Tag: finance

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Just like we witnessed during the last recession, major retailers are laying off tens of thousands of workers, and it looks like this will be the worst year for store closings in all of U.S. history.  Many are referring to this as “the retail apocalypse”, and without a doubt this is one of the toughest stretches for retailers that we have ever seen.  But many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.  After all, if retailers are struggling this much now, how bad will things be once the next recession really gets rolling?

Of course the truth is that things have been rocky for the retail industry for quite a few years, but the numbers are telling us that this crisis is really starting to accelerate.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, retail layoffs were up a whopping 92 percent in January and February compared to the same period a year ago.  The following comes from NBC News…

More than 41,000 people have lost their jobs in the retail industry so far this year — a 92 percent spike in layoffs since the same time last year, according to a new report.

And the layoffs continue to mount, with JCPenney announcing this week it would be closing 18 stores in addition to three previously announced closures, as part of a “standard annual review.”

Yes, competition from Internet commerce is hurting the traditional retail industry, but it certainly doesn’t explain a 92 percent increase.

And very few retailers have been able to avoid this downsizing trend.  At this point, even the largest retailer in the entire country has begun “quietly closing stores”…

Walmart is closing at least 11 US stores across eight states.

The stores include one Walmart Supercenter in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Walmart Neighborhood Market stores in Arizona, California, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.

For decades, Wal-Mart has been expanding extremely aggressively.

They have plenty of cash, and so the only way that it would make sense for them to close stores is if they anticipated that we are heading into a recession.

Here is a list of the addresses where Wal-Mart stores are closing…

• 6085 W. Chandler Blvd., Chandler, Arizona

• 3900 W. Ina Road, Tucson, Arizona

• 1600 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, California

• 712 N. Western Ave., Liberal, Kansas

• 1229 NE. Evangeline Trwy., Lafayette, Louisiana

• 3603 Broad River Road, Columbia, South Carolina

• 1757 W. Andrew Johnson Hwy., Morristown, Tennessee

• 2501 University Commons Way, Knoxville, Tennessee

• 7000 Iron Bridge Road, North Chesterfield, Virginia

• 2864 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach, Virginia

• 7809 NE. Vancouver Plaza Dr., Vancouver, Washington

Of course Wal-Mart is in far better shape than almost everyone else in the industry.

One of Wal-Mart’s key competitors, Shopko, has just announced that they will be shutting down all of their stores…

Shopko will liquidate its assets and close all of its remaining locations by mid-June.

The company was unable to find a buyer for the retail business and will begin winding down its operations beginning this week, the company said in statement released Monday. The decision to liquidate will bring an end to the brick-and-mortar business that began in 1962 with one location in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And personally I was very saddened to learn that Lifeway Christian Bookstores has also decided to close all their brick and mortar stores…

Lifeway Christian Bookstores announced last week it would be closing the doors of all 170 brick and mortar stores, in a pivot to focusing on digital and e-commerce.

“The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one,” said Lifeway Chief Executive Officer Brad Waggoner. “While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market projections show this is no longer a viable option.”

Whenever I do an article like this, I always have some readers that try to convince me that this is only happening because of the growth of Internet retailing.

And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales.  In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did.

Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent months.

During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year earlier.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

Now it’s the third month in a row, and the red flag is getting more visible and a little harder to ignore about the goods-based economy: Freight shipment volume in the US across all modes of transportation – truck, rail, air, and barge – in February fell 2.1% from February a year ago, according to the Cass Freight Index, released today. The three months in a row of year-over-year declines are the first such declines since the transportation recession of 2015 and 2016.

I have a feeling that when we get the final numbers for March that they will show that this streak has now extended to four months.

Right now, unsold goods are starting to pile up in U.S. warehouses at a rate that we haven’t seen since the last recession.  Many retailers that are barely clinging to life will simply not survive if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in the months ahead.

