Georgia Death Row Prisoner Jimmy Meders Has Sentence Commuted Hours Before Execution

Jimmy Meders was scheduled to die by lethal injection today, but the Georgia parole board has granted him clemency.

Meders was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 for the murder of Don Anderson. Meders fatally shot Anderson, a Jiffy Store clerk, during a robbery.

According to his clemency application, Meders is one of the last people in the state to be tried before the legislature authorized life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty. Jurors in Meders’ case stated that they would have chosen life without parole had it been available at the time of his trial. The jurors even asked the trial judge if they could choose such a sentence. They were informed that the sentence was not available. So while they did not believe Meders’ crime was aggravated enough to warrant the death penalty, they made a choice based on limited options.

“Did I want the man to die? No, not really. But that was the only option if we wanted to make sure he didn’t get out. If life without parole had been available, I believe that’s the option we would have gone for,” the head juror explained in an affidavit. All six remaining jurors confirmed they’d authorize a sentence of life without confirmed.

Meders’ case is a good example of why life without parole has since been authorized in the state. The sentence provides jurors with a sort of middle ground for criminals who are not, as the clemency application states, the “worst of the worst.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported that Meders’ sentence is disproportionate by today’s criminal justice standards. Meders did not have a criminal history prior to his crime, making him one of the few people on death row without previous convictions. The death penalty is typically reserved for habitual or heinous offenders.

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole announced on Thursday that it would commute Meders’ sentence to life in prison.

The board cited the jurors; “explicit desire” to impose the unavailable sentence as part of the reason behind its decision.

“We are deeply grateful for the Board’s decision to commute Jimmy Meders’s death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The board’s critically important role in showing mercy in these rare circumstances cannot be overstated. By taking this action, this parole board has made real the intent of the jury to sentence Jimmy to life without parole, and not death,” Michael Admirand of the Southern Center for Human Rights, Meders’ counsel, said in a statement provided to Reason.

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Does Letting Police Enter Your House Give Them Permission To Wreck It?

When Shaniz West agreed to let police enter her house so they could arrest her former boyfriend, she had no idea she was consenting to a barrage of tear gas grenades that would smash her windows, tear holes in her walls and ceiling, and leave a sticky, noxious residue on her food, furniture, electronics, and clothing. But after she sued for damages, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said the officers responsible for making her home uninhabitable were shielded from liability because it was not “clearly established” at the time that such a wanton destruction of property violated the Fourth Amendment.

In a petition filed today, the Institute for Justice urges the U.S. Supreme Court to review that decision and in the process clarify the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which in many cases lets police off the hook for outrageous conduct when their victims are unable to identify prior rulings involving similar facts. That understanding of the doctrine effectively immunizes officers who find novel ways to violate people’s constitutional rights.

The case began on a Wednesday afternoon in August 2014, when West returned to her home in Caldwell, Idaho, where she encountered four local police officers. They were looking for her ex-boyfriend, Fabian Salinas, a gang member wanted for several violent crimes. West said Salinas had been in the house earlier that day, collecting his belongings, and she was not sure whether he was still there. It turned out he wasn’t, but the cops did not realize that until after they had wreaked havoc on West’s home.

After intimating that West might be arrested for harboring a fugitive, Officer Matthew Richardon asked, “Do we have permission to get inside your house and apprehend him?” West nodded, handed over the key to her front door, and left with a friend who came to pick her up. Instead of entering the house, Sgt. Joe Hoadley summoned a SWAT team, which hatched a three-stage plan of attack that included “us[ing] 12-gauge shotguns to inject tear gas into the house through the windows and the garage door,” as two members of a three-judge 9th Circuit panel described it.

Dissenting Judge Marsha Berzon’s description better reflects the reality of what happened. “SWAT used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot tear gas canisters into the home, breaking windows and extensively damaging the walls and ceiling in the process,” she wrote. “West’s personal belongings and the home itself were saturated in tear gas; broken glass littered the floor; and the walls and ceiling had gaping holes from contact with the tear gas canisters. In the aftermath of the destruction, West and her children could not live in their home for several months.”

The majority nevertheless concluded that, even if the operation exceeded the scope of West’s consent, case law had not clearly established that point. “Our research has uncovered no controlling Supreme Court or Ninth Circuit decision holding that ‘an officer acting under similar circumstances as [Defendants]…violated the Fourth
Amendment,'” wrote Judge Susan Graber in a 2019 opinion joined by Judge Eduardo  Robreno. “Prior precedent must articulate ‘a constitutional rule specific enough to alert these [officers] in this case that their particular conduct was unlawful.'”

