Major Winter Storm Threatens Millions In Northeast This Weekend

Major Winter Storm Threatens Millions In Northeast This Weekend

A powerful winter storm is expected to dump snow and ice across the Midwest and Northeast this weekend. 

Early indications suggest wintry precipitation is possibly Saturday as the winter storm transitions from Midwest states to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, while heavy snow could fall in some areas. 

We noted on Monday how the Global Forecast System (GFS) data shows Old Man Winter will return to the Northeast on Friday with average temperatures from Washington, D.C., to Boston around 25 to 34 degrees. This could make conditions ripe for a snowstorm over the weekend. 

The National Weather Service (NWS) is projecting that snow and ice could be seen on early Saturday for Mid-Atlantic states, with mixed precipitation in the afternoon. The further north, the higher the probability of significant snowfall. 

“Although confidence continues to increase on the potential for a winter storm for parts of our area (above average confidence for this time range, in fact), it is still too early to get into specifics on timing and amounts of different precipitation types given … this is still 4 to 5 days away,” NWS said Tuesday. 

Henry Margusity, a meteorologist for Weather Madness, provides several weather charts that indicate the storm could quickly impact tens of millions of folks in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast this weekend. 

Margusity provides another chart showing the winter precipitation could start early Saturday morning in the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area and move up the Interstate-95 corridor in the Northeast through Saturday afternoon into the evening. 

“As you can see on the image above, this will be a widespread snow and ice event covering many states from the Plains to the Northeast. The snow will be in general 1-6 inches but locally 8-9 inch amounts will occur. Ice is probably marginal in this storm as the snow will change to just rain in the changeover locations shown in pink on the map,” Margusity said. 


Tyler Durden

Tue, 01/14/2020 – 23:25

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Weather

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Shocking Number Of Young Americans Say Other Countries Are Better

Shocking Number Of Young Americans Say Other Countries Are Better

Authored by Mary Rose Corkery via CampusReform.org,

Over a third of young Americans do not believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. 

In a recent Pew Research poll, 47 percent of Democrat and Democrat-leaning Americans between the ages of 19-29 prefer other countries over the U.S, while 19 percent of Republicans within the same age group agree. 

The poll also showed that 36 percent of this age group say other countries are greater than the U.S.

The survey was conducted as part of a larger study by the Pew Research Center in September about partisanship as “the dividing line in the American public’s political attitudes.”

The findings showed that within the age group of 19-29, 47 percent of adult Democrat and Democrat-leaning individuals believe that there are other countries better than the United States, while within the same age group, 19 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning individuals agree. That leaves only 53 percent of young Democrats who prefer the United States to any other country, while 81 percent of young Republicans favor America.

The same survey found 36 percent of all young Americans within the ages of 19-29 believe other countries are better than the U.S, leaving only 64 percent who believe in American exceptionalism.

When the same age group was asked their opinion about America being a military superpower, 55 percent of Democrats in the same age group responded that they wouldn’t mind if other countries could be as militarily powerful as the U.S. Even a sizeable percentage of Republicans of the same age group agreed, with 38 percent agreeing with their Democrat counterparts.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 01/14/2020 – 23:05

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Politics
Social Issues

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SoftBank Chairman To Help Oversee Construction Of New Indonesian Capital

SoftBank Chairman To Help Oversee Construction Of New Indonesian Capital

Indonesia has assembled a star-studded team to oversee the construction of its new capital city on the island of Borneo – a move that’s intended to alleviate some of the pressure on rapidly-sinking Jakarta.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known to millions as Jokowi, has selected Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the man whom the NYT recently described as the Arab world’s most powerful ruler, comparing him favorably to Saudi Arabian Crown Prince MbS, to chair the committee responsible for overseeing the construction of the capital.

Also joining the board: Former UK PM Tony Blair, and – get this – SoftBank Chairman and founder Masayoshi Son.

Indonesia is counting on a mix of private and state-owned entities to bear about 80% of the cost of building the capital, a “cost” that has been estimated at $34 billion. The city’s precarious situation was highlighted again last week after a brutal monsoon flooded Jakarta and the surrounding area.

The crown prince accepted Jokowi’s offer to lead the committee during a meeting in Abu Dhabi this week where investment deals worth $22.8 billion were signed between companies from the UAE and Indonesia.

