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Authored by Rowena He via The Nation,

Remembering the Tiananmen Movement is not just about repression… it’s about hope.

“Young lovers from China!” a smiling sales lady said as she approached Yu Dongyue and me in a mall on a rainy afternoon in February. It took me a moment to realize that Yu could be taken as an ordinary man with a girlfriend. Yu’s hat covered the scar that he received from brutal beatings. No one could have guessed that he was suffering from severe trauma and mental disorders after 16 years of incarceration marked by torture and solitary confinement as a political prisoner in China.

I had long featured Yu’s story in my courses on Tiananmen and China, but I’d met him for the first time that day in Indianapolis, where he and his sister settled after escaping China in 2009. In spring 1989, when millions of citizens filled the streets all over China demanding political reforms, Yu was a 21-year-old art editor for the Liuyang Daily, a newspaper in Hunan province. The city of Liuyang also happened to be the hometown of Hu Yaobang, the former secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose sudden death on April 15, 1989 triggered a nationwide campaign that would become known as the 1989 Tiananmen Movement.

Hu was a proponent of reform, and students saw his passing as an opportunity to renew their push for change. After students launched a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, Yu Dongyue and two friends, Yu Zhijian and Lu Decheng, traveled to Beijing to join the protests. Boarding the train, the three men, who would become known in Chinese as the Three Gentlemen of Tiananmen, could not have known it would be a one-way trip.

On May 23, 1989, Yu and his two friends threw eggshells filled with paint at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square. Instead of applauding their audacity, the students turned them over to the authorities.

The students wanted to keep their protests separate from those of the workers. There was never an attempt to form a grand alliance to overthrow the regime, as Beijing would later assert. The students also feared that if they didn’t hand over the three young men, the government would have an excuse to crack down on them.

Paints mars the portrait of Mao Zedong after Yu Dongyue, Yu Zhijian, and Lu Decheng threw paint-filled egg shells at in May, 1989. (AP Photo / Mark Avery)

Ten days later, Chinese soldiers equipped with tanks and AK-47s attacked, nonetheless. On June 4, some 200,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers were deployed to participate in the lethal action. Hu’s successor as CCP general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, refused to order the assault and was purged. He lived under house arrest until his death in 2005. Thus, the Tiananmen Movement was bracketed by the death of one CCP secretary general and the expulsion of another. The fate of these two reform-minded CCP leaders foreshadowed China’s development ever since.

The Tiananmen Movement remains a taboo topic in China, banned from academic and popular realms. Even the actual number of the dead and wounded remains unknown. In the immediate aftermath, after mass arrests and purges throughout the country, the CCP constructed a narrative portraying the Tiananmen Movement as a Western conspiracy to weaken and divide China. Reporting to the National People’s Congress on June 30, 1989, Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong asserted that the movement was “planned, organized, and premeditated” by those who “unite with all hostile forces overseas and in foreign countries to launch a battle against us to the last.”

The official justification for the clampdown was that the students were “counterrevolutionaries” who threatened the country’s stability and prosperity. Yet, in 1989, they were hoping the regime would transform itself. They were not seeking regime change, just asking the CCP to live up to its ideals. Their actions were rooted in the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent—helping the rulers to improve, but not seeking to overthrow them.

Yu’s experiences are a testimony to the non-revolutionary nature of the movement. During my visit, Yu repeated the phrase: “This was not done by the students or the people.” After Yu and his two friends defaced Mao’s portrait, the students at Tiananmen had inscribed that sentence on a banner in order to disavow their vandalism. The three young men had not tried to run away, and they wrongly assumed the students would be on their side.

In the end, the Three Gentlemen and the students faced the same charges of counterrevolution. That was the label CCP officials affixed to those who openly disagreed with them. Since the CCP claimed to represent the revolution, anyone criticizing them could be labeled counterrevolutionary. Today, China accuses its critics of “subverting the state,” but, at its core, it’s the same charge.Yu Dongyue was sentenced to 20 years, Lu Decheng to 16 years, and Yu Zhijian to life in prison. Lu escaped to Thailand in 2006, and was later granted asylum in Canada. In 2009, Yu Zhijian and his pregnant wife smuggled themselves out together with Yu Dongyue. They hoped that they could get medical treatment for Yu so that he would recover from his mental disability. Yu’s younger sister fled with her brother in order to take care of him. At great personal cost, she left behind her former husband and her child, neither of whom can leave China to be reunited with her.