Judge Berzon suggested that “the likely reason there are no closely similar cases standing for the proposition that officers may not use a general consent to search to take actions that render a home uninhabitable for months is that law enforcement officers well understand that, and do not rely on consent alone to conduct home-destructive activities.” Instead of asking whether any federal court had ever declared such an operation unconstitutional, she said, her colleagues should have deemed it telling that no federal court has ever said anything like it is consistent with the Fourth Amendment.

The majority suggested that the Caldwell officers might reasonably have believed West’s permission to enter her house included permission to wreck it. “Plaintiff agreed that officers could ‘get inside [her] house and apprehend’ Salinas,” Graber wrote. “Defendants did ‘get inside’ Plaintiff’s house, first with objects and later with people. Plaintiff never expressed a limitation as to time, place within the house, or manner of entry.”

Berzon treated that risible argument, which she said “borders on the fantastic,” with the scorn it deserved:

West’s consent quite obviously contemplated an entry by live human beings, not the tossing of incendiary objects into the house from the outside….The majority adopts an entirely implausible contrary reading of West’s consent…Because West “never expressed a limitation as to time, place within the house, or manner of entry,” the majority concludes that her consent that officers could “get inside” permitted a violent initial attack on her house with toxic objects. In so concluding, the majority supposes that someone who permits law enforcement officers to “get inside [her] house” while handing over a key consents to the officers not entering the house but instead lobbing dangerous objects, such as tear gas canisters—or stones or bombs, for other examples—into the house from the outside. It further presupposes that, in providing consent to entry, a resident must preemptively forbid actions no one would guess are contemplated by the commonsense understanding of the articulated consent. That is not the law.

In Berzon’s view, “interpreting the exchange between West and Officer Richardson as permitting the SWAT attack on West’s house as performed is patently unreasonable.” Based on principles established in prior cases, she said, “it is clear that extensive property destruction rendering a home uninhabitable goes beyond the limitations inherent in a general consent to search.” Hence “any reasonable officer would have known at the time that the search exceeded the scope of West’s consent.”

The 9th Circuit’s decision not only shields the officers involved in this particular incident from liability. It also invites other officers to do the same sort of thing in the future, since the court never actually says whether the Caldwell cops violated the Fourth Amendment. As 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett has noted, the practice of affirming qualified immunity without resolving the underlying constitutional issue creates a “Catch-22,” because “plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent,” and “important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered.”

In its petition, the Institute for Justice argues that West’s case is “an ideal vehicle” for resolving a split between appeals courts that agree with Graber’s approach to qualified immunity, requiring precedents with facts that closely resemble those of the current case, and appeals courts that favor Berzon’s approach, which asks whether police conduct violates well-established constitutional principles even if no court has ever considered anything exactly like it before. “‘Courts of appeals are divided—intractably—over precisely what degree of factual similarity must exist’ to defeat qualified immunity,” the petition notes, quoting a 2019 opinion by Willett. “The split presented by this case is emblematic of a broader disagreement about what constitutes ‘clearly established’ law for purposes of qualified immunity.”

This case is part of a broader Institute for Justice project aimed at getting the Supreme Court to reconsider qualified immunity, an arguably unlawful doctrine it invented in 1982. The Court’s application of qualified immunity, Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in a 2018 dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who does not agree with Sotomayor and Ginsburg about much else, also has urged his colleagues to reconsider the Court’s approach.

“Qualified immunity means that government officials can get away with violating your rights as long as they violate them in a way nobody thought of before,” says Institute for Justice attorney Joshua Windham. “Government officials are not above the law, and if citizens must follow the law, the government must follow the Constitution. That includes being held accountable for violating it.”

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Is Farm-Free Food the Future?

Factory farming may soon well mean something quite different than feedlot cattle and battery chickens. Entrepreneurs around the globe are seeking to replace conventional farming with shiny clean aluminum bioreactors that churn out tasty steaks, drumsticks, and flour. If this vision works out, the human footprint on the natural world will shrink dramatically since we use about one-third the world’s land to produce food.

Recently, plant-based meats created by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have gained some traction in the marketplace. Both products have significantly less impact on the natural environment than does the equivalent beef product. For example, the carbon footprint of an Impossible Burger is “89 percent smaller than a burger made from a cow,” according to one life-cycle analysis. It also “uses 87 percent less water than beef, uses 96 percent less land, and cuts water contamination by 92 percent.” Another study found that a Beyond Beef burger “generates 90 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46 percent less energy, has >99 percent less impact on water scarcity and 93 percent less impact on land use than a 1⁄4 pound of U.S. beef.” Of course, most of the ingredients for these products are still grown on farms.