So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing “retail apocalypse” in the mainstream media.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2U91i0x Tyler Durden

Nearly nine years have passed since the May 6, 2010 flash crash – when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points within minutes, before swiftly recovering most of the loss – yet the scapegoating of those alleged to be responsible by the CFTC continues.

The trial of a Chicago programmer who allegedly created the software used by Navindar Singh Sarao, the “flash crash trader” who pleaded guilty in November 2016 to one count of wire fraud and one count of spoofing futures markets, began on Monday, with Sarao expected to testify as the prosecution’s key witness.

Jitesh Thakkar, who is being charged with conspiracy to manipulate markets, never placed any trades. Prosecutors are claiming that the conspiracy occurred between 2011 and April 2015, beginning with an email exchange with Sarao where he agreed to build the software. For those keeping score at home, this means that Thakkar’s alleged misbehavior occurred after the 2010 crash (though, to be fair, there have been several similar ‘flash crashes’ since, including the Aug. 24, 2015 ‘flash crash’ where the Dow dropped 1,100 points during the first five minutes of trading.

Nav Sarao

According to Bloomberg, the program Thakkar created for Sarao had a “back of the queue” function that automatically delayed the execution of the spoofed orders for S&P 500 futures contracts on CME Group Inc.’s Globex trading platform. After placing the spoofed orders, Sarao would open positions intended to profit off these orders, before cancelling them. Spoofing became a crime in the US with the passage of Dodd-Frank.

Thakkar isn’t the first programmer to become embroiled in a spoofing case, as BBG explains. Some suspect that a programmer who testified against convicted spoofer Michael Coscia would have been indicted if he hadn’t agreed to testify. Though Thakkar will be the first non-trader prosecuted under the Dodd-Frank law.

The first person convicted of spoofing was Michael Coscia. During his 2015 trial, the programmer who designed the algorithm Coscia used was a key prosecution witness. Some legal experts speculated the programmer might have been charged had he not agreed to testify. Prosecutors have indicated that traders aren’t their only targets when it comes to market manipulation cases.

By prosecuting Thakkar, prosecutors said they’re hoping to send a message.

“We will also seek to find and hold accountable those who teach others how to spoof, who build the tools designed to spoof, or who otherwise aid and abet the wrongdoing,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement announcing the criminal charges in January 2018 against eight individuals, including Thakkar. “The government wants to send a message that you have to be careful how you design these programs” for traders, Wayne State’s Henning said. If Thakkar is found not guilty, the message will be that “you have to be careful about how you design these programs, but you don’t really have much to worry about,” he said.

Fortunately for Thakkar, the bar for a conviction is high. To convince the jury that Thakkar is guilty, prosecutors will need to prove that he knew he was participating in an illegal scheme to dig markets.

Sarao, who hasn’t given any interviews since his guilty plea, earned (and was later scammed out of) tens of millions of dollars trading from his parent’s home outside London. He is cooperating with authorities to try and earn as light a sentence as possible, though he has been banned from trading for life.

Meanwhile, HFT traders on Wall Street have been largely ignored by regulators as the scapegoated Sarao, who made just under $1 million on the day of the flash crash, a pittance in the grand scheme of things. Though a former programmer for Goldman Sachs was famously convicted, then vindicated, then convicted again for “stealing” code, including some of the bank’s HFT strats.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CMD5CA Tyler Durden

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The sore beset people of this land may be good and goddam sick of politics, RussiaGate, and Trump-inspired social strife, but they may soon have something more down-to-earth to worry about: Biblical floods and plagues.

Media hysteria around the Mueller Report has nearly eclipsed news of historic flooding in the midwest that has already caused $3 billion in damage to farms, homes, livestock, and infrastructure. With spring rainfall already at 200 percent of normal levels, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement in late March saying, “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

More to the point, two major western dams show disturbing signs of potential failure that may bring on unprecedented disasters. The Oroville Dam on the Feather River north of Sacramento — the highest earthen dam in the US — nearly blew out in February 2017 when record rains damaged the main spillway, threatening to send a 30-foot wall of water downstream towards California’s capital and towns along the way. When that spillway was closed to assess the damage, which was significant, the secondary emergency spillway was opened for the first time since the dam was built in 1968. It too started disintegrating and before long Lake Oroville began flowing over the top of the dam itself. The state had to order evacuation of 188,000 people in three counties. Frantic efforts to drop sandbags from helicopters stabilized the damage and, luckily, the rain stopped.

