Tag: news

Goldman Spots An Ominous Inflection: Labor Market Recovery Has Stalled Out 

Goldman Spots An Ominous Inflection: Labor Market Recovery Has Stalled Out 

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 10:25

While scrolling through Twitter this morning, we stumbled upon a thread from Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal arguing (somewhat facetiously) that the rebound in total compensation (which, crucially, includes enhanced unemployment benefits and the stimulus checks) and retail sales (driven in part by the shift to working from home and a reaction to the shortages of critical supplies that plagued US pharmacies and supermarkets) suggests that the US economy did experience a “V-shaped recovery” after all, and that the only way this will end is if Congress pulls the plug (by not approving more stimulus checks and ‘enhanced’ benefits). After all, the last round of expanded unemployment checks are going out in 5 days.

Weezy can be forgiven for trolling readers with his “maybe the real V-shaped rebound was inside us all along” routine – that’s just what he does. In reality, one of the biggest reasons economists – or at least most economists – have stopped talking about a “V-shaped” rebound is that, despite two months of labor-market growth, some 50 million Americans have been marooned on the unemployment rolls.

And after this week ends, as Weezy acknowledges, Americans who are out of work will be forced to make do with less – a lot less.

At this point, 80% or more of US states have scaled back reopening measures, with many of these decisions coming in the past week or two. California, the biggest state in the US, has taken perhaps the most drastic measures to rollback its reopening.

Using real-time data, Goldman suggests that consumption is stalling out in July as restrictions are reimposed.

And if all US states who are rolling back their reopening efforts decide to go all-in like California, that could have a disastrous impact on consumption.

While it’s tempting to believe that any new restrictions would simply push growth back from Q3 and Q4 to 2021, as Goldman points out, the situation unfortunately isn’t that simple. Because the longer businesses remain shuttered, the more likely they will fail and close their doors permanently.

Meanwhile, the longer a given worker remains furloughed, the greater the chance that they’ll lose touch with their former employer.

Even a temporary stalling of the economy threatens to inflict some longer-term damage, however. We have highlighted the risk that operating well below normal for too long will cause scarring effects on the business sector and the labor market, which we monitor in our weekly US economic recovery tracker. For businesses like bars and restaurants, being forced to close a second time—and shortly after Paycheck Protection Program funds have been exhausted in most cases—could lead to a jump in permanent closures, though further support from the Phase 4 fiscal package should help.

Similarly, many of the over 80% of newly unemployed workers who remain on temporary layoff likely have a limited window of time to get back to their old jobs before the connection with their former employer is lost. Exhibit 10 shows that employment growth is also likely to stall in July after two months of healthy gains. Even if the stall in rehiring lasts only a couple of months, it could have lasting effects.

Finally, using real-time data from Google’s Mobility project, Goldman warns that after two months of rebound-driven growth, the job market is expected to stall in July.

Even if rehiring stalls out for only a few months, it could still have a lasting impact as the global economy tries to shake off the trappings of the pandemic.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hhyIRC Tyler Durden

Watch Live: Big Pharma CEOs Testify Before Congress About “Pathway To A Vaccine”

Watch Live: Big Pharma CEOs Testify Before Congress About “Pathway To A Vaccine”

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 10:21

With stocks continuing to power higher on elevated hopes for a vaccine by the end of the year, executives from five major drugmakers are testifying Tuesday before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee panel. The executives will testify about their high-stakes efforts to develop a vaccine. Lawmakers are expected to grill them about plans to develop and distribute the vaccines.

The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce is hosting the hearing. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce is led by Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone, and the subcommittee is led by Rep. Diana DeGette.

Watch live below:

Witnesses include:

  • Dr. Mene Pangalos Executive Vice President, BioPharmaceuticals R&D AstraZeneca
  • Dr. Macaya Douoguih Head of Clinical Development and Medical Affairs, Janssen Vaccines Johnson & Johnson
  • Dr. Julie Gerberding Executive Vice President and Chief Patient Officer Merck
  • Dr. Stephen Hoge President Moderna
  • Mr. John Young Chief Business Officer Pfizer

The tesimony is being delivered remotely via Cisco Webex.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30t829U Tyler Durden

15 Bullish Beliefs (Or Not) For The Market

15 Bullish Beliefs (Or Not) For The Market

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 10:05

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

n this edition of “Technically Speaking” we analyze the 15-bullish beliefs (or not) currently supporting the market. Is this time different? Or should investors be concerned?

Bullish Moves

Yesterday, the market broke out of its consolidation range that we have been discussing over the past several weeks. Such is undeniably bullish and sets the market up for a test of “all-time” highs. 

However, while we did get a bit of “exuberance” yesterday, there was still considerable weakness beneath the overall market. As noted this weekend, the month of July has continued to perform as expected and has provided the seasonal lift to stocks.

