him for this.

The timing of this announcement was done to stifle the latest breakout to a new high in Bitcoin and undermine the Coinbase (COIN) IPO, which was very successful especially when you remember Facebook’s IPO back in 2012.  Since then it’s been one attack after another on the crypto market as I talked about in a recent post.

And it looks like it’s finally been successful in slowing down bitcoin’s momentum. First causing a big breakout in high-quality altcoins.  DASH hit $400, Decred hit $250, Litecoin went past $300, Monero threatened $375.  ARRR $15.00, And DOGE hit a truly staggering $0.45.  

They have all since finally succumbed to the same loss of momentum which is shaping up to being a significant top, possibly now, for the rest of 2021. There’s been sufficient stabilization of the U.S. treasury market with good demand for the long-end of the yield curve, evidenced by a solid 20-year auction this week, to warrant some consolidation of 2021’s immense gains.

The important thing to remember here, isn’t that bitcoin is or even was in a bubble, but that this rotation into altcoins occurred because people no longer want to rotate back to USDs or EURs.  They want custody.

And that brings me back to the counter-move by China who threw Turkey’s banks a lifeline by announcing that China’s banks can now import gold for the first time since 2019.  

Since Turkey’s banks can hold gold as reserves, the languishing gold price has really harmed them and Turkey’s financial position.   Because if a new rally in gold starts with last week’s move up in gold prices, then watch Turkey’s foreign debt position improve as well.

It won’t quell the rampant inflation, soaring food prices and any of Turkey’s other societal problems in time for elections later this year. Turks, by the look of the current polling, are beginning to see that Erdogan doesn’t have any real answers nor does he have any friends.

If they have to swallow being the only country left to refuse to admit to their own history this will be a moment of memetic collapse for them about just how far their position has fallen thanks to Erdogan’s failed adventures and failed stewardship of their wealth.

The suppression of gold was important to try and keep a lid on institutional money moving into bitcoin. China enabling some stability in gold prices should mitigate some of the downward momentum in the crypto-space, depending on how much leverage is still out there. With the U.S. economy getting an artificial boost from all the ridiculous stimulus money flowing out from D.C. in the most unsustainable way, the Fed is under no compunction to bail out emerging markets, like Turkey, short of dollars.

Erdogan had to take steps to stem the tide against the lira. Making a public move against bitcoin was the easiest thing, and obviously done to appease his partners in the West who then stabbed him in the back less than a week later. But it won’t be enough and this move may have been the strongest signal yet of how powerful bitcoin’s ability to find weaknesses in the financial system is.

Erdogan wouldn’t have made this announcement against bitcoin and cryptos if it didn’t pose a real threat to the lira. In a world where US dollar stablecoins are paying 10+% and can be bought and sold for nearly nothing, what could a Turkish bank possibly offer Turks at this point other than an unsafe place to park their money?

Turkey is rapidly approaching a serious decision point as is Erdogan. His pride has led him to places he should have never went and having bit the hands that fed him too many times, his future along with his government’s is looking grim. Thankfully for his victims there are solutions available to protect them from him.

*  *  *

UPDATE: Erdogan’s goons have now gone after the 2nd bitcoin exchange in Turkey in less than a week. These are the moves of a desperate leader.

Used car auto lenders are falling ass backward into business as the global semi shortage and supply chain bottlenecks have caused used-car prices to rocket.

This is also creating a boom for the banks that involve themselves into used car loans, which generally have higher yields than traditional new-car loans, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Institutions like Ally Financial are benefiting from the shift. It says it’ll see yields on auto originations jump to the 7% range for the rest of 2021, up from a 6.66% average in Q1. The bank’s auto leasing yields have also surged, jumping to 8.6% in the most recent quarter in 2021 from 5.2% at the beginning of 2020.

Both rises in rates are happening as benchmark rates remain low.

Dealers usually borrow to finance their floor inventory, the Journal notes, and when there’s supply chain disruption – as there is now – it can hurt banks’ loan growth. But as supply picks up and used car prices start to fall, “for banks there may be an offset in the form of faster dealer floor-plan loan growth.”

But it isn’t all blue skies and rainbows for lenders: this type of environment can prompt intense competition, and automakers saw their captive financing arms gain share in the used-car loan market versus banks in 2020. 