Now comes the proposition that “ferming” in order to produce edible proteins and carbohydrates will displace most farming. Ferming is a portmanteau word combining fermenting with farming. “While arguments rage about plant-versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant,” boldly asserts journalist George Monbiot over at The Guardian. Monbiot, who is promoting his new documentary Apocalypse Cow, explains that “before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.”

Solar Foods in Finland functions as Monbiot’s dawn herald of the brave new world of fermented foods. The company promotes itself as producing “food out of thin air.” Solar Foods’s fermenting microbes produce a high-protein powder, marketed as Solein, in bioreactors using carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere and hydrogen generated using renewable electricity, along with added nutrients like sodium and potassium. Solein is 65 to 75 percent proteins and its amino acid composition is comparable to conventional sources like soybeans and beef. Consumers will not eat Solein flour directly. Instead, it will be a food ingredient replacing conventional proteins in almost any food product.

The company claims that fermenting one kilogram of Solein flour uses 500 times less water than producing a kilogram of beef and 100 times less than a kilogram of plant proteins. With respect to land use, Solein is 60 times more efficient than plants, and 1,000 times more so than beef. Taking post-farming afforestation into account (trees returning to abandoned cropland and pastures), producing Solein actually reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

The company sunnily predicts that Solein will be cheaper than soy protein within five years. Prices vary, but one recent bulk wholesale price for soy powder is $600 for an order of 2 metric tons, or $3.33 per kilogram. Solar Foods’ projection depends on, among other things, the continuing fall in the price of renewable electricity used to generate the hydrogen feedstock from electrolyzing water. The U.S. Department of Energy recently projected that commercial-scale solar PV power will drop from $0.11 now to $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2030. Electrolysis uses about 51 kilowatt-hours to generate a kilogram of hydrogen, implying a price of around $1.50 per kilogram. (Another analysis suggests that this hydrogen price milestone won’t be achieved until after 2040.)  Of course, any source of electricity could be used, but Solein’s claimed climate benefits would thereby be significantly reduced.

Solar Foods is certainly not the only company aiming to end the age of agriculture by producing scalable food products that are generated rather than grown. Clara Foods, for example, is using sugar and yeast to produce egg proteins and Perfect Day Foods uses genetically enhanced microbes to ferment sugar to produce whey and casein to make animal-free dairy products. Israel-based Aleph Farms is producing slaughter-free steaks by using bioreactors to grow muscle, fat, and blood cells taken from cows.

The market for fish and seafood has not been neglected. Finless Foods is producing fish fillets and steaks by growing fish muscle cells in bioreactors, whereas Good Catch is pursuing the plant-based route to make fish-free tuna, crab cakes, and fish sticks. Unlike Solein, these companies use feedstocks still grown on farms, but nevertheless, the foods they produce use much less land, water, and fertilizer while generating far less greenhouse gases than do foods grown using conventional agriculture.

A 2018 study in Science calculated that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use about 83 percent of the world’s farmland while providing only 37 percent of humanity’s protein consumption and 18 percent of our calories. This map (below) from a fascinating Bloomberg News article on how we Americans use our land nicely illustrates just how much is devoted to agriculture in the United States.

Let the buffalo roam!
The end of farming would mean lots of rewilding

Notionally speaking, if all meat, milk, egg, and fish production were replaced using generated rather than grown foods that could mean restoring 781 million acres devoted to livestock feed and pasturage to nature. That’s about 41 percent of the total land area of the contiguous United States.

Is such a transformation really possible? Not only is this possible, but it is also likely and coming fast, assert the analysts at the independent RethinkX think tank. Their new report, “Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030,”contends that “we are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption of agriculture in history.” RethinkX analysts predict nothing less than the collapse of industrial livestock production by 2030 due to being outcompeted by the development and deployment of precision fermentation.

“The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar,” states the report. “They will also be superior in every key attribute—more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.” They project that modern fermented foods will save the average U.S. family more than $1,200 a year in food costs.

To illustrate just how disruptive ferming will be, the report focuses on cattle production. The analysts project that precision fermentation will, by 2030, reduce the demand for cow products by 70 percent with similar declines for other livestock products. This fall in demand for conventional animal foodstuffs and products will have huge knock-on effects with respect to farm equipment, fertilizer use, livestock feed, and the value of farmland. For example, the demand for soy, corn, and alfalfa as livestock feed will decline by 50 percent by 2030. This disruption will free up hundreds of millions of acres that could be returned to nature while dramatically reducing water consumption, pollution from fertilizer run-off and greenhouse gas emissions. The RethinkX analysts project that the value of U.S. farmland will fall by 40 percent.