The fact that the plan to build a new capital is a public-private partnership suggests that these board members were likely picked for one reason: They either have connections around the world, or direct control over billions of dollars of capital.

Does this mean that SoftBank sees an opportunity to profit in Indonesia? Investing in a new capital city is a bold move, there’s not much in the way of precedent, but a hefty return would help revive SB’s reputation, which took another hit last week following reports that robot-pizza maker Zume, another one of SB’s portfolio companies, has burned through most of its working capital, including a $350 million investment from the company.

But there’s no question that the government needs to make this new capital work. As one of the world’s largest megacities, Jakarta is extremely overpopulated given the fact that the entire city is build on top of a swamp.

Jokowi is hoping private industry and state-run companies will step up and cover at least 80% of the cost of the new city, presumably leaving the Indonesia state on the hook for the rest.

Hopefully, this process will be better-managed than the WeWork IPO…


Tyler Durden

Tue, 01/14/2020 – 22:45

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CNN Implicitly Took Elizabeth Warren’s Side in the Unproven Sexism Accusation Against Bernie Sanders

Diehard supports of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) have long believed that the mainstream media finds subtle ways to undermine their candidate—and occasionally their suspicions are well supported. Tuesday night’s Democratic debate provided another one of these moments, as the progressive believe-all-victims mantra led CNN’s Abby Phillip to presume the truth of the unproven accusation that Sanders privately told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) that a woman couldn’t win the presidency.

The accusation surfaced over the weekend, with the media citing unnamed sources—likely members of the Warren campaign—who claimed that Sanders made the comment during a meeting with Warren in 2018. Sanders vehemently denied saying this, and was asked about it again on the debate stage.

It was a fascinating exchange. When Sanders again stated that the story wasn’t true, Phillip asked, “You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn’t win the election?”

“Correct,” Sanders responded.

Phillip then turned to Warren and asked, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders said a woman couldn’t win the election?”

Note that Phillip did not actually ask Warren whether he had made the comment—she merely presumed that he had, even though he just denied it. Moments later, CNN.com ran with the headline, “Sanders denies saying a woman can’t be president.” This framing of the subject makes it sound like Sanders is denying some objective reality—even though there’s no evidence he said it, and Warren’s recollection of the statement was not specifically probed by the moderator.

CNN missed an important opportunity to shed some light on a rare dispute between Sanders and Warren. Instead, they punted—in a manner that implicitly took Warren’s side. No doubt many of Sanders’ most fervent online backers found that telling.

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Joe Biden’s Debate Answer About His Support for the Iraq War Leaves Out Some Important Details

Former Vice President Joe Biden says his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. That’s good, but it’s not good enough—and his explanation of his support for war leaves out some crucial context.

In the opening minutes of Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate, CNN’s moderators specifically sought to stoke conflict between Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as a member of the Senate in 2003, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who opposed the war at the time. This is a potential weakness for Biden, who remains the frontrunner in the crowded field, and the former vice president made an effort to blunt criticism for his Iraq War vote by flat-out admitting he was wrong.

“It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war,” said Biden. “They said they were not going to go to war. They said they were just going to get inspectors in. The world, in fact, voted to get inspectors in, and they still went to war.”

A little exposition is necessary here since Biden’s response is somewhat unclear. This response, which effectively blames President George W. Bush for Biden’s vote in favor of the use of military force in Iraq, hinges on a series of events that took place during the final months of 2002. In Biden’s telling—and this is an answer he’s given in greater detail in other settings—the Bush administration falsely promised him that congressional approval for the use of military force against Iraq was merely a negotiating tactic to get Saddam to accept weapons inspectors.

Here’s how Biden described the situation to NRP in an interview given last year (emphasis mine):

I let my record stand. I think my record has been good. I think the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks it’s been very good. For example, I got a commitment from President Bush he was not going to go to war in Iraq. He looked me in the eye in the Oval Office; he said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program. He got them in, and before we know it, we had a shock and awe. Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.