Average rates on used car loans last year were 8.4%, down from over 9% in 2019. And the average loan term hit a record high last year. With shares of names like Ally and Capital One trading “at or above their highest price-to-book ratios in years” and potential looming credit risk, stocks of used-car loan players may already be robustly valued. 

 

Authored by Cyril Widdershoven via OilPrice.com,

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is starting to feel the heat of new U.S. sanctions, as Washington is putting some additional bite into its confrontation with Moscow.

At the same time, new sanctions or even a full-out (proxy) confrontation are looming on the horizon, looking at the tensions at the Russian-Ukrainian border. Putin’s reactions are straightforward, threatening asymmetric responses to any Western pressure or military interference in the coming months. 

The still fledgling or outright weak reactions of Western governments, especially in Europe, are received in Russia as a sign of weakness. Even though current US-EU sanctions on Russian institutions and oligarchs are taking their toll, the larger picture hasn’t changed much.

Russia’s military buildup on the eastern Ukrainian border, the unilateral decision to block the Black Sea for international shipping and naval forces, in breach with the Montreux Convention, and the threat of increased US sanctions on the NordStream 2 involved parties, doesn’t seem to have changed Putin’s strategic considerations. The global critique about the Russian treatment of Navalny is seen by Moscow as external interference in an internal issue, not to be discussed even during Putin’s yearly “State of Union” address to the Russian people.

US President Biden, however, seems not to be satisfied at all with the effects of current sanctions on Russia. New, harsher measures are already planned, even after last week’s Washington decision to expel Russian diplomats and bar US banks from buying Russia’s sovereign bonds on the primary market. Until now, most US sanctions have been linked to Russian interference in US elections, cyber-attacks and its appalling treatment of the political opposition. 

Moscow’s reaction until now has been rather icy, the Bear doesn’t seem to be impressed by the threat of new sanctions. This reasonably soft Russian approach could, however, change very quickly, as Putin’s State of the Union address issues asymmetric reactions on all levels if so-called “red-lines” are crossed.

For the outside world, however, it’s not really clear what those red lines exactly are.  Moscow already has indicated that additional Western sanctions or a military build-up in the Ukraine-Black Sea arena are a red-line. Analysts are now speculating what the Russian reaction to such actions could be. 

Western analysts mainly fear a military reaction, looking at the Ukrainian issue at present. The immense military buildup on Ukrainian borders could lead to a direct open involvement of Russian troops under the pretext of ‘protecting’ Russian citizens and interests in the region, as has been done before in Georgia and other places. This full out Cold-War approach is an option not to diminish straight away, as Russian aggressive maneuvering has been building up since the Arab Spring, with its involvement in Syria and Libya being the clearest examples.

Others are wondering if a possible Russian retaliation could be through blocking oil and gas supplies to Europe and and or the U.S.

Increased energy supply dependency of the EU and the US increases Moscow’s geopolitical leverage. This situation has divided the leading European powers. Germany, for example, is hinting at opening up to Moscow, while France and the UK are taking the opposite approach. 

Then there’s the largely undiscussed nuclear option. Another oil price war. While it may seem counterintuitive to some, Moscow could decide to push down prices in order to hurt international oil and gas companies, and independent US shale companies in specific. By taking on the U.S. oil industry, Biden’s economic recovery could be dealt some serious damage.

Another oil price war could destabilize the entire U.S. shale patch, which is still recovering from last year’s oil price implosion. During 2020 Russia has grown to be the third-largest oil supplier to the United States, overtaking even Saudi Arabia. Oil analysts have noticed it, but US politicians have turned a blind eye. The power of oil suppliers should not be undervalued, especially not when it’s in the hands of a rival world power. 

An aggressive move by Moscow doesn’t necessarily have to be at the expense of others in the OPEC+ alliance. In fact, other OPEC members could actually benefit from a direct assault on US oil and gas export markets. Asian economies such as China or India will not be unhappy with lower oil prices, and Beijing even could be a supporter as it will hurt the US at a time that Washington is expanding its sphere of influence in the South China Sea.

Just days after major Turkish Crypto exchange Thodex collapsed, its CEO fled with a rumored $2 billion (and was reportedly detained) and dozens of people were arrested, Turkey’s cryptocurrency investors were dealt another blow as second big exchange collapsed.