The Three Gentlemen of Tiananmen might not have anticipated the severity of the punishment that they received, but they were not naive about the repression of dissent. Being idealistic in China means being selfish to your loved ones. You choose to fight for your cause, uphold your principles, and stand ready to pay the price—but often family members suffer consequences, too. Prohibiting the children of human-rights lawyers from going to school is a vivid recent example.

Three decades on, the mothers of Tiananmen victims still cannot openly mourn their children, and exiled student protesters are banned from returning home, even for a parent’s funeral. Many older supporters of the movement, liberal intellectuals in the 1980s, died in exile. One of the Three Gentlemen, Yu Zhijian, died in Indianapolis in 2017, at the age of 54.

News of Yu Zhijian’s death was accompanied by a photo of his wife kneeling in front of the cardboard box that held his body. Printed on the makeshift coffin were the words, “Handle with care.” On one Chinese website, a comment in English read: “Garbage dead,” another said simply, “Traitor’s ending.”

For the past 30 years, the CCP has promoted historical amnesia, fostered a narrow and xenophobic nationalism, impeded reflection on historical tragedies and injustice, and stoked a growing enthusiasm for international assertiveness. The recent detentions of young communists on college campuses in China is a reminder that it still doesn’t take much to become a target of the state machinery. Those student leftists were simply doing what the government had told them to do “as successors of the Communist cause.” They formed study groups on Maoism and Marxism, and supported workers’ rights in a state where independent unions are forbidden. But once again, the Communists in power are cracking down on the young communists siding with the powerless.

Since the Tiananmen massacre, activists, scholars, and regular citizens have launched a war against forgetting. Many Tiananmen veterans, both inside and outside China, including Liu Xiaobo, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died a political prisoner in 2017, have devoted their lives to the unfinished cause of 1989. Commemoration activities are organized in major cities every year. Tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park annually to demand truth and justice for those who were violently silenced in 1989. The image of thousands of people holding candles has become as iconic as the Tank Man, reminding us that Tiananmen is not just about repression—it’s about hope. Tiananmen symbolizes the struggle for freedom and human rights. Because this longing for basic rights is universal, history will witness the Tiananmen spirit again and again.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Xn8UKA Tyler Durden

The automation wave is expected to dramatically reshape the US economy in the 2020s. This disruption will impact the labor force and cause tremendous job losses. By 2030, automation could eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs — equivalent to 40 million displaced workers, hitting the bottom 90% of Americans the hardest.

A new report from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) shows how warehouse automation is starting to gain traction in Atlanta, the sixth largest warehousing space in the US.

The new, robot-powered warehouse in McDonough, Georgia, is currently undergoing pilot tests and will begin operations in June. Project Verte, a start-up trying to compete with Amazon, is responsible for automating the warehouse.

The Butler system, an advanced autonomous fleet of mobile robots, uses robotic goods-to-person technology for automated put-away, inventory storage, replenishment, and order picking.

AJC said the Bulter robots are like “giant Roombas” that move between 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep within the warehouse. An employee summons the robot with a handheld device, it then uses a jack to lift the shelving unit and transports it to the human picker, who then grabs items out of the bins, scans it and hands it off to the packaging department.

While there are no other fully automated warehouses in Georgia, the closest one is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses similar Roomba-like robots.

In the next 10.5 years, automation is set to eliminate millions of jobs in the warehouse and logistics space, as well as increase the demand for small to medium-sized automated warehouses.

“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.

According to AJC, Atlanta has 683 million square feet of warehouse space, making it the sixth-most largest in the country.

Once fully operational, the McDonough warehouse will be able to ship 200,000 items per day, aided by a fleet of robots and 400 human pickers, packers, supervisors and technicians.

Tye Brady, the chief technologist for Amazon, said rising demand for new technologies [automated warehouses] would lead to job losses.

Before the Butler system, human pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day shifting items around the warehouse, said Leigh.

The collision of automation on the labor force will lead to severe economic dislocation that could depress wages and lead to an even wider gap in wealth inequality that would have significant economic and social ramifications. Nevertheless, millions of Americans will lose their jobs. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MrXyE1 Tyler Durden

Via Monty Pelerin’s World blog,

To fully understand the Deep State one need focus on matters both inside and outside of government. The Deep State corrupts everything it touches. Today that includes much of the country.

The Deep State corrupted the media.

The first task of any State is to control the information (propaganda) fed to its citizens. Totalitarian states eliminate any free exchange of opinions. The Soviet Union had a state-run newspaper known as Pravda. It was a monopoly in that no other sources legally provided news. The new Russia pretends it has press freedom, but it controls the media. So does China. Severe penalties, including murder, are used to obtain conformity.