There are a bunch of problems with this explanation. At a bare minimum, it demonstrates a lack of good judgment on Biden’s part. Voting to go to war is one of the most significant decisions a member of Congress can make—it’s a vote that should be made only when all other options have been exhausted and there is a clear threat to national security. Authorizing a president to use military force as a negotiating tactic is an abdication of Congress’ constitutional role, and blaming Bush for lying (and he did, of course) is nothing more than a clever way to remove Biden’s own culpability for going along with those lies.

Biden didn’t simply vote for the war. On March 13, 2003, just weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, Biden delivered a nearly hourlong speech that grappled with the seriousness of the war President George W. Bush wanted Congress to authorize. In the end, he gave his assent, saying that the United States “has a special, unilateral capacity, and indeed obligation, to lead in implementing its convictions.”

But the rest of Biden’s answer about Iraq also deserves scrutiny. As he did in that 2019 NPR interview, Biden during Tuesday’s debate claimed that he immediately came out against the war when he realized he’d been duped by Bush.

That’s simply not true. More than a year after the war started, Biden was still defending America’s involvement. “I still believe my vote was just,” he wrote in June 2004 in the pages of The New Republic. “But it would be even more foolhardy, and dangerous, to accept failure as inevitable and move to cut our losses. Despite the naysayers, it is not too late.”

By 2007, Biden was pushing a bizarre plan to divide Iraq into three smaller states. It never caught on. He spent the next few years pushing for the Pentagon to provide troops in Iraq with mine-resistant vehicles to protect them from the improvised roadside bombs that were becoming a major hazard. That was a noble effort that may have saved lives—but it’s a far cry from trying to bring the troops home. Indeed, it suggests that Biden believed it was important for American troops to remain in Iraq.

“Biden is the last of the pre-Obama generation of Democratic foreign policy grandees who enabled the Iraq war,” wrote The Daily Beast‘s Spencer Ackerman in a must-read review of Biden’s record of failure in Iraq.

Biden has a long record, of course, and it’s difficult to distill it into a single sound bite. But the history that he is pushing—that he supported the war at first because Bush lied, but then quickly reversed course and worked to bring troops home—is at odds with his own record.

Making matters worse, Biden effectively invoked the “we have to fight them over there, so we don’t fight them over here” argument while responding to a question about whether he would be willing to deploy U.S. troops abroad without congressional approval.

“I think it’s a mistake to pull out the small number of troops that are there now to deal with ISIS,” Biden said. “ISIS is going to reconstitute itself.”

That’s the sort of open-ended, post-9/11 thinking that drew the United States into the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Biden hasn’t learned that lesson from the past two decades, he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.

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Did We Just Hear Three Democratic Candidates Talk About Reducing Deficit and Debt?

Most moments in Democratic presidential debates this cycle can be classified in one of three ways: 1) Let’s raise all the taxes! 2) Let’s spend all the money! Or 3) Let’s squabble endlessly over the dreamy-time details of the tax/spending increases on Medicare for All. That, and whatever stupid slap fights the moderators want to egg on.

So color me flabbergasted that not one but two of the six candidates on stage tonight, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said—out loud, even—that they intend to reduce the deficit. Klobuchar, who used to make noises about deficit hawkery back when George W. Bush was president, went first, asking viewers to check out her plan online. And here it is!

Establish a dedicated fund to tackle the U.S. debt and support our economy. Senator Klobuchar will establish a dedicated fund to make a down payment to tackle the U.S. debt and protect our economy. She will initially seed the fund with $300 billion by raising the corporate tax rate and dedicating savings from the government-wide budget review. When the economy is doing well, the fund will finance deficit reduction. When specific economic indicators show our economy is in a recession, the funding will automatically be diverted to increase spending on programs that are effective at stimulating the economy like infrastructure spending, increased unemployment and nutrition assistance, and an increased federal share of Medicaid and CHIP spending. As tax changes are implemented and as departments complete Senator Klobuchar’s government-wide review, she will invest additional government-wide savings towards expanding the fund to decrease the deficit and support our economy.

  • Eliminate duplicative government spending. 

Etc. Then Buttigieg, who is competing with Klobuchar in the centrist lane of this primary, went further, expressing outrage that Donald Trump has presided over the return of trillion-dollar deficits, and suggesting that Democrats jump feet-first into the issue.

Several minutes later came the real shocker: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), she of the ever-fuzzy numbers, actually claimed—albeit with almost zero apparent conviction—that her policy plans would, “for those who want to, bring down the national debt.” What fresh hell is this!