Subsequent lawsuits against the state’s Department of Water Resources revealed shoddy maintenance, theft of equipment, and poor record keeping. Now, two years later, new cracks have appeared in the repaired Oroville Dam main spillway. The Sierra Nevada snowpack stands at 153 percent above average, and the National Weather Service predicts that weak El Nino conditions with above-average Pacific Ocean temperatures are likely to produce above-average rainfall this spring along with the snowpack melt.

The Fort Peck Dam on the upper Missouri River in Montana is likewise troubling experts watching a record snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. It too is an earthen dam — the world’s largest by volume — filled with hydraulic slurry. Because it is located on the flat high plains, the dam is extremely long, running 21,000 feet — about four miles — from end to end. Behind it is a reservoir that is the fifth-largest man-made lake in the nation.

Concern is rising because the coming snow melt coincides with unusually active seismic activity around the Yellowstone Caldera, one of the world’s super-volcanos. The slurry construction of the dam inclines it to liquification when the ground shakes.

Failure of the Fort Peck dam would send the equivalent of a whole year’s flow of the Missouri River downstream in one release that could potentially wash away the other five downstream dams in the Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System, along with every bridge from Montana to St. Louis, an unimaginable amount of farm and town infrastructure, and several nuclear power installations.

It would be the greatest national disaster in US history. Just sayin’.

A shy, science-nerd correspondent writes:

“Epidemiologists speculate that a flooding event in Central Asia steppes triggered the 1347 Eurasian plague outbreak.  Rumors of a mass human die-off in India reached Europe in the mid-1340’s.  The Mongols besieging the coastal city of Trebizond on the shore of the Black Sea catapulted plague infested corpses over the city walls and Italian merchant ships fleeing Trebizond carried the infestation to Genoa which foolishly permitted the dying crew to land…

Rodents hosting plague spreading fleas typically inhabit arid grassland regions such as the Great Plains of America and the semi deserts of California and New Mexico. The current flooding of the American Mid-West and the mass dumping of flood tainted wheat, corn and soybeans will likely spark a rodent population explosion in the region, which in the context of rat-swarming homeless encampments may yield a 1347 repeat event in North America during the 2020s. What happened before can happen again.”

The homeless camps around Los Angeles have turned up cases of other medieval-type diseases typical of human settlements before public sanitation became a standard feature of civilized life: Many are spread through feces (as well as drug use): Hepatitis A, Typhus, shigellosis (or trench fever, spread through body lice), and tuberculosis. Gawd knows what is coming across the border into America’s proudly leading “sanctuary state.” Wait for it. Just sayin’.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UmXg41 Tyler Durden

On Monday, a Connecticut woman claims that Biden touched her inappropriately and “rubbed noses” with her during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich. 

“It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head,” Amy Lappos told The Hardford Courant on Monday. Lappos is a former congressional aide to Rep. Jim Hines (D-CT) and first posted about the alleged incident in the Facebook group Connecticut Women in Politics on Sunday using a pseudonym. 

“He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.“

“I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody,” said Lappos. “There’s absolutely a line of decency. There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not cultural. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”

False narrative? 

A spokesman for former Vice President Joe Biden says that recent reports of decades-old images and footage of him creeping on women and children is a “false narrative” perpetuated by trolls from the “dark recesses of the internet,” according to Business Insider. 

Biden spokesperson Bill Russo said in a statement Monday that multiple pictures being used to paint the potential 2020 presidential candidate as creepily touching women are being misinterpreted and have been refuted by the subjects of photos that have gone viral.