Given how conservative most folks tend to be when it comes to the foods they choose to eat, the RethinkX projections for a fast roll-out and adoption of fermented foods will perhaps turn out to be too optimistic. In addition, modern fermented foods will face some stiff headwinds, not least from incumbent farmers who will turn to politicians to help them fend off the competition; the usual claque of anti-technology activists; and, of course, over-cautious regulators.

Nevertheless, the prospect of much lower prices, better nutrition, and substantial environmental benefits all favor eventual consumer acceptance of foods made using precision fermentation.

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Is Farm-Free Food the Future?

Factory farming may soon well mean something quite different than feedlot cattle and battery chickens. Entrepreneurs around the globe are seeking to replace conventional farming with shiny clean aluminum bioreactors that churn out tasty steaks, drumsticks, and flour. If this vision works out, the human footprint on the natural world will shrink dramatically since we use about one-third the world’s land to produce food.

Recently, plant-based meats created by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have gained some traction in the marketplace. Both products have significantly less impact on the natural environment than does the equivalent beef product. For example, the carbon footprint of an Impossible Burger is “89 percent smaller than a burger made from a cow,” according to one life-cycle analysis. It also “uses 87 percent less water than beef, uses 96 percent less land, and cuts water contamination by 92 percent.” Another study found that a Beyond Beef burger “generates 90 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46 percent less energy, has >99 percent less impact on water scarcity and 93 percent less impact on land use than a 1⁄4 pound of U.S. beef.” Of course, most of the ingredients for these products are still grown on farms.

Now comes the proposition that “ferming” in order to produce edible proteins and carbohydrates will displace most farming. Ferming is a portmanteau word combining fermenting with farming. “While arguments rage about plant-versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant,” boldly asserts journalist George Monbiot over at The Guardian. Monbiot, who is promoting his new documentary Apocalypse Cow, explains that “before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.”

Solar Foods in Finland functions as Monbiot’s dawn herald of the brave new world of fermented foods. The company promotes itself as producing “food out of thin air.” Solar Foods’s fermenting microbes produce a high-protein powder, marketed as Solein, in bioreactors using carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere and hydrogen generated using renewable electricity, along with added nutrients like sodium and potassium. Solein is 65 to 75 percent proteins and its amino acid composition is comparable to conventional sources like soybeans and beef. Consumers will not eat Solein flour directly. Instead, it will be a food ingredient replacing conventional proteins in almost any food product.

The company claims that fermenting one kilogram of Solein flour uses 500 times less water than producing a kilogram of beef and 100 times less than a kilogram of plant proteins. With respect to land use, Solein is 60 times more efficient than plants, and 1,000 times more so than beef. Taking post-farming afforestation into account (trees returning to abandoned cropland and pastures), producing Solein actually reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

The company sunnily predicts that Solein will be cheaper than soy protein within five years. Prices vary, but one recent bulk wholesale price for soy powder is $600 for an order of 2 metric tons, or $3.33 per kilogram. Solar Foods’ projection depends on, among other things, the continuing fall in the price of renewable electricity used to generate the hydrogen feedstock from electrolyzing water. The U.S. Department of Energy recently projected that commercial-scale solar PV power will drop from $0.11 now to $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2030. Electrolysis uses about 51 kilowatt-hours to generate a kilogram of hydrogen, implying a price of around $1.50 per kilogram. (Another analysis suggests that this hydrogen price milestone won’t be achieved until after 2040.)  Of course, any source of electricity could be used, but Solein’s claimed climate benefits would thereby be significantly reduced.

Solar Foods is certainly not the only company aiming to end the age of agriculture by producing scalable food products that are generated rather than grown. Clara Foods, for example, is using sugar and yeast to produce egg proteins and Perfect Day Foods uses genetically enhanced microbes to ferment sugar to produce whey and casein to make animal-free dairy products. Israel-based Aleph Farms is producing slaughter-free steaks by using bioreactors to grow muscle, fat, and blood cells taken from cows.

The market for fish and seafood has not been neglected. Finless Foods is producing fish fillets and steaks by growing fish muscle cells in bioreactors, whereas Good Catch is pursuing the plant-based route to make fish-free tuna, crab cakes, and fish sticks. Unlike Solein, these companies use feedstocks still grown on farms, but nevertheless, the foods they produce use much less land, water, and fertilizer while generating far less greenhouse gases than do foods grown using conventional agriculture.