In a statement posted late Friday on its website, Vebitcoin said it halted operations citing deteriorating financial conditions claiming that unspecified financial strain led to the decision — possibly caused by an unusually high number of withdrawals leading up to Turkey’s forthcoming cryptocurrency ban, according to CoinTelegraph.

“We have decided to cease our activities in order to fulfill all regulations and claims,” the announcement read in part.

Demiroren News Agency said its Chief Executive Ilker Bas and three other employees have been detained on Saturday. The Financial Crimes Investigation Board has blocked Vebitcoin’s accounts and opened a probe. Vebitcoin is – or rather was – Turkey’s fourth biggest exchange with close to $60 million in daily volumes, according to CoinGecko.com which tracks data on price, volume and market value on crypto markets. More than half of this volume came from Bitcoin, which dropped 19% this week.

On Saturday morning, Muğla chief public prosecutor Mehmet Nadir Yağcı announced in a statement to local media that four employees have been detained by law enforcement following allegations of fraud.

“Following the search and seizure operations carried out at the company headquarters and at some addresses, 4 people, who are company directors and employees, were detained. The investigation carried out by the Directorate of Cyber ​​Crimes Branch of the Muğla Police Department is carried out in a multifaceted and meticulous manner.”

The collapse of Vebitcoin comes days after Thodex halted operations and its 27-year-old founder fled to Albania. Thodex had about 390,000 users according to a lawyer for the victims and losses could be as high as $2 billion, according to Turkey’s Haberturk newspaper. Police subsequently issued upwards of 75 arrest warrants and detained 62 in connection to a possible exit scam.

This week’s rout marks the worst period for Bitcoin since it tumbled amid a wider slump in risk assets at the end of February with bitcoin sliding as low as $48,000 late on Sunday, amid broader weakness in the entire crypto space.

The two exchanges were part of the cryptocurrency boom that had drawn in legions of Turks seeking to protect their savings from rampant inflation and the collapsing Turkish currency. Turkish inflation hit 16.2% in March, more than three times the central bank’s target, and the lira has weakened more than 11% against the dollar this year — its ninth consecutive year of losses – making it the year’s worst performing major currency.

The boom in Turkish crypto trading which saw daily volume on local crypto markets close to $2 billion for Friday, according to data from CoinGecko.com, regulators have come knocking. In early April, Turkey’s Central Bank has banned cryptocurrencies as a form of payment from April 30, and the country has prohibited payment and electronic money institutions from mediating money transfers to cryptocurrency platforms.

Central Bank chief Sahap Kavcioglu said more regulations are in the pipeline in a televised interview on Friday. “We are working on regulations in terms of cryptocurrency,” he said. “There are disturbing money outflows to outside of Turkey via cryptocurrencies.”

Turkey’s crypto ban has become a hot-button issue, as opposition leaders have voiced support for crypto.

Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

A spectre is haunting the Western world – the spectre of a grossly mistaken understanding of the world. 

British kids have nightmares about the climate. Half of French respondents think it likely that climate change will cause “the extinction of the human race.” American teachers coddle students who have panic attacks when wildfires rage somewhere on the planet. Eco-anxiety has clearly gripped the Western world, but what’s worse is that most people have a dismal outlook on all of humanity’s progress, not just climate change. 

Because slow changes don’t get noticed, and because humans use mental shortcuts to understand the world, we end up with a grossly misinformed view of what is. The late Hans Rosling, the Swedish professor of international health that most of us know as the excited man on YouTube (the one who explains the progress of the world with bubbles and giant blocks), dedicated his life to dispelling these misperceptions. The Gapminder Foundation that now carries on his legacy writes

“Our ignorance surveys have shown that the general public is misguided about many basic global facts. Reliable global statistics exist for nearly every aspect of global development, but these numbers are not transformed into popular understanding because using and teaching statistics is still too difficult.” 

Gapminder routinely asks 12 questions (sometimes with a thirteenth question on global temperatures, which most people tend to get right) about basic, uncontroversial, changes in global development – multiple-choice questions on things like demographic change, how many girls in poor countries finish primary school, and what’s happened to extreme poverty in the last twenty years. 