…

“These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while,” he said. “And to this day, right wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain.” –Business Insider

It’s unclear what Russo means by “forgeries” – since the authenticity of the material has not been challenged to this point. 

“There are other, even more insidious examples of claims about the Vice President that have no foundation: the use of photoshopped images and other manipulations of social media,” added Russo. “Perhaps most galling of all, a cropped photo of the Vice President comforting his grandson outside of his son Beau’s funeral has been used to further this false narrative.” 

Which, of note, is distinctly different than this picture of Biden about to mouth-kiss his grandson Hunter after taking the oath of office.

Former Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor Lucy Flores accused Biden of smelling her hair before planting a “big slow kiss” on her head in a 2014 incident. 

On Sunday, Flores recounted the incident on CNN‘s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper, stating that amid the chaos and energy of the event, Biden “very unexpectedly and out of nowhere,” Biden “put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair, and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.” 

Lucy Flores: “Part of the reason why I decided to finally say something is because those behaviors were not being taken very seriously. … I just can’t imagine that there was never a situation where someone said to him, ‘Mr. Vice President, you probably should stop doing that’” pic.twitter.com/6Vt5m5DHrE

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) March 31, 2019

Biden’s odds of winning the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, according to PredictIt, have taken yet another dive on the news of his second accuser. 

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

China’s manufacturing PMI surged overnight back above 50, “proving” that all that stimulus hype has finally fixed the Chinese economy – sparking stock and commodity buying worldwide as a reflation-fest sent bond yields reeling higher.

There’s just one thing… we’ve seen these PMI ‘green shoots’ a few times before in the last decade…

But never mind that – US stocks soared (despite a big disappointment in US retail sales) mean ‘everything is awesome’ again…

Chinese stocks surged on the ‘green shoot’ – with ChiNext up 4%!!

As a reminder – foreign investors bought the most China stocks since December on Friday…

Despite a wall of disappointing PMIs across Europe, European stocks were panic bid at the open thanks to China optimism (UK’s FTSE lagged)

 

US equity futures show the opening panic bid drifted through the EU session then the algos stepped into lift it across the US day session…

 

Trannies were the day’s big winner – up a shocking 2.5%…

 

Busting above the 200DMA… (5th up day in a row)

 

 

The S&P took out the pre-Fed highs back to the Oct 10th plunge levels…

 

Remember The Dow has not fallen in April since 2005, and April seasonality for US Equities is a powerful phenomenon: April has posted the best avg monthly return for the S&P over the past 30 years (+1.64%) and actually posts the second-highest % hit-rate of “positive return instances” of any month over the past 90 years

There’s just one thing – VIX wasn’t playing along at all!!

 

 

So much for 20x oversubscribed! LYFT crashed back below its IP Price…

 

Grocers got hit on AMZN headlines…

 

US Treasury yields exploded higher today as the US Manufacturing ISM beat (after an initial kneejerk on the China data)…

 

Today was the biggest 10Y yield spike since Jan 4th’s big rebound from the Dec lows…

NOTE – the pattern of yields pikes at the start of each month.

 

The 3m10Y curve has surged back from inversion…

 

The market’s expectations of Fed dovishness have hawkishly surged in the last three days…

 

The dollar ended the day unchanged, finding support overnight at around 97.00 figure once again…

 

Cryptos were mixed with Bitcoin back above $4100 but Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin lower…

 

Copper and Crude jumped as China’s data hit but copper did not follow through at all…

 

WTI Crude kneejerked on Saudi production and then the liftathon algos took over…

 

Gold futures managed to scramble back above $1300 early on but then someone decided to puke over a billion notional paper gold into the market…

 

But if China is so awesome for the global economy, why didn’t copper rally?

And if oil is such a great signal of global growth, why aren’t inflation expectations following through?