The last presidential election in which Democrats spent any time at all decrying deficits and debt was…well, the last time there was a Republican in the White House, 2008. While deficit politics came back with a vengeance during the Tea Party backlash to President Barack Obama, that discipline evaporated pretty much the moment Republicans re-took the Senate after November 2014. By the last presidential election, it was all debt denialism, all the time, in both major parties.

So will Democrats turn into the party of deficit reduction? Well, all you had to do was to keep watching—massive climate change investments, free college for most or all, child care, historic Medicare expansion, and so on. Whenever the party gets the keys back to the White House—and it will, someday—the president will do what 99 percent of all elected executives do: Expand power, not voluntarily hand the stuff away. To the extent that deficits will be invoked by Democrats, you can bet it will be in service of raising taxes, not trimming back the sails of state.

Still, it’s better to hear politicians talk about this stuff than not. Though until a party campaigns and wins consistently on the issue of reducing government, there is no reason to believe that it ever will.

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CNN Implicitly Took Elizabeth Warren’s Side in the Unproven Sexism Accusation Against Bernie Sanders

Diehard supports of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) have long believed that the mainstream media finds subtle ways to undermine their candidate—and occasionally their suspicions are well supported. Tuesday night’s Democratic debate provided another one of these moments, as the progressive believe-all-victims mantra led CNN’s Abby Phillip to presume the truth of the unproven accusation that Sanders privately told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) that a woman couldn’t win the presidency.

The accusation surfaced over the weekend, with the media citing unnamed sources—likely members of the Warren campaign—who claimed that Sanders made the comment during a meeting with Warren in 2018. Sanders vehemently denied saying this, and was asked about it again on the debate stage.

It was a fascinating exchange. When Sanders again stated that the story wasn’t true, Phillip asked, “You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn’t win the election?”

“Correct,” Sanders responded.

Phillip then turned to Warren and asked, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders said a woman couldn’t win the election?”

Note that Phillip did not actually ask Warren whether he had made the comment—she merely presumed that he had, even though he just denied it. Moments later, CNN.com ran with the headline, “Sanders denies saying a woman can’t be president.” This framing of the subject makes it sound like Sanders is denying some objective reality—even though there’s no evidence he said it, and Warren’s recollection of the statement was not specifically probed by the moderator.

CNN missed an important opportunity to shed some light on a rare dispute between Sanders and Warren. Instead, they punted—in a manner that implicitly took Warren’s side. No doubt many of Sanders’ most fervent online backers found that telling.

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Joe Biden’s Debate Answer About His Support for the Iraq War Leaves Out Some Important Details

Former Vice President Joe Biden says his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. That’s good, but it’s not good enough—and his explanation of his support for war leaves out some crucial context.

In the opening minutes of Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate, CNN’s moderators specifically sought to stoke conflict between Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as a member of the Senate in 2003, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who opposed the war at the time. This is a potential weakness for Biden, who remains the frontrunner in the crowded field, and the former vice president made an effort to blunt criticism for his Iraq War vote by flat-out admitting he was wrong.

“It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war,” said Biden. “They said they were not going to go to war. They said they were just going to get inspectors in. The world, in fact, voted to get inspectors in, and they still went to war.”

A little exposition is necessary here since Biden’s response is somewhat unclear. This response, which effectively blames President George W. Bush for Biden’s vote in favor of the use of military force in Iraq, hinges on a series of events that took place during the final months of 2002. In Biden’s telling—and this is an answer he’s given in greater detail in other settings—the Bush administration falsely promised him that congressional approval for the use of military force against Iraq was merely a negotiating tactic to get Saddam to accept weapons inspectors.

Here’s how Biden described the situation to NRP in an interview given last year (emphasis mine):

I let my record stand. I think my record has been good. I think the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks it’s been very good. For example, I got a commitment from President Bush he was not going to go to war in Iraq. He looked me in the eye in the Oval Office; he said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program. He got them in, and before we know it, we had a shock and awe. Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.