The results are terrible, but it’s not a question of ignorance. If people genuinely didn’t know, by chance alone they’d pick the right answer a third of the time: this is the chimpanzee threshold. Instead, the average human gets 2.2 answers right. The results for some questions, like global life expectancy (50, 60, or 70 years?), ought to scare us more than any dismal vision of climate change. Having more than doubled since 1900, the global improvements in the last forty years seem to have passed most smart people by. Of students and faculty at top universities less than one in five manage to get this right – even Nobel Laureates underperform the chimps. The worst-performing groups were Swedish trade unionists (10% got the answer right) and Norwegian teachers (7% correct). In one memorable lecture, Rosling animatedly exclaimed “What in the world are you teaching the kids?!”

In that one line lies much of the problem for our continued misinformation about the world. 

Media coverage inundates us with a constant flow of catastrophes from one part or the world or another, while overlooking the great non-events of the world. When super cyclones kill 128 people instead of the hundreds of thousands they used to or would have, we don’t even hear about them. When hundreds of thousands of people are lifted out of extreme poverty a day, every day, that’s no longer newsworthy. The result is, Gapminder notes, that “people end up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).”

Counteracting that requires information and an updated framework for thinking about the world. To embrace the notion that things gradually get better – not worse – as we solve more problems, invent better things, and bring more people into the global marketplace. The return of such an optimist mentality (Rosling prefers ‘possibilist’) requires nothing more than accepting that “facts are better than myths – especially for understanding the world.”

Thou shalt not misinform

To say that the world is getting better is not to be complacent about its problems. It is not to be Pollyannaish about the future or believe that from here the only way is up. It’s to say that, on net and over time, the world gets better. It’s to say that progress is hard-earned; that it’s a gradual process, with deep structural and historical roots; that the small heavens we may create in our own lives combine to make the entire world slightly less bad than it was yesterday. I work for you doing what I’m good at; you work for me doing what you’re good at – and inventors and entrepreneurs halfway around the world figure out ways to do things that make both our lives better.  

This isn’t a predetermined path, and it most certainly isn’t always up. Last year was a setback in just about every way we know how to measure (mortality, life expectancy, poverty). The twentieth century saw some of humanity’s worst atrocities: world wars, genocide, autocrats. Sometimes progress pauses, and sometimes our past progress gives rise to new challenges we have yet to overcome – like the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from the coal and oil we burned for (great!) use as fuel, production, and transportation. 

While that’s a global challenge to talk seriously about with our children, we don’t have to overdo it. Imbuing them with mistaken doom-mongering helps nobody. When we do, we’re not setting up the next generation for a flourishing world, or even a factful one. 

Nobody told these kids that wildfires destroy less area now than they used to and forests in California burned much more before Europeans arrived. Deaths from natural disasters, those like storms, hurricanes, and floods that we usually associate with worsening climate change, are massively down over almost any time frame, even though we are many more people on the planet. Child mortality is falling everywhere around the globe, and we produce more food than we ever have. None of those trends are about to suddenly stop, reverse, and undo the progress we’ve already made. 

What is the point of studying when the world is collapsing around us?

This is a point that many schoolchildren have raised, Greta Thunberg perhaps most prominently. The world is heading for an urgent climate disaster, so why should they study for a future they won’t have? 

One reason would be to learn that the world isn’t collapsing, that things are getting better – even though the pandemic coverage and climate change alarmism seem to suggest otherwise. Disasters are quick and sudden; progress is slow and hard-won. We live longer, healthier, safer, better, and more fulfilling lives, with better access to almost anything you can imagine. So far, human ingenuity has outpaced anything that a hostile planet has thrown at us or a declinist mentality has conjured up.

In all this mess, thankfully, there’s at least one thing you can do: imbue your child not with the dangers of the world, but with the factful progress of the world. This is what Tony Morley, a fellow traveler and prominent advocate for progress, is doing: Targeted at 6-to-12-year-olds, Morley is bringing together a hundred one-page stories about the forces, the people, and the astonishing history of how humans have progressed and collectively improved our global living standards. Human Progress for Beginners tries to

“tell the dramatic history of human civilization and the jagged upward path of improved living standards in the last 250 years. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, civilization has experienced the greatest increase in living standards, prosperity, and well-being in our species’ history. […] Human Progress for Beginners will tell the untold story of progress for young readers in a bright and engaging book, the likes of which has never been attempted.”