In the US, we say we have freedom and a “free press.” But do we?

The answer regarding freedom is increasingly negative, at least when compared with our history. The issue regarding a “free press” is a bit more complicated. America’s press, while not owned by the State, is under similar restrictions as the press in more totalitarian states. These restrictions are not officially codified in law but are understood by the media. They result from the fact that the US government has the power to bankrupt any person or corporation it chooses to target.

The unlimited resources of the Deep State make it impossible for individuals or corporations to defend themselves. If they come after you, you will lose.  Your limited resources or the resources of even the largest corporation are no match for the unlimited resources of the Deep State. Admission of guilt (even when not guilty) and plea deals (often admitting guilt), are generally the least costly alternative to settling any argument with the State. Often it is necessary to survive such assaults.

With this kind of power and the willingness to use it, the Deep State need not own corporations.

The recognition that the Deep State can “kill” any corporation it chooses explains why the “free press” (or literally any other person or company) is not truly free. There is no corporation or individual that does not break the law every day in some manner. These violations are not intentional nor are they even known by the actor. There are too many laws that none of us don’t violate several of them, unknowingly, every day.

This type of society is not socialism in the normal sense. Actually, it is more like fascism where private ownership is allowed but behavior is so subject to government rules and regulations that it is government that actually drives behavior.

While we think of the media as independent companies operated in local markets, they are hardly that. Most media giants control local markets. US media (as most large corporations) is “owned” by the State because of the State’s arbitrary and immense regulatory and punative powers. To understand how easy it is to influence/control media, this information sent by a reader is useful:

This is what you call a  “stacked deck.”   Info like this can be a great benefit to the general public and  help more and more people to wake up to who their real enemies are

IF YOU HAD A HUNCH THE NEWS SYSTEM WAS SOMEWHAT RIGGED AND YOU COULDN’T PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, THIS MIGHT HELP YOU SOLVE THE PUZZLE.

ABC       News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice,   Obama’s   former National Security Adviser.

CBS       President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes,  Obama’s   Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.

ABC       News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former  Obama Whitehouse Press Secretary Jay Carney.

ABC       News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s former Deputy  Press  Secretary   .

ABC       President Ben Sherwood is the brother of  Obama’s   former Special Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood.

CNN       President Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary   Clinton’s Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.

This is “Huge” and is   only  a ‘partial’ list since the same holds true for NBC/MSNBC and most media outlets.
Trump has been right all along. Fake News is generated by these incestuous relationships .

h/t to Roscoe

Obviously the relationships are more numerous and deeper than those listed above. Compounding the executive conflicts is the crossover between politics and journalism. George Stephanopoulos, John Brennan, Jason Chaffetz, James Clapper and others slide easily from the Deep State into the Deep Media.  The reverse is also common. This incestuousness is not limited to the media.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2wyz0hV Tyler Durden

President Trump’s efforts to force China to ‘fair’ trade (along with sanctions and/or tariff threats against many other nations in the world) appears more likely to destabilize the unipolar US hegemon than support it.

Many multipolar-supporting nations are hording gold, seeking alternative payment systems, and creating bilateral trade agreements between themselves in an effort to skirt US threats (or merely to defend their own sovereignty in the long-run).

While we have seen China pushing the petro-yuan (rather anti-climactically for now) and Europe pushing INSTEX to enable trade with Iran (still unused for now), RT reports the latest shift away from the US ‘system’ and towards multi-polar collaboration is coming from China, where small and medium-sized enterprises, under pressure from Washington’s trade war, are studying the possibility of moving production to Russia.

According to the secretary general of the China Overseas Development Association (CODA), He Zhenwei, “many Chinese export-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises are now facing difficulties.”

“The US has already raised its duties on Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent, which is tantamount to closing its doors. In case American consumers agree to pay more out of their pockets, these companies will be able to raise prices on products by 25 percent, which is hardly probable,” he said.

In such harsh conditions, Chinese companies are now struggling to maintain their existence.

“They should think about moving production to Russia,” He said, adding that “Chinese goods produced in Russia could be further sold in the United States and even in Europe.”