“In the short-term, the bulls remain in charge currently, and as such, we must be mindful of those trends. Also, the month of July tends to be one of the better performing months of the year.”

Seasonal Weakness

However, as noted by SentimenTrader, the markets are about to enter the seasonally “weak,” two months of the year.

“According to Morgan Stanley (via the WSJ), stocks are about to enter a seasonally rough stretch. Indeed we are, based on seasonal calendar returns for the S&P 500. Seasonality in stocks is a tertiary factor even at its best and carries very little weight. It’s still a headwind, though.”

“It’s even worse for indexes like the Nasdaq 100, whose component stocks have helped to drive this rally. The NDX’s seasonal peak is right now.”

“If we use the Morgan Stanley methodology to look at the S&P 500’s forward rolling 2-month returns since 1999, then we can see a similar pattern, with the biggest dip occurring right about now.”

“What the black line on the chart shows us is the S&P’s average two-month return over the next two months for every trading day of the year. We’re at trading day #138 as of Monday, with late July being one of the very few windows where the S&P’s average forward return is more than -1%. Contrast that to early October, when its average two-month return has been more than +3.5%.”

SentimenTrader’s analysis does mean that markets will “absolutely” fall out of bed next month. However, given the size of the run from the March lows, against a backdrop of extremely weak economic data, a “breather” should not be out of the question.

This is also the case, when we analyze the most common “media” arguments for the rally.

15 Bullish Factors (Or Not)

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it does offer many of the most important assumptions currently supporting the market.

1. Corporate managers have become so adept at their jobs that profit margins and equity valuations will remain at, or rise from current nearly unprecedented levels.

Read More

2. Bond yields will rise as economic growth returns, which will support stock prices.

Read More

3. The Fed will continue to expand its balance sheet and provide more liquidity. 

Read More

4. Annual fiscal deficits over $1 trillion will power economic growth with no consequences

Read More

5. The rising number of COVID-19 Cases, when they collide with the annual “Flu” season, will not inhibit consumers from getting back into the economy.

H/T @not_jim_cramer

6. The rising number of corporate bankruptcies is a “non-event” due to the Fed.

7. Technology companies are the best place to invest now and going forward as they can continue to grow earnings.

Read More

8. The resurgence of the U.S./China trade war won’t have any impact on the economy or markets.

Exports, which comprise roughly 40% of corporate profits, also have a high correlation to consumption and related economic activity.

Read More

9. Corporations, via stock buybacks, will continue to be the predominant purchaser of U.S. stocks

10. Liquidity flows to the financial markets are never going to stop. 

11. Central Banks can permanently prop up asset prices.

Read More

12. Valuations don’t matter. Just the Fed.

Read More

13. Corporations are issuing debt at cheap rates, which will be a good thing long-term. 

14. The stock market is a can’t lose situation. Buy stocks as they always go up.

 And…The most important factor bulls must assume to be true:

15. This time is different

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3jsddiY Tyler Durden

NFL Players Union Agrees To Safety Protocols, Clearing Major Hurdle To 2020-2021 Season

NFL Players Union Agrees To Safety Protocols, Clearing Major Hurdle To 2020-2021 Season

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 09:45

In a move that clears one more hurdle to what’s expected to be a full NFL season for 2020-2021, the NFL players union has agreed to a new arrangement whereby players will be tested daily for coronavirus infections during the first two weeks of training camp. The players’ union had raised concerns about practices putting players at risk with the first set to begin in a week.

The decision comes after dozens of MLB and NBA players have tested positive, along with a smattering of soccer players and other athletes, as the coronavirus briefly shut down athletics around the world. Although the 2020 Olympics has been postponed, European soccer leagues have mostly re-started play.

The NFL preseason is set to begin mostly on time, with practices starting in late July, with the first games being held more than a month later.

The NFL Players Association told the press that 72 players have tested positive for the virus as of July 10. The spread across the population is risk enough to make players anxious about sharing locker rooms and other facilities, along with the physical contact that’s simply an essential part of the sport.

Here’s more from ESPN:

According to a memo obtained by ESPN, the NFL and the NFL Players Association will require daily COVID-19 testing for the first two weeks of training camp. After two weeks, if the positive test rate is below 5%, the league would scale back to testing every other day. If the positive test rate is not below 5%, they will continue with daily testing until such time as it falls below that number. If the positivity rate hits 5% or higher at any point, they go back to daily testing until it comes down again.

“This is ongoing work,” Dr. Allen Sills, the league’s chief medical officer, said. “There’s no finish line with health and safety, and I think these protocol are living, breathing documents, which means they will change as we get new information. They will undoubtedly be changing over time, which is what we usually see in medicine.”

Upon arriving at the team facility for the first time, players and team employees will be required to test negative twice before being allowed in. Basically, you show up on Day One, take a test, go home. You then must wait 72 hours before taking a second test. If both are negative, you can go into the building and get to work on Day 5.