Chapters span the innovations that rocked our world: the printing presses, steam power, and combustion engines; the history of living standards, of light, and of food; and the progress of literacy, peace, and pollution. 

“Progress forward,” Morley emphasizes, “is not progress completed,” and our world certainly has room for improvement. But that’s not reason enough to despair and invoke the doom-and-gloom zeitgeist of “civilizational decline,” “apocalypse,” or “climate emergency.” Instead, we ought to celebrate our achievements, even in the areas that many of our young people now believe are irrevocably destroyed. 

It’s a counterintuitive notion and a difficult thing to wrap one’s head around, that the world can both be better and is still in many respects bad. We do nobody any favors, least of all our children, by exaggerating one while forgetting how far we’ve come.

By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints

Illinois’ political establishment is far out of touch with the general public on the racial dogma now forced on students from kindergarten through college. Yet a stunning two-thirds of Illinoisans say they don’t speak up, thereby ceding control to an intolerant, extremist minority.

The proof is in a poll released last month that was mostly buried and ignored by the press. It primarily addressed what schools now teach as unquestionable truth: critical race theory, often called anti-racism or wokism.

Illinoisans don’t like it. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which commissioned the poll, summarized their findings this way:

A majority  of respondents  favor equipping teachers to develop core skills and competencies over the encouragement of  progressive  political activism.  Illinoisans  also  favor  a curriculum that  focuses  on “American founding principles and . . . documents” over  one that  incorporates  key  tenets of the  New York Times’ 1619  Project.  At  the post secondary level,  strong  majorities  oppose reducing police presence on campus;  support viewpoint diversity; favor a merit-based application process;  and  prioritize  reducing the cost of tuition over expanding  diversity  and equity  programs.     

That’s completely at odds with mandates from the state’s politicians and education officials. The Illinois State Board of Education recently approved woke teaching standards with its “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Standards” for K-12 education, and the state earlier made “implicit bias” training required by law for Illinois teachers.

Among the survey’s specific findings:

• Sixty-two percent of Illinoisans say it’s more important to expose students to a variety of perspectives, compared to just 23% who want teachers to embrace progressive viewpoints and perspectives; 15% were not sure where they stood. The view was shared by a plurality of Democrats (49.6%) as well as majorities of Republicans (78%) and Independents (69%).

• Illinoisans reject a core piece of woke teaching, 1619 Project published by The New York Times, which aims to “reframe the country’s history” by putting slavery and its enduring consequences “at the very center of our national narrative.” Forty-eight percent of respondents favored a focus on “American founding principles and . . . documents,” compared to 38% who favored “new curriculums that teach children to understand that America is founded on slavery and remains systemically racist today.”

• 57% of respondents said training programs should focus on making teachers better equipped to help students develop core skills and competencies, not on social justice or progressive politics. Just 34% said the priority should go toward teaching progressive viewpoints and social justice advocacy to help teachers overcome their own biases and build more inclusive classrooms

• “A resounding 84% of respondents,” according to the poll’s sponsor, said that “all people should be treated equally on merit” when the question was posed in general terms. When asked to think about the college admissions process specifically, 63% answered that “all people should be treated equally based on merit, even if that results in less racial diversity at selective colleges and universities,” including 89% of Republicans, 62% of Independents and a plurality (47%) of Democrats.

The polling was done by a reputable firm, Eighteen92, which surveyed 800 Illinois residents.

That last bullet point above is particularly striking because it means Illinoisans even oppose affirmative action, and it’s affirmative action that is systemic in most of America, not racism.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising since even Californians oppose affirmative action. In November they voted overwhelmingly to retain their constitutional ban on affirmative action, which is another story that was buried. “The margin of defeat, 56 to 44 percent, was striking to students of political history, because it suggests that race neutrality is more popular now than when it was initially mandated by a 1996 ballot initiative that passed by a slightly smaller margin,” said The Atlantic, which did cover it.

Most significant of all, however, is that over two-thirds of Illinoisans say they are afraid to speak up on these issues.

Why?

Because they fear the mob.