As a reminder, trade between Russia and China saw historic growth last year of around 25 percent to US$108 billion, beating all forecasts. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, China is and will continue to be Russia’s number one foreign trade partner. He recently said that the two countries are enjoying their best trade and economic ties ever… not something that Makes America Great Again, for sure.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Ktg5NB Tyler Durden

Authored by Richard White via ConsortiumNews.com,

The tech monopoly giants have a lot to learn from the railroad monopolies of the 19th Century during the First Gilded Age…

Late 19th-century Americans loved railroads, which seemed to eradicate time and space, moving goods and people more cheaply and more conveniently than ever before. And they feared railroads because in most of the country it was impossible to do business without them.

Businesses, and the republic itself, seemed to be at the mercy of the monopoly power of railroad corporations. American farmers, businessmen and consumers thought of competition as a way to ensure fairness in the marketplace. But with no real competitors over many routes, railroads could charge different rates to different customers. This power to decide economic winners and losers threatened not only individual businesses but also the conditions that sustained the republic.

An 1882 political cartoon portrays the railroad industry as a monopolistic octopus, with its tentacles controlling many businesses. (G. Frederick Keller) 

That may sound familiar. As a historian of that first Gilded Age, I see parallels between the power of the railroads and today’s internet giants like Verizon and Comcast. The current regulators – the Federal Communications Commission’s Republican majority – and many of its critics both embrace a solution that 19th-century Americans tried and dismissed: market competition.

Monopolies as Natural and Efficient

In the 1880s, the most sophisticated railroad managers and some economists argued that railroads were “natural monopolies,” the inevitable consequence of an industry that required huge investments in rights of way over land, constructing railways, and building train engines and rail cars.

Competition was expensive and wasteful. In 1886 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Missouri Pacific Railroad both built railroad tracks heading west from the Great Bend of the Arkansas River in Kansas to Greeley County on the western border, roughly 200 miles away.

The tracks ran parallel to each other, about two miles apart. Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, called this redundancy the “maddest specimen of railroad construction of which” he had ever heard. And then his own railroad built new tracks into western Kansas, too.

After ruinous bouts of competition like this, rival railroad companies would agree to cooperate, pooling the business in certain areas and setting common rates. These agreements effectively established monopolies, even if more than one company was involved.

Monopolies as Unfairly Subsidized

Anti-monopolists who opposed the railroads’ power argued that monopolies originated not as a result of efficient investment strategies, but rather from special privileges afforded by the government. Railroads had the ability to condemn land to build their routes. They got subsidies of land, loans, bonds and other financial aid from federal, state and local governments. Their political contributions and favors secured them supporters in legislatures, Congress and the courts.

As stronger railroads bought up weaker companies and divided up markets with the remaining competitors, the dangers of monopoly became more and more apparent. Railroad companies made decisions on innovation based on the effects on their bottom line, not societal values.

For instance, the death toll was enormous: In 1893, 1,567 trainmen died and 18,877 were injured on the rails. Congress enacted the first national railroad safety legislation that year because the companies had insisted it was too expensive to put automatic braking systems and couplers on freight trains.

But a monopoly’s great economic and societal danger was its ability to decide who succeeded in business and who failed. For example, in 1883 the Northern Pacific Railway raised the rates it charged O.A. Dodge’s Idaho lumber company. The new rates left Dodge unable to compete with the rival Montana Improvement Company, reputedly owned by Northern Pacific executives and investors. Dodge knew the game was up. All he could do was ask if they wanted to buy his company.

For anti-monopolists, Dodge’s dilemma went to the heart of the issue. Monopolies were intrinsically wrong because they unfairly influenced businesses’ likelihood of success or failure. In an 1886 report on the railroad industry, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce agreed, stating clearly that the “great desideratum is to secure equality.”

Turning to Regulators for Help

To achieve equality, anti-monopolists wanted more government regulation and enforcement. By the late 1880s, some railroad executives were starting to agree. Their efforts at cooperation had failed because railroads treated each other no better than they did their customers. As Charles Francis Adams put it, his own industry’s “method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating, and stealing: all bad things.”

The consensus was that the railroads needed the federal government to enforce the rules, bringing greater efficiency and ultimately lower rates. But Congress ran into a problem: If an even, competitive playing field depended on regulation, the marketplace wasn’t truly open or free.

The solution was no clearer then than it is now. The technologies of railroads inherently gave large operators advantages of efficiency and profitability. Large customers also got benefits: John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, for example, could guarantee large shipments and provide his own tank cars – so he got special rates and rebates. Newcomers and small enterprises were left out.

Some reformers suggested accepting monopolies, so long as their rates were carefully regulated. But the calculations were complex: Charges by the mile ignored the fact that most costs came not from transport but rather from loading, unloading and transferring freight. And even the best bookkeepers had a hard time unraveling railway accounts.