A 2018 study in Science calculated that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use about 83 percent of the world’s farmland while providing only 37 percent of humanity’s protein consumption and 18 percent of our calories. This map (below) from a fascinating Bloomberg News article on how we Americans use our land nicely illustrates just how much is devoted to agriculture in the United States.

Let the buffalo roam!
The end of farming would mean lots of rewilding

Notionally speaking, if all meat, milk, egg, and fish production were replaced using generated rather than grown foods that could mean restoring 781 million acres devoted to livestock feed and pasturage to nature. That’s about 41 percent of the total land area of the contiguous United States.

Is such a transformation really possible? Not only is this possible, but it is also likely and coming fast, assert the analysts at the independent RethinkX think tank. Their new report, “Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030,”contends that “we are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption of agriculture in history.” RethinkX analysts predict nothing less than the collapse of industrial livestock production by 2030 due to being outcompeted by the development and deployment of precision fermentation.

“The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar,” states the report. “They will also be superior in every key attribute—more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.” They project that modern fermented foods will save the average U.S. family more than $1,200 a year in food costs.

To illustrate just how disruptive ferming will be, the report focuses on cattle production. The analysts project that precision fermentation will, by 2030, reduce the demand for cow products by 70 percent with similar declines for other livestock products. This fall in demand for conventional animal foodstuffs and products will have huge knock-on effects with respect to farm equipment, fertilizer use, livestock feed, and the value of farmland. For example, the demand for soy, corn, and alfalfa as livestock feed will decline by 50 percent by 2030. This disruption will free up hundreds of millions of acres that could be returned to nature while dramatically reducing water consumption, pollution from fertilizer run-off and greenhouse gas emissions. The RethinkX analysts project that the value of U.S. farmland will fall by 40 percent.

Given how conservative most folks tend to be when it comes to the foods they choose to eat, the RethinkX projections for a fast roll-out and adoption of fermented foods will perhaps turn out to be too optimistic. In addition, modern fermented foods will face some stiff headwinds, not least from incumbent farmers who will turn to politicians to help them fend off the competition; the usual claque of anti-technology activists; and, of course, over-cautious regulators.

Nevertheless, the prospect of much lower prices, better nutrition, and substantial environmental benefits all favor eventual consumer acceptance of foods made using precision fermentation.

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Huge Short-Squeeze Sparks New Record Stock Highs As FX Vol Crashes To Record Low

Huge Short-Squeeze Sparks New Record Stock Highs As FX Vol Crashes To Record Low

Another day, another short-squeeze, and another record high…

This four-day squeeze is now of the size that has historically led to a reversal…

Source: Bloomberg

US equity markets were higher mainly thanks to the opening jolt (and of course the late-day meltup)…

Panic-bid at the close?

Why were stocks up? Because “that is the law”…

Nasdaq is now up 4% on the year…

…but that is less than 2019 and 2018 (and the same as 2017) for this far into the year…

Source: Bloomberg

Dow topped 29,200; S&P topped 3,300.

The S&P 500 Index is trading at the highest level over its 200-day moving average since late January 2018.

As Bloomberg reports, amid a solid monthly U.S. retail-sales report and diminished geopolitical risks, the benchmark has been looking heated from a technical standpoint, begging the question on how long the rally can last.

Cyclicals outperformed today but Defensives dominate the week…

Source: Bloomberg

Mixed day for banks with GS now best on the week and WFC still the laggard…

Source: Bloomberg

TSLA dared to have another down day, but we note that once again it was panic-bid at the cash open after weakness overnight…

Source: Bloomberg

Chinese markets were mixed with small-cap tech soaring as the big caps slipped…

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks were also mixed with Spain and Italy outperforming today and the rest unch…

Source: Bloomberg

VIX crashed to an 11 handle intraday and while credit protection costs slipped, they remain notably decoupled from equity risk…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were higher by around 2bps across the curve today…

Source: Bloomberg

30Y yields found support at YTD low yields…

Source: Bloomberg

The Dollar edged higher today, rebounding off the 50% Fib retracement of the year-end plunge…

Source: Bloomberg

JPMorgan’s gauge of global currency volatility hit an all-time low today…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos were lower today but holding on to the week’s impressive gains…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin is holding around $8700 – well above the pre-Soleimani levels…best start to a year since 2012

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities were mixed today with copper down as crude rallied and PMs relatively flat…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold futures stalled at pre-Soleimeni levels again…

WTI bounced off $57 handle once again…

Finally, while today’s data was solid, the decoupling between stocks and macro fundamentals makes a mockery of markets (can you guess what’s really driving stocks higher?)

Source: Bloomberg

And, if everything’s so awesome with the trade deal (all those Ag buys), why did all the softs collapse today?