Sixty-four percent of respondents reported that they stop themselves from expressing their opinion on controversial political and social issues “often” (30%) or “sometimes” (34%), with an additional 18% doing so “rarely,” according to the survey sponsor. No surprise there. National surveys, as the sponsor wrote, “have repeatedly shown that political correctness has silenced important discussions—among students on college campuses and in the broader marketplace of ideas.”

Of those who reported self-censoring, 22.4% said the main reason they do so is because they are worried about unfair criticism, while 22.0% answered that they are “worried about professional or academic consequences” for saying the wrong thing.

This must end.

Critical race theory is perhaps the most pernicious and destructive movements our age. It is a doctrine of hatred and division designed purposefully to stoke racial division, just as countless tyrannical movements throughout history have inflamed racial division to divide and conquer.

It expressly rejects the goals of color blindness and the melting pot, which have been among the most noble aspirations of America and most all of the Western Hemisphere. By asserting that race, not character, fundamentally defines all humans, it rejects, at its core, the most fundamental premise of our society – that all men are created equal.

Yet it gains momentum every day. “When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, I am not exaggerating, wrote a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute this week in City Journal. “[F]rom the universities to bureaucracies to K-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.”

What the majority lacks is courage. Courage to stand one’s ground in the face of a mob. Courage to speak up to politicians, administrative officials and school boards. From that City Journal column:

Above all, we must have courage, the fundamental virtue required in our time: courage to stand and speak the truth, courage to withstand epithets, courage to face the mob, and courage to shrug off the scorn of elites. When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1 million, or more who stand up together for the principles of America. Truth and justice are on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.

“I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated.” That’s the title under which a New York teacher last week published his case for why children “are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school.”

Read his column. Find your own way to show the courage he has. Do not stand by while our children are indoctrinated.

Another month, another gaping discrepancy between Chinese FX reserve data and actual yuan cross-border flows.

In the same month that PBOC data revealed that FX reserves stood at US$3,170bn in March, $35BN lower than February (granted mostly on valuation effect, which when netted out implies that FX reserves declined by $4bn), Goldman has calculated that net FX flows were actually $34BN into the Chinese economy.

According to Goldman’s Maggie Wei, in March, there was $2BN in net inflows via onshore outright spot transactions,and US$7BN in net inflow via freshly entered and canceled forward transactions, while a separate SAFE dataset on “cross-border RMB flows” shows that domestic banks saw net RMB receipt of $25BN from onshore to offshore. Combining the three, Goldman’s “preferred” FX flow measure suggests a total of $34BN inflows in March, which while slightly slower than February, was a mirror image of the picture implied from FX reserve data.

Digging deeper into the numbers reveals that FX inflows related to the goods trade surplus remained strong at $26BN in March, even higher than the single month goods trade surplus at $14bn in March. The FX conversion ratio for net goods trade surplus in Q1 2021 stood at 81%, higher than 45% in Q4 2020. Services trade related FX outflow in March was modestly higher at $6BN, vs $2BN in February.

FX inflows notwithstanding, China’s net foreign exchange settlement, which the US Treasury considers a more comprehensive proxy for intervention because it includes the activities of China’s state-owned banks, and surged to about $180 billion last year, remained persistently wide compared to the modest decline in PBOC FX assets. As a reminder, historically these two data series have tracked each other closely but a striking divergence emerged since last November.

Commenting on China’s FX shennanigans, Bloomberg’s Ye Xie notes that yuan forward transactions surged as corporates hedged their currency exposure, with settlement data showing that yuan-forward sales surged in March to the highest since 2015 as China’s currency weakened during the period. “The increased trading of currency derivatives is a healthy development, suggesting Chinese companies have become more prudent managing their currency exposure” according to Wang Chunying, spokeswoman for the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

As Xie summarizes the above, hedging activities soared since October when regulators cut the reserve requirement to make it less costly to sell the yuan in forwards. It may have helped lower currency volatility. Separately, the settlement data showed net foreign currency inflows continued last month, albeit at a slower pace, as strong exports offset small bond outflows.

Authored by John Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics.com,

President Biden claimed that Derek Chauvin’s conviction on Tuesday “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” of police. With the police shooting that same day of 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, the White House again pushed the racism claim, noting that this was just another example of how “police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people.”