Managing Power

The simplest solution, advanced by the Populist party and others, was the most difficult politically:nationalize the railroad routes. Turning them into a publicly owned network, like today’s interstate highway system, would give the government the responsibility to create clear, fair rules for private companies wishing to use them. But profitable railroads opposed it tooth and nail, and skeptical reformers did not want the government to buy derelict and unprofitable railroads.

The current controversy about the monopolistic power of internet service providers echoes those concerns from the first Gilded Age. As anti-monopolists did in the 19th century, advocates of an open internet argue that regulation will advance competition by creating a level playing field for all comers, big and small, resulting in more innovation and better products. (There was even a radical, if short-lived, proposal to nationalize high-speed wireless service.)

However, no proposed regulations for an open internet address the existing power of either the service providers or the “Big Five” internet giants: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Like Standard Oil, they have the power to wring enormous advantages from the internet service providers, to the detriment of smaller competitors.

The most important element of the debate – both then and now – is not the particular regulations that are or are not enacted. What’s crucial is the wider concerns about the effects on society. The Gilded Age’s anti-monopolists had political and moral concerns, not economic ones. They believed, as many in the U.S. still do, that a democracy’s economy should be judged not only – nor even primarily – by its financial output. Rather, success is how well it sustains the ideals, values and engaged citizenship on which free societies depend.

When monopoly threatens something as fundamental as the free circulation of information and the equal access of citizens to technologies central to their daily life, the issues are no longer economic.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IpnoDc Tyler Durden

China’s top economic adviser has issued guidelines over how to introduce incentives that can boost a person’s social credit score, according to ECNS. 

Issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the new guidelines include 15 preferential policies to evaluate if a person should be considered a ‘role model’ in terms of creditworthiness. 

Outstanding individuals in the system can freely acquire personal credit reports a number of times in a year, and freely search information in the national credit information online platform, according to the regulation.

They will also enjoy fast-tracked services when applying for administrative approval, qualification reviews, credit cards or personal loans, patents or copyright registration, and quick refunds from financial institutions or platform companies. –ECNS

The guidelines also state that role models will have priority access to public elderly care services as well as preferential treatment when applying for civil service positions. 

Cities are encouraged to reward outstanding individuals with benefits in education, housing, employment, medicare and and administrative approvals. 

“Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” is the guiding ideology of Beijing’s attempt to crack down on rampant corruption, financial scams, corporate scandals and petty crimes. 

 In the eastern city of Hangzhou, “pro-social” activity includes donating blood and volunteer work, while violating traffic laws lowers an individual’s credit score. In Zhoushan, an island near Shanghai, no-nos include smoking or driving while using a mobile phone, vandalism, walking a dog without a leash and playing loud music in public. Too much time playing video games and circulating fake news can also count against individuals. According to U.S. magazine Foreign Policy, residents of the northeastern city of Rongcheng adapted the system to include penalties for online defamation and spreading religion illegally. –Washington Post

“Untrustworthy conduct” by both business and individuals includes failure to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, swindling customers, and – for individuals, acts such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

According to a February report by SCMP, around 17.46 million people who are “discredited” were prevented from buying plane tickets, while 5.47 million were disallowed from purchasing tickets to China’s high-speed train system. 

Legal experts have expressed concern that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system trample on what little privacy rights they have in China. 

“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” said one attorney quoted by SCMP, who added “It violates the rights of human beings.” 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KqujyM Tyler Durden

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The unusual shaking on the west coast continues to intensify. As you can see from this map, over 240 earthquakes have struck the states of California and Nevada over the last 24 hours. Yes, the west coast gets hit by quakes every day, but this is definitely an unusually high number. Fortunately, most of the earthquakes have been very small, but a couple of them were greater than magnitude 3.0.

The following comes from the Los Angeles Times…

A magnitude 3.3 earthquake was felt in parts of Southern California on Sunday afternoon, one in a series of quakes to hit the Riverside County area.

The latest quake occurred at 4:36 p.m. and was centered on Glen Avon, south of Fontana. The seismic activity continued into Monday morning with dozens of new small quakes.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quakes were felt across swaths of the Inland Empire, a region that has had hundreds of small quakes over the weekend, including one that registered a magnitude of 3.1.

This comes during a stretch of time when there has been a heightened level of seismic activity along the west coast. For much more on this please see my previous article entitled “California Is Shaken By More Than 80 Earthquakes As Chile Is Hit By The Largest Quake In 12 Years”. So when I got this latest news, I wanted to get this update out to you all right away.