Finally, we note that the last 24 hours have seen Aussie PMI plunged, Japan’s Tankan disappointed, South Korean exports disappointed (-8.2% YoY), German manufacturing massacre, French PMI miss, Italian new car registrations collapsed, EU inflation weak, US retail sales unexpectedly tumbled… but fuck yeah – we will focus on China’s PMI!

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2I6yY7F Tyler Durden

Just days after the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge disappointed once again in its reading for January, Amazon has handed Jerome Powell another excuse to keep interest rates on hold – or maybe even, as investors keep insisting, consider a cut.

Not long after it reported that Amazon’s Whole Foods would be raising prices on certain items at the insistence of vendors, who are struggling with higher transportation costs, the Wall Street Journal has returned with another Amazon “scoop”, this time reporting the exact opposite: The grocer once derided as “Whole Paycheck” will be cutting prices on hundreds of items in what WSJ described as “some of the broadest [price cuts] since Amazon bought Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017.” Citing internal WF documents, WSJ said the cuts would be implemented on Wednesday at the 480 stores, as competition between grocery chains heats up.

The average discount was reportedly around 20%.

Prices on more than 500 items, with more being added, are set to drop at Whole Foods stores across the U.S. on Wednesday, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The products range from sliced salami to popcorn to cod fillets.

The cuts are some of the broadest since Amazon bought Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017, spanning many product categories across the supermarket. The e-commerce giant has tried to extend its own reputation for low prices and convenience to Whole Foods, to counter a sense among some consumers that shopping there required a “Whole Paycheck.”

Whole Foods is cutting as Wal Mart and Kroger have insisted on keeping prices low to try and hang on to their share of the $1 trillion market for groceries in the US. Kroger shares tumbled during the last hour of the trading day after the Whole Foods news hit the tape.

Meanwhile, the reaction in Amazon and Wal-Mart shares was relatively muted.

Further discounts of up to 10% on sale items will be offered to Amazon Prime members. During the weeks before the cuts, the news was kept under wraps at the company to prevent leaks, with most employees at the chain’s stores unaware of the cuts. Employees will work overnight on Tuesday to change out labels on impacted products, which will include more meat and poultry items then past rounds of cuts. Notably, WF is moving ahead with the cuts as Amazon prepares to open another chain of grocery stores aimed at more middle-market shoppers.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2I5GGPK Tyler Durden

The Trump administration is floating the idea of hiring a “border” or “immigration” czar who would coordinate executive policies across several federal agencies, according to TPM, citing three anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. 

Two candidates are reportedly under consideration; Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli – both of whom have strong conservative views on immigration.

It has yet to be decided whether the post would be housed within the Department of Homeland Security or the White House.

White House press aides, Kobach and Cuccinelli did not immediately respond to requests for comment. –TPM

Trump, meanwhile, halted foreign aid to the Central American ‘caravan’ countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and threatened last week to close the US border with Mexico. 

On Friday Trump accused the countries of ‘setting up’ migrant caravans,  per CNN. 

“We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore. Because they haven’t done a thing for us. They set up these caravans,” Trump reportedly said. 

“At the Secretary’s instruction, we are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” said a State Department spokesperson. “We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.”

Sounding angry and fed up, Pres Trump says Mexico has to stop illegal crossings into the US. If it doesn’t, he says he’ll shut the southern border for a long time. Also calls on Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador & Colombia to do more to stop caravans and drugs headed for US. pic.twitter.com/HkFALvqvMV

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) March 29, 2019

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HPRDW9 Tyler Durden

In his most recent media appearance, Peter Schiff blasts the mainstream financial media and Fed policies, which he believes to be inflating the “biggest bubble yet”. Schiff appeared on the Quoth the Raven Podcast on Sunday and spent an hour and a half explaining his case as to why the United States is heading to a currency crisis.

Schiff On the Financial Media

Schiff led off talking about why he doesn’t get any mainstream financial media attention anymore, partly responding to recent comments by CNBC contributor Guy Adami that Schiff was “bad for TV”. 