But where is the evidence for these claims? In Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution never once mentioned evidence that the now-former officer is racist. A day after the verdict, the Biden administration announced plans for a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if there is such racism, but the administration’s comments sure sound as if they have already determined the study’s outcome.

In the other case, body camera footage released by police revealed that Ma’Khia Bryant was fatally shot as she charged another girl with a knife. The officer shot one black girl in an attempt to save what appears to be another black girl from being stabbed.

Politicians such as Biden as well as the media have helped create a biased perception that is far from the reality of shootings by police.

In a study, the Crime Prevention Research Center (where I serve as president) found that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mention the officer’s race. When the officer is black, news coverage rarely mentions that detail.

And there’s evidence that blacks aren’t all that fed up with the police. A July 2017 Quinnipiac University poll in New York City found that blacks strongly support the cops in their neighborhoods — 62% approved compared to just 35% who disapproved. That approval rating was 11 percentage points higher than for the New York City Police Department as a whole. It makes sense that people only know their local cops, and rely on media reports to form impressions about other areas they are less familiar with. A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 72% of both blacks and whites are satisfied with their local police.

There is other evidence. If blacks don’t trust the police, they presumably won’t turn to them as frequently as whites when a crime occurs. Yet, blacks report violent crime to police at a higher rate than either whites or Hispanics, even when controlling for income levels. Low- and middle-income blacks are about 11 percentage points more likely to report violent crimes to police.

Through extensive research, we found 2,699 police shootings across the nation from 2013-2015. That’s far more than the FBI found, since its data is limited to only 1,366 cases voluntarily provided by police departments. The FBI data has other shortcomings, too: It disproportionately includes cases from heavily minority areas, giving a misleading picture of the frequency at which blacks are shot.

Our database keeps track of characteristics of both the suspect and the officer involved in each shooting, local violent crime rates, demographics of the city and police department, and many other factors that help determine what causes police shootings.

Officers kill blacks at a higher rate than their share of the population: 25% of the suspects killed were black, 45% white, and 16% Hispanic. As for where the deaths are occurring, black suspects tend to die in heavily black larger cities with populations averaging over 600,000, while whites are killed in smaller cities with an average population of 250,000. 

White suspects were slightly more likely to be holding a firearm than blacks (63% to 61%). Black and white suspects were both equally likely to be involved in violent crime when they lose their lives at an officer’s hands, though blacks who died were more likely to be involved in drug or property offenses. But police generally have more challenging jobs in cities where blacks are killed. The average city where blacks are killed had a 61% higher violent crime rate and 126% higher murder rate than where the average white was killed.

After accounting for these and other factors, including averaged cultural differences in police departments, we found that black officers were at least as likely as their white peers to kill black suspects, but that black officers were more likely to kill unarmed blacks than were white officers.

The data offered some clues for how to reduce these fatal incidents. It can’t explain all instances, such as George Floyd’s case where Floyd resisted arrest by four officers, or possibly the Columbus case where an attack by a knife-wielding suspect was already in process. But, usually, when more police are present at the scene of a confrontation with a suspect, the odds of a fatality decline. There is about a 14% to 18% reduction in the suspect’s chances of being killed for each additional officer present. Officers feel more vulnerable if they are alone at the scene, making them more likely to use deadly force. Also, suspects may be emboldened and resist arrest when fewer officers are present.  

It is a dangerous fiction that prejudiced white officers are going out and disproportionately killing black men.

But that doesn’t mean that measures can’t be taken to reduce shootings by police. The most obvious step would be to increase the number of officers responding to a call, to avoid forcing lone, vulnerable officers to make life-or-death decisions.

Now that President Biden has reached his goal of 200M COVID-19 jabs administered across the US, Americans should expect fewer updates about the vaccination effort. Why? Because from here on out, the pace of new vaccinations is expected to slow substantially now that the vaccine rollout has hit a critical inflection point. As former FDA Director (and current Pfizer board member) Dr. Scott Gottlieb predicted a few weeks back, the US will “struggle” to reach herd immunity.

Since then, mass vaccination centers have been shut down in states across the US. Even in wealthy, deep-blue states like Connecticut, local officials are warning that demand for the new jabs is waning. In many states, unused vaccines are beginning to pile up, leaving thousands of jabs to spoil, while more than 100 countries have yet to receive even a single jab.