“We recognize that, as players and coaches and staff come in, they’re going to be coming in from all over the country and in some cases the world,” Sills said. “So we want to take a slow approach here.”

The memo states that the testing rules – and the 5% threshold – will apply to all Tier 1 and Tier 2 employees for each team in the league. A June 7 memo sent to the teams by the league defined Tier 1 employees as all players and necessary personnel who must have direct access to players. It defined Tier 2 as “other essential personnel who may need to be in close proximity to players and other Tier 1 individuals and who may need to access restricted areas.”

Sills also said the league’s expectation is that test results will come back within 24 hours. The NFL has contracted with BioReference Laboratories to handle its tests and has said multiple times over the past several months that it wants to remain responsible about not taking up too large a share of the available tests in any market.

In other news, the NFL has reportedly assented to a Players’ Union demand that there be no pre-season games, in keeping with the notion that the season be as stripped-down as possible to minimize risk to players and team staff.

The proposal included an offer for a longer training and acclimation period, ESPN reported.

Some players have taken to Twitter to voice their concerns about the league’s decision to start training camps before an agreement on safety protocols have been reached. But the agreement should quiet those concerns.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2E6k2Xp Tyler Durden

Judge Says Teen Who Didn’t Finish Online Schoolwork Must Stay Locked Up Until September

EdEFliPWAAEx9Bd

Protesters ask courts to #FreeGrace. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages jails and prisons, many people are fighting to keep low-level and nonviolent offenders out. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a 15-year-old girl has been jailed since May for not doing her homework—and a judge says that the Oakland County teenager will stay that way until at least sometime in September.

The family court judge, Mary Ellen Brennan, ruled on Monday that “Grace” must remain in a juvenile detention facility and denied the girl’s motion for early release.

“Grace, a pseudonym for the juvenile, was on probation on assault and theft charges related to a November assault on her mother,” notes The Detroit News. The assault Grace was found guilty of involved biting her mom’s finger and pulling her hair; the theft, swiping another student’s phone from the school locker room.

One condition of Grace’s probation was that she must complete her coursework from her high school’s online classes. When a judge found in May that Grace was behind on this remote coursework, the girl was ruled in violation of her probation and locked up.

Grace was “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school,” Brennan wrote.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Grace’s mom told ProPublica. “Every day I go to bed thinking, and wake up thinking, ‘How is this a better situation for her?'”

On Monday, Grace told Brennan: “I miss my mom. I can control myself. I can be obedient.”

Grace’s mom also wants her home.

But Brennan seems to think she knows more about what is best for this family than they do. “The right thing is for your and your mom to be separated for right now,” she told Grace in court. “Give yourself a chance to follow through and finish something.”

Brennan also said yesterday that Grace “was not detained because she didn’t turn her homework in. She was detained because she was a threat to her mother.” But Grace’s mom doesn’t seem to feel like her daughter is a threat to her at present, and the incidents that led to Grace’s arrest are not what provoked the judge to detain her; that came later, when the judge found Grace not following the court’s homework order.

“This situation is an emotional challenge,” said Grace’s mom in a statement, “but is also a window into the brokenness that demands and deserves attention and repair as to prevent other children and families from being negatively impacted by a system that is supposed to offer protection and support.”

“Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is,” points out ProPublica, which first reported on Grace’s story last week:

But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children’s health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace’s mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Activists flanked the courthouse yesterday in protest of Grace’s treatment.

“She is 15 years old,” Cherisie Evans, a leader with the Michigan Liberation Action Fund, told The Detroit News. “Where is the counseling? Where are the resources?”

Brennan insisted in court that Children’s Village, the juvenile detention facility that Grace is in, is a “treatment program.”

Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court’s communications director said “the State Court Administrative Office is working with the Oakland Circuit Court to examine the processes in this case.”

FOLLOWUP

Portland protest updates. Demonstrations in downtown Portland continued last night, despite the aggressive response from outside agitators in the form of federal agents.

In response to recent events, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.’s non-voting congressional delegate, a Democrat) are introducing legislation to make federal law enforcement agents identify themselves.

“The bill would require on-duty federal agents to display not just the name of their agency but also the individual agent’s last name and identification number,” notes The Nation. “It would also mandate a new form of oversight for the Justice Department, requiring its inspector general to conduct routine audits to ensure compliance with the legislation. The results of these audits would then be reported to Congress.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump seems mighty pleased with the work his secret police force is doing:

For more Reason takes on the situation, check out yesterday’s Reason Roundtable podcast, read Billy Binion on Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian’s Schatz’s hypocritical concerns that libertarians aren’t outraged, and check out C.J. Ciaramella on the Trump administration’s plans to take their Portland performance to Chicago.

QUICK HITS

• Kanye West is going through… something.

(More on the potential West candidacy here.)

• Whistleblower Reality Winner has contracted COVID-19 in