“They abruptly cancelled my appearance a day before I was supposed to go on,” he said of a scheduled interview with Rick Santelli on CNBC. “They haven’t tried to book me since. Obviously Santelli’s team didn’t get the memo that Peter Schiff’s not allowed on.”

“I think they want to shield the audience from my perspective,” he continued. “Maybe they think they’re doing their audience a favor by keeping me off the air.”

Schiff On Gold

He continues the interview, explaining why he suggests his clients constantly keep 5-10% of their capital in gold. When asked about how he personally invests versus how he advises his clients, he explains why he is the most overweight gold miner stocks that he’s ever been. 

Schiff also says we will need a gold standard again, which he thinks is inevitable, much to the dispassion of the government. “When they choose gold, which is the right choice, it’ll only be because they’ve exhausted everything else that wouldn’t work. When they admit we need a gold standard, the party’s over”.

“Gold keeps government honest, which is why the government doesn’t want it,” he said.  

Schiff on the Fed’s Reversal

Schiff also talked at length about the Fed’s most recent decision to not raise rates again in 2019.

“The Fed did a reversal. A complete 180,” Schiff says about the Fed’s most recent minutes. “They’re never going to complete the normalization process,” Schiff recounts saying in late 2018 interviews. “I’m one of the only people out there saying the Fed is BSing, but the markets believed it.”

Schiff said either the Fed was deliberately lying in late 2018 when they said they would continue to taper and hike, or that they just didn’t know. Either way, Schiff believes that we are now in the midst of a bear market rally – not a bull market – as a result. 

“I said they were going to wait for an excuse to abort normalization because they couldn’t tell the truth. They can’t raise interest rates because there’s too much debt,” he says. “It has nothing to do with problems abroad, it has nothing to do with Brexit.” 

“This is permanent debt monetization,” he says. 

You can list to the full 90 minute podcast here:

Peter Schiff is Chairman of SchiffGold, CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc, and host of The Peter Schiff Show. Peter is an economic forecaster and investment advisor influenced by the free-market Austrian School of economics. He is one of the few forecasters who accurately and publicly predicted the 2007 housing market collapse and subsequent 2008 financial crisis.

Visit www.schiffgold.com for more on Peter Schiff. 

Visit www.quoththeravenresearch.com for more on Quoth the Raven Research. 

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FL79iw Tyler Durden

Authored by Irina Slav via Oilprice.com,

A study has suggested Caucasian Americans’ diet is contributing significantly more to climate change than the diets of other demographic groups in the country. The study, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, said white people contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions, at 680 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, but added that the Black demographic had the highest contribution to land impacts related to food.

The study set out to “fill in the gaps” in research about how various dietary habits affect the environment along the whole supply chain from land resources to water and energy. It focused on three demographic groups – White, non-Hispanic Back, and Latino – since they represent 92.4 percent of the U.S. population and looked into their eating habits to glean some insight into the relation between these habits and what it calls the food-energy-water nexis.

The study’s authors note that the White population, as portion of the U.S. total, was 61.3 percent, with Latinx – a term the authors of the study call intersectional and non-binary to reflect the latest term trends in social sciences – accounting for 17.8 percent and the Black population accounting for 13.3 percent.

In light of these proportions it’s hardly surprising the White population’s diet was a greater contributor to climate change in terms of greenhouse emissions. However, the study also suggested that the White group’s diet was a greater contributor to climate change because of its higher consumption of what the authors call “environmentally intense” food items.

“Results indicate that Whites tend to consume the highest rates of environmentally intense food items, except for the apples food item, when compared to their Black and Latinx counterparts,” the authors wrote.

“Comparing Whites to Latinx, Whites consume significantly more than Latinx for five of the seven environmentally intense food items. This pattern remains the same for beef meat although the difference between Whites and Latinx beef meat is marginally significant.”