In CT, the New Haven Register carried a warning from a top doctor from the Yale University health-care system. Dr. Thomas Balcezak, the chief clinical officer at Yale-New Haven, warned that CT might not reach herd immunity.

He spoke about the slackening in demand:  “Right around 55 percent of the state vaccinated: half is there and half has not yet been vaccinated.”

“A slack in that demand tells us the second half of the state isn’t seeking vaccinations with the same ferocity as the first half did. I hope that trend changes,” Balcezak said.

And that’s a problem, Dr. Balcezak added, because the expectations for herd immunity require between 70% and 80% of the adult population to be vaccinated. And if that level isn’t achieved quickly enough, mutant strains of the virus might be able to get the upper hand, as more vaccinated individuals fall ill despite being – in theory – immune to “severe” effects of the illness.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a story warning that the federal government is already considering new tactics to encourage more people to accept the vaccines, including allowing people to receive the jabs directly from their own doctors. Unfortunately, for these new strategies to be implemented country-wide, a new logistical obstacle will need to be overcome: vaccines will need to be shipped in much smaller batches.

“If you think of this as a war,” said Michael Carney, the senior vice president for emerging issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “we’re about to enter the hand-to-hand combat phase of the war.”

However Pfizer, Moderna and J&J – which just received permission to continue doling out the shots despite concerns about rare and deadly blood clots – decide to tackle these problems, it has become clear that the timeline for “herd immunity” sketched out below looks almost impossibly optimistic.

To try and make it easier for adults hoping to get vaccinated, President Biden this week urged employers to allow their workers paid time off, if necessary, to allow them to get vaccinated.

Whether these new targeted methods will make a difference in vaccination rates is unclear. As the NYT pointed out, vaccination rates vary widely at the state level.

But the distribution is uneven: While New Hampshire has given at least one shot to 59 percent of its citizens (that figure includes children, most of whom are not yet eligible), Mississippi and Alabama are languishing at 30 percent.

The laggards are trying to adjust. In Louisiana, where 40 percent of the adult population has had one shot even though all adults have been eligible since March, officials are delivering doses to commercial fishermen near the docks and running pop-up clinics at a Buddhist temple, homeless shelters and truck stops. Civic groups are conducting door-to-door visits, akin to a get-out-the-vote effort, in neighborhoods with low vaccination rates.

Some southern doctors are directly emailing patients to encourage them to get vaccinated.

In Alabama, Dr. Scott Harris, the state health officer, is trying to reach rural white residents, who are mistrustful of politicians and the news media. Dr. Harris is asking doctors to record cellphone videos, with a plea: “Please email them to your patients, saying, ‘This is why I think you ought to take the vaccine.’”

According to the NYT, those in charge of the vaccine rollout have started to compare this late-stage of the adult vaccination rollout to the “ground game” seen in the final phase of a hard-fought political campaign.

White House and state health officials are calling this next phase of the vaccination campaign “the ground game,” and are likening it to a get-out-the-vote effort. The work will be labor intensive – much of it may fall on private employers – but the risk is clear: If it takes too long to reach “herd immunity,” the point at which the spread of the virus slows, worrisome new variants could emerge that evade the vaccine.

“If you think of this as a war,” said Michael Carney, the senior vice president for emerging issues at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “we’re about to enter the hand-to-hand combat phase of the war.”

But the executive director of another national health organization said these efforts might not amount to much. At the end of the day, the people who want the vaccine have had every opportunity to seek it out. What’s left are people who are more skeptical of the vaccine. And the recent issues surrounding rare side effects tied to the J&J jab probably haven’t helped to dissuade them.

“There are states where they feel they have hit the wall,” said Michael Fraser, the executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “The folks that wanted it have found it. The folks that don’t want it are not bothering to find it.”

Circling back to the situation in Connecticut, Dr. Balcezak pointed out that rumors about patients who suffered severe COVID-19 symptoms – or even succumbed to the virus – despite being fully vaccinated have also hurt the prospects for the rollout: there have been about a dozen cases across Connecticut where people who were fully vaccinated who nevertheless were hospitalized for COVID-19. Balcezak said one of those people later died, although the patient had “underlying respiratory illnesses.”