Hopefully it will not happen immediately, but at some point there will be a history-altering earthquake along the southern California coastline that will cause death and destruction on a scale that most of us don’t even want to think about right now.

In fact, scientists have specifically warned us that someday a colossal earthquake “could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”.

Unfortunately, most California residents will not care about these warnings until it is too late to do anything about them.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JXyfYw Tyler Durden

With Chinese macro continuing its serial disappointment (absent the record liquidity-injection rebound in April), expectations were for Caixin PMI Services data to slow in May (after its exuberant rebound) echoing the demise seen in Chinese manufacturing.

China’s official manufacturing PMI tumbled into contraction (and Caixin was flat just above contraction) in May.

China’s official services PMI was flat from April but Caixin data plunged from 54.5 to 52.7 (well below the 54.0 drop expected).

 

Comment Commenting on the China General Services PMI™ data, Dr. Zhengsheng Zhong, Director of Macroeconomic Analysis at CEBM Group said: “The Caixin China General Services Business Activity Index fell to 52.7 in May from the recent high of 54.5 in April, although it remained firmly within expansionary territory.”

Among the gauges included in the survey:

1) The gauge for new business fell from the past month’s recent high but remained in expansionary territory, reflecting slowing growth in demand across the services sector.

2) The measure for employment fell from the past month’s recent high while remaining within expansionary territory, suggesting jobs growth is slowing.

3) Gauges for input costs and prices charged by services providers both fell slightly while remaining in expansionary territory. Growth in input costs outpaced that of prices charged, indicating that services companies remained under significant pressure.

4) The measure for business expectations continued to fall, despite staying in positive territory, reflecting services providers’ weakening confidence in their future prospects.

The Caixin China Composite Output Index fell to 51.5 in May from 52.7 the month before, mainly due to slower growth in the service sector.

1) The gauge for new orders edged down while remaining in expansionary territory, while the measure for new export orders returned to growth, pointing to weakening demand at home but improved demand abroad. The negative effects of China-U.S. tensions on exports have yet to emerge, perhaps due to exporters front-loading shipments of products that are in the remaining $300 billion of goods not subject to punitive tariffs.

2) The employment gauge continued to fall, entering contractionary territory. This suggested the labor market is under pressure. In a move that is likely related, the State Council recently set up a new leading group on employment.

3) Both gauges for input costs and output charges edged down while remaining in expansionary territory. Growth in input costs outpaced that of output charges, indicating companies continued to be squeezed.

4) The measure for future output fell markedly, to the lowest reading since the series began in 2012, although it remained in positive territory. This indicates business confidence is in urgent need of a boost.

“Overall, China’s economic growth showed some signs of slowing in May. Employment and business confidence in particular merit policymakers’ attention.”

There was one big potential shift in May that could have affected the Services data – the yuan plunged…

As a reminder, Global Manufacturing PMI is in freefall to its lowest since 2012…

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MuGJZa Tyler Durden

After decades of unrestricted money printing, debt accumulation, and financial bubbles, millennials are still hibernating in their parents’ basements.

The homeownership rate among these young adults (under 35 years old) is currently at 1994 levels. Back then, a 30-year loan yielded over 9%. Today it’s a little under 4%.

Mother Jones examined mortgage rates and looked at monthly payments as a percentage of income, indicating average monthly home payments nationally for young adults has relatively stayed the same over the last several decades.

The average monthly home payment for Los Angeles, New York City, and Atlanta have been stable since 1994:

But with the “greatest economy ever,” why hasn’t the millennial homeownership rate risen?

Well, that it’s an easy one – debt loads held by millennials exceeded well over a $1 trillion at the end of last year. On top of that, 60% of them don’t have $500 in savings, which is also contributing to their inability to buy a home.

Financial stress among this heavily indebted generation is showing up in record debt delinquencies of student loans.

Student loans “have completely broken with the business cycle,” NY Fed researchers wrote in a report earlier this month that showed student loan growth continued to increase even as other forms of debt growth slowed.

While the student loan bubble is set to implode in the next downturn, young people might not be able to buy homes until the mid-2020s, this is primarily due to their credit reports would be so devastated in a recession that lenders would have to deny young applicants on tighter lending standards.

Even though average monthly mortgage payments have been relatively the same cost from two decades ago, young adults today are financially challenged with insurmountable debts that inhibit them from purchasing a home, another clue that the American Dream has died for the millennial generation who will be a majority of the workforce in the next five years. 

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/3187iqd Tyler Durden