There are a bunch of problems with this explanation. At a bare minimum, it demonstrates a lack of good judgment on Biden’s part. Voting to go to war is one of the most significant decisions a member of Congress can make—it’s a vote that should be made only when all other options have been exhausted and there is a clear threat to national security. Authorizing a president to use military force as a negotiating tactic is an abdication of Congress’ constitutional role, and blaming Bush for lying (and he did, of course) is nothing more than a clever way to remove Biden’s own culpability for going along with those lies.

Biden didn’t simply vote for the war. On March 13, 2003, just weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, Biden delivered a nearly hourlong speech that grappled with the seriousness of the war President George W. Bush wanted Congress to authorize. In the end, he gave his assent, saying that the United States “has a special, unilateral capacity, and indeed obligation, to lead in implementing its convictions.”

But the rest of Biden’s answer about Iraq also deserves scrutiny. As he did in that 2019 NPR interview, Biden during Tuesday’s debate claimed that he immediately came out against the war when he realized he’d been duped by Bush.

That’s simply not true. More than a year after the war started, Biden was still defending America’s involvement. “I still believe my vote was just,” he wrote in June 2004 in the pages of The New Republic. “But it would be even more foolhardy, and dangerous, to accept failure as inevitable and move to cut our losses. Despite the naysayers, it is not too late.”

By 2007, Biden was pushing a bizarre plan to divide Iraq into three smaller states. It never caught on. He spent the next few years pushing for the Pentagon to provide troops in Iraq with mine-resistant vehicles to protect them from the improvised roadside bombs that were becoming a major hazard. That was a noble effort that may have saved lives—but it’s a far cry from trying to bring the troops home. Indeed, it suggests that Biden believed it was important for American troops to remain in Iraq.

“Biden is the last of the pre-Obama generation of Democratic foreign policy grandees who enabled the Iraq war,” wrote The Daily Beast‘s Spencer Ackerman in a must-read review of Biden’s record of failure in Iraq.

Biden has a long record, of course, and it’s difficult to distill it into a single sound bite. But the history that he is pushing—that he supported the war at first because Bush lied, but then quickly reversed course and worked to bring troops home—is at odds with his own record.

Making matters worse, Biden effectively invoked the “we have to fight them over there, so we don’t fight them over here” argument while responding to a question about whether he would be willing to deploy U.S. troops abroad without congressional approval.

“I think it’s a mistake to pull out the small number of troops that are there now to deal with ISIS,” Biden said. “ISIS is going to reconstitute itself.”

That’s the sort of open-ended, post-9/11 thinking that drew the United States into the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Biden hasn’t learned that lesson from the past two decades, he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.

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Cops Acquire “Nasal Ranger” Smell-Amplifier To Crack Down On Marijuana Users

Cops Acquire “Nasal Ranger” Smell-Amplifier To Crack Down On Marijuana Users

Authored by Matt Agorist via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,

In case after infuriating case, the Free Thought Project has reported on instances of horrifying rights violations all stemming from a police officer claiming to smell a plant. We have seen both women and men sodomized and raped — often times in public — as cops search for this smell. We have seen entire families held hostage, women and children beaten up, rampant sexual assault, and all of it stemming from a plant smell. Now, police are arming themselves with a “smell amplifier” to go after those who’d dare grow or partake in a plant—in a state where recreational marijuana is legal.

In December 2018, the state of Michigan legalized recreational marijuana. According to the city council in the town of Bessemer, however, the most common complaint from residents in the town is the smell of weed. Despite it being legal, cops are now arming themselves with new smell technology to go after those who dare partake in a legal plant in the legal state.

The Daily Globe reported that the Michigan town of Bessemer has voted to spend approximately $3,400 to purchase a device to smell marijuana plants and train police officers in its use.

“The city of Bessemer stinks,” council member Linda Nelson said.

“You can smell marijuana everywhere. We’ve got people who can’t sit in their backyard because the smell from their neighbor is so bad.”

Council Member William McDonald added, “It’s time we do something,” even though he said the cost of the equipment posed some concern for him, the Globe reported.

As Newsweek reports:

Michigan law enforcement has been struggling with the ramifications of marijuana use since it was legalized. In November 2019, Newsweek reported that state police were still receiving calls about marijuana smoke and odor but lacked the jurisdiction to investigate them unless they suspect that it was being consumed by underage users.