Source: Bloomberg

Is the deal real or fake?

Source: Bloomberg


Tyler Durden

Thu, 01/16/2020 – 16:01

Tags
Business Finance

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RpvkZD Tyler Durden

Amazon Juggernaut Forces Retail Giants To Flee Times Square

Amazon Juggernaut Forces Retail Giants To Flee Times Square

Is Amazon’s monopoly of online retailing about to transform Times Square into a ghost town? 

As online sales cannibalize ever more traffic – and sales – from legacy brick and mortar stores, even such traditional foot traffic meccas as Times Square are starting to feel the heat, as brand name retailers flee, leading to what Bloomberg called “turmoil” at one of the world’s busiest locations.

Take Gap and Cover Girl, which are among merchants looking to leave stores in the district, where companies have historically been willing to swap high rent payments for daily exposure to hundreds of thousands of tourists and commuters.

But as more shopping moves online and bricks-and-mortar spaces shrink, Bloomberg reports that real estate brokers are on the hunt for new tenants to occupy a pair of adjacent flagship stores at 1530 and 1532 Broadway – one for Gap and one for its discount brand Old Navy.

Additionally, new space is also available right next door, at 30 Times Square, where beauty giant Coty opened its first-ever Cover Girl store a little more than a year ago, and which now appears to be on the way out. Those come on top of a four-story flagship at 1551 Broadway that American Eagle Outfitters may depart.

“Some retail is just antiquated,” said Brett Herschenfeld, who oversees the retail unit of SL Green Realty Corp. It “hasn’t evolved with the times and they either fix it to the meet the consumer segment or they’re closing stores.”

To be sure, while Times Square hasn’t been hit as hard as other neighborhoods by mushrooming vacancies, asking rents have slipped and some of the district’s largest merchants, including Toys “R” Us, have shuttered stores in recent years. Others are evaluating whether their outsized spaces are the best way to generate sales while giving shoppers the experiences they flock to the area for.

“The most successful approach to Times Square will be to think outside of the large box,” said Phil Granof, chief marketing officer of NewStore, operator of a mobile e-commerce platform that works with physical stores. “Breaking it down into smaller pieces, there might be more value there.”

Among the giant currently occupying space on Times Square are Gp, which has roughly 80,000 square feet at the two locations in Times Square, with leases that run through 2032; Coty has about 10,000 square feet across five floors that is being marketed for sublease through 2021. And while the buildings all come with massive digital billboards, in an era when advertising has shifted to Instagram and other social media, companies are questioning the cost of pushing their wares in Times Square.

“The value that brands will pay for the exposure in Times Square on a permanent basis is under some pressure,” said Michael Hirschfeld, a retail broker at Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “A lot of mass-market types of consumer brands are now reaching you directly on your phones or Instagram.”

For two retail giants, the warm glare of Times Square LCD lights, has outstayed its welcome: Gap, on the hunt for a permanent chief executive officer after Art Peck was fired in November, is closing stores as it struggles to revitalize a label that has fallen out of step with shoppers. Old Navy has been a bright spot for the company, but that brand has also faced challenges in recent quarters, including increased competition from other discount chains.

Yet while Times Square may be losing its luster for some companies, Bloomberg notes that there’s still plenty of interest in the area from current and prospective tenants – and that shows how powerful it remains for retailers, according to Steven Soutendijk, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield: “It’s not just about marketing and branding anymore,” he said. “It’s about the footfall and the shoppers that are there.”


Tyler Durden

Thu, 01/16/2020 – 15:49

Tags
Business Finance

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NxM4Nb Tyler Durden

The Failure of LBJ’s Great Society and What It Means for the 21st Century

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for what he called “the Great Society,” a sweeping set of programs that marked the most ambitious expansion of the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Johnson declared war on poverty, jacked up federal spending on education, and pushed massive new entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, which promised to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care to the nation’s elderly and poor. When Republican Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson, a Democrat, as president after the 1968 election, he continued and even expanded many of the Great Society programs despite being from a different political party.

But did the Great Society achieve its goals of eradicating poverty, sheltering the homeless, and helping all citizens participate more fully in the American Dream? In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes argues that Lyndon Johnson’s bold makeover of the government was a massive failure despite the good intentions of its architects and implementers.

Shlaes, who is the author of The Forgotten Man, a best-selling history of The Great Depression (read Reason‘s 2008 interview with her), and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, says remembering the failure of the Great Society is especially relevant in an election year when presidential candidates are promising to spend huge amounts of money on all sorts of new government programs.

Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with her about the origins of the Great Society, its failure, and what it all means for 21st century America.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Intro by Lex Villena. Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.