Whites yield the highest per-capita GHG and water impacts across all categories due to their consumption of environmentally intense food items in the vegetables, dairy, total grains, and water food groups, whereas Blacks yield the highest per capita land impact due to their consumption of land-intense food items in the fruit and “protein foods” foodgroups.

So, will AOC ban ‘white Americans’ next?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Upj7Yy Tyler Durden

Last Friday we reported that Turkey slammed the door on Washington’s demands that it cancel its S-400 contract with Moscow in the wake of continued US threats that it will deny transfer of F-35s to Turkey over the Erdogan government’s plans to move forward with taking delivery of the advanced Russian anti-air defense system in July. 

This took place one day after four US senators introduced a bipartisan bill last Thursday to prohibit the transfer of the F-35 until the US can certify that Ankara will reject the S-400 deal. But Turkish officials reiterated their prior stance that it’s a “done deal” and that Turkey won’t back down. 

“We have signed a deal with Russia, and this deal is valid. Now we are discussing the delivery process,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Friday during a press conference while standing beside his Russian counterpart. He added that “We have an agreement with Russia and we are bound by it.” Confirming Turkey is set to take delivery from the Russians in July of this year, Cavusoglu added that every aspect of Turkish defense purchases were legitimate and in accord with international law.

The foreign minister also noted that Ankara has met its obligations to Lockheed Martin, producer of the F-35 stealth fighter. “Turkey is also a partner in the F-35 project. Some parts are being made in here in Turkey. Turkey has fulfilled its responsibilities in this regard,” the minister said.

* * *

Fast forward to today when, with Erdogan still smarting from one of his biggest electoral losses in decades in local elections which saw the ruling AKP lose control over the capital Ankara and, most likely, Istanbul as well, Reuters reports that the US has followed through with its threat, and halted delivery of equipment related to the stealthy F-35 fighter aircraft to the Nato ally, “marking the first concrete U.S. step to block delivery of the jet to the NATO ally in light of Ankara’s planned purchase of a Russian missile defense system.”

According to the Reuters sources, U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts they will not receive further shipments of F-35 related equipment needed to prepare for the arrival of the stealthy jet. The sources also said the next shipment of training equipment, and all subsequent shipments of F-35 related material, have been canceled.

As Reuters notes, “the disagreement over the F-35 is the latest of a series of diplomatic disputes between the United States and Turkey including Turkish demands that the United States extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran.”

In March, a Pentagon official said that the United States had a number of items it could withhold in order to send Turkey a signal that the United States was serious about Ankara dropping its ambition to own the S-400: the F-35 was one of them.

Predictably, the U.S. decision on the F-35s will likely complicate Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s planned visit to Washington this week for a NATO summit.

In parallel, Washington is also exploring whether it can remove Turkey from production of the F-35. Turkey makes parts of the fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays. Sources familiar with the F-35’s intricate worldwide production process and U.S. thinking on the issue last week said Turkey’s role can be replaced.

The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the Russian S-400 missile system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons in the future.

In an attempt to persuade Erdogan to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the United States offered the pricier American-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March. And while Turkey had shown interest in the Patriot system, it would not do so at the expense of abandoning the S-400 and extending Russia’s strategic ties with Turkey.

Meanwhile, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar in March said that despite the escalating diplomatic scandal, Turkish pilots were continuing their training at an air base in Arizona on the F-35, each of which costs $90 million, and that Ankara was expecting the aircraft to arrive in Turkey in November.

Last summer, a diplomatic rout between the US and Turkey led to a series of temporary sanctions which resulted in a collapse in bilateral relations between the two nations and culminated with Turkey’s economy sliding into recession, soaring prices and a collapse in the lira. Whether that painful episode repeats itself will depend on just how vocal Erdogan’s reaction will be when he learns that the the US has halted the F-35 shipment. Considering that the Turkish “executive” president is now scrambling to boost his popularity in the aftermath of the local elections, it is more than likely that the posture adopted by Erdogan will be aggressive to very aggressive, especially if he feels he has Putin’s backing. 

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