While it is legal to grow marijuana in Michigan, the state’s statute mandates that the plants cannot be visible to the naked eye or grown outside of an enclosed, secure area.

This move by the city to acquire a smell device to catch “stinky” marijuana users and growers highlights a problem that still plagues the United States — the bureaucracy’s addiction to the war on drugs. A recent article out of Forbes pointed out just how bad this problem has become.

Despite an increasing number of states legalizing marijuana, arrests for the beneficial plant continue to increase. As Forbes reports:

According to new data released by the FBI in October, there were 663,367 marijuana arrests in the country in 2018.

That’s one every 48 seconds, and represents an uptick from the 659,700 cannabis busts American police made in 2017, and from 2016’s total of 653,249.

The jump comes despite the fact that there are now 11 states where marijuana is legal for adults over 21.

“Americans should be outraged that police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession,” NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said. We agree.

Now, cops are reverting back to smell technology they used when weed was illegal nationwide. This is a dangerous move in the wrong direction for many reasons.

As TFTP reported in June, an infuriating video was shared with the Free Thought Project showing North Carolina cops violate the rights of multiple innocent people because one of them smelled marijuana. No marijuana was found, but that didn’t stop cops from holding a family and their guests hostage for over an hour to look for it.

Also in June, TFTP reported the case of Erica Reynolds, 37, who is seeking $12.5 million in damages accusing police of sexual assault and battery, wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, gross negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The reason for this sexual assault and battery? Cops smelled weed.

Just last September, TFTP reported on another case in which Chanel Bates, 26, was leaving a restaurant when she was targeted by police who claimed they smelled marijuana. The officers’ olfactory intuition was then used as the justification to detain, savagely beat, and kidnap the entirely innocent woman who had caused harm to no one. The infuriating and disturbing scene was captured on video.

There is at least one state moving in the right direction, however. As TFTP reported in August, the violence associated with cops claiming to smell weed has gotten so out of hand that one top court in Maryland is doing something about it. The court ruled that police are not justified in searching a person based solely off of the smell of marijuana. 

This ruling is a major boon for freedom and will only serve to improve police and citizen interactions by removing one of the ways police can harass individuals. Hopefully it will spread to other states like Texas where tyrant cops like Parris smash in people’s heads for the smell.

In the land of the free, cops will claim to smell a plant on you and use that claim to violate your body in the most horrific way. And some people still have the audacity to call this “justice.”


Tyler Durden

Tue, 01/14/2020 – 22:25

Tags
Law Crime

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China Deceleration Continues As Stocks Price-In Massive Rebound

China Deceleration Continues As Stocks Price-In Massive Rebound

The World Bank trimmed its global growth forecast for 2020 due to a slowing China and a synchronized global downturn. This comes despite the Fed, ECB, and BoJ injecting upwards of $1.1 trillion into global markets in the past four months, along with cutting rates 80 times in the last 12 months.

The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report slashed 2020 growth by 0.2 percentage points to 2.5% from a June 2019 forecast.

China’s growth outlook for the year is one of stabilization, with growth expected to slip under the 6% mark. Still, there’s a significant risk that a disorderly unwinding of debt could slow the economy even further.

Over the last decade, China has been responsible for 60% of the world’s debt creation – and with the country continuing to slow, that doesn’t bode well for a massive global recovery that equity markets have already priced in.

To get a better view of China’s economy, we turn to Fathom Consulting, who developed the China Momentum Indicator 3.0 (CMI 3.0) that includes twelve measures of economic activity, including retail sales, unoccupied housing, and net trade.

Fathom has had a deep distrust for China’s official GDP data and created CMI 3.0 as an alternative measure of China’s economic activity.

CMI 3.0 prints around 4.7%, has stabilized since the middle of last year. There’s no indication that China’s economy will significantly turn up in early 2020, which means the global economy could continue to stagnate.

Slowing China has also weighed on crude oil prices.

Auto production in China will continue to slow with a decelerating economy.

Global stocks, juiced by trillions of dollars in money printing via central banks and 80 rate cuts, have already priced in a global recovery.

With no massive rebound expected in China in 1H20, this also means the probability of a significant rebound in the US is low. Equity markets are mispriced, thanks to an abundance of central bank liquidity.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 01/14/2020 – 22:05

Tags
Business Finance

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