Music Credit: ‘Late Truth’ by Audio Hertz

 

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The Failure of LBJ’s Great Society and What It Means for the 21st Century

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for what he called “the Great Society,” a sweeping set of programs that marked the most ambitious expansion of the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Johnson declared war on poverty, jacked up federal spending on education, and pushed massive new entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, which promised to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care to the nation’s elderly and poor. When Republican Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson, a Democrat, as president after the 1968 election, he continued and even expanded many of the Great Society programs despite being from a different political party.

But did the Great Society achieve its goals of eradicating poverty, sheltering the homeless, and helping all citizens participate more fully in the American Dream? In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes argues that Lyndon Johnson’s bold makeover of the government was a massive failure despite the good intentions of its architects and implementers.

Shlaes, who is the author of The Forgotten Man, a best-selling history of The Great Depression (read Reason‘s 2008 interview with her), and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, says remembering the failure of the Great Society is especially relevant in an election year when presidential candidates are promising to spend huge amounts of money on all sorts of new government programs.

Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with her about the origins of the Great Society, its failure, and what it all means for 21st century America.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Intro by Lex Villena. Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.

Music Credit: ‘Late Truth’ by Audio Hertz

 

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What Could Spoil 2020?

What Could Spoil 2020?

Authored by Anatole Kaletsky, op-ed via Project Syndicate,

The traditional January game of economic forecasting for the year ahead hardly seems worth playing when the predictions have been the same for a decade. In 2020, it is even more likely than it has been every year since the financial crisis that the global economy will continue growing, interest rates will remain at rock-bottom levels, and stock markets will keep rising.

So, instead of predicting the most probable scenario, which is fairly obvious, it is more useful to consider unlikely events that would alter the likely benign scenario.

I believe ten risks could cause the most economic and financial trouble in 2020. These are not predictions: continuing global expansion is more probable than any combination of these setbacks. And they are not “surprises,” which, by definition, are impossible to foresee. Rather, they are “known unknowns,” arranged from the lowest risk to the highest, in my view.

The smallest risk is the one that many economists predict every year: a global recession, caused by the United States or China. A recession is inevitable, but less likely in 2020 than in any of the previous ten years. While investment and manufacturing worldwide have suffered from the US-China trade war, macroeconomic policies in both countries have boosted housing, services, and public spending. The world economy will continue to benefit this year from a tailwind from last year’s US interest-rate cuts and China’s efforts to support roughly 6% growth. Absent some powerful new shock, recession in 2020 is therefore extremely unlikely.

Likewise, there is a negligible risk of higher interest rates. Many investors and businesses are worried that today’s low-interest-rate environment may soon end, at least in the US. Inflation and long-term interest rates will probably rise somewhat this year, but it is almost out of the question that central banks will tighten monetary policy. The Fed would lead this process, and it will not raise rates in an election year.

In Europe, instead of triggering an epidemic of Euroskepticism, Brexit has acted like a vaccination. Even the populist leaders in Italy, France, and Germany seem deterred by the Brexit experience, and this year’s negotiations on a post-Brexit trade deal will reinforce Europeans’ negative perceptions of the process. But politics is always volatile, especially in Italy, so a politically driven euro crisis remains a low but non-negligible risk.

Although the US-China trade war grabbed the most attention in 2019, Europe was actually the weakest link in the world economy. Recently, Europe’s economic performance has stabilized, and policy has improved dramatically, with the European Central Bank restarting quantitative easing and political sentiment turning against fiscal austerity. But Germany’s economy still faces an existential crisis, and European politicians have an almost unbroken record of foolish efforts to cut budget deficits when their economies need fiscal support. A European recession therefore remains the biggest macroeconomic risk in 2020, just as it was last year.

Then there is the threat of a major energy disruption. Since the US assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, financial markets have been worrying about a spiral toward war and a spike in oil prices. Every global recession in the past 50 years been preceded by a doubling of the oil price (although not every doubling of the oil price has been followed by a recession). To double year on year, oil prices would have to soar above $110. This is unlikely, but possible if a US-Iran war stopped shipping in the Persian Gulf. An oil-induced recession is therefore a moderate risk.

There is also a moderate risk of increased protectionism. The US-China trade war has been a market obsession long enough for the bad news to be largely priced in, and the “phase one” agreement suggests no further escalation this year. That still leaves several trade risks on the horizon, especially for Europe, which is vulnerable to a breakdown in the Brexit talks or to a diversion of Trump’s protectionist instincts from Chinese electronics to German cars. But Trump will probably be too busy this year with the Iran confrontation and the election in November to start a US-EU trade war. Meanwhile, UK-EU trading relations will remain completely unchanged until December 31. As a result, greater global protectionism is a smaller risk this year than it was in 2018 and 2019.

There are two other moderate risks to growth this year. One is that debt ratios in US corporations have risen to unprecedented levels, far exceeding the levels that preceded the financial crisis. But this is hardly surprising, given that interest rates have never been so low for so long. While a leverage bubble will probably be a risk sometime in the future, there is no reason why it should burst, or even deflate, until interest rates significantly rise. This is why corporate leverage seems only a modest threat in 2020.

The last moderate risk is of an auto industry collapse. Sales collapsed worldwide last year, devastating the German economy, which is by far the biggest exporter of cars and machinery for making them. Production in Germany is now below its trough in the 2009 recession, and the industry’s decline is not just a cyclical problem. A perfect storm of environmental concerns, social changes, and energy and technological transitions means that the auto and engineering industries – not only in Germany, but also in the US, Japan, and Western Europe – are probably in a secular decline that could prove as profound as the deindustrialization of the 1980s. But the collapse in demand last year was so extreme that a temporary recovery is likely, which is why the auto and engineering industries should not cause as much trouble this year.

The risk to the technology sector, by contrast, is political – and high. Big Tech firms can no longer rely on policymakers’ deference. Once regarded as innovators and agents of progress, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are now viewed as ruthless monopolists that manipulate politicians and exploit consumers. These companies have been the main driving force of the US economy and stock market, and serious political challenges to their business models – in the form of regulation, special taxation, or breakup – could cause a repeat of the 2000-02 dot-com bust. A reckoning could begin this year.

The highest of the ten risks stems from the US presidential election. Global markets’ consensus that President Donald Trump will win exposes them to two potential shocks. A victorious Trump could become even more protectionist, belligerent, and unpredictable in a second term. And if his opponent is Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, the US economy’s four biggest sectors – health care, finance, technology, and energy – will face unprecedented threats of disruption. Given that Trump is bound to make statements that alarm investors, and that some opinion polls will suggest a possible Democratic victory at some point in the campaign, US politics is almost certain to trigger occasional bouts of panic before November 3.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 01/16/2020 – 15:35

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Business Finance

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2018 Tesla Autopilot Crash To Be Probed In February NTSB Meeting

2018 Tesla Autopilot Crash To Be Probed In February NTSB Meeting

The NTSB said this week that its going to convene a meeting on February 25 to examine the probable cause of a fatal Tesla accident that took place in California in 2018.

Autopilot was engaged in 38 year old Apple engineer Walter Huang’s Model X prior to the accident, as we have reported. The NTSB and NHTSA are now investigating a “number of crashes” where Autopilot was involved, according to Automotive News.  

Last week, for instance, the NHTSA said it was investigating a December 29th crash of a Model 3 that a passenger dead after the Model 3 collided with an inanimate fire truck in Indiana. It’s also investigating another crash on the same date where a Model S ran a red light and struck a Honda, killing its two occupants. 

The December crashes mark the 13th and 14th involving Tesla that “NHTSA’s special crash investigation program has taken up in which it suspects Autopilot or another advanced driver assistance system was in use” and it’s the third crash the NHTSA has said it was investigating in recent weeks.

As they also note, the powers of the NTSB are relatively limited compared to the NHTSA. “NTSB makes safety recommendations but cannot compel action, while NHTSA can order a recall if it deems a vehicle poses an unreasonable safety risk,” the note states. 

In the case of Huang, he was driving on Highway 101 near Mountain View, California, when his Model X hit a carpool lane barrier, leading two more cars to crashing into it, and causing the lithium ion batteries powering the vehicle to ignite and explode, at which point the vehicle burst into flames. 

“We saw a big cloud of smoke and then all of a sudden, there was a fire ball in the air,” witness Aiden Sanchez said at the time.

Huang was then taken to Stanford hospital and tragically, the California Highway Patrol announced the day of the accident that he had died from his injuries. According to a timeline of occurrences from the day of the crash, the cause of death appeared to be that the driver was “trapped” inside the burning car.

The family of Walter Huang sued Tesla last year, claiming his “state-of-the-art” Tesla lacked safety features, such as an automatic emergency braking system, which the family pointed out was available on less expensive vehicles from other carmakers.

The family also says that Tesla knew, or should have known “that the Tesla Model X was likely to cause injury to its occupants by leaving travel lanes and striking fixed objects when used in a reasonably foreseeable manner.”


Tyler Durden

Thu, 01/16/2020 – 15:20

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Disaster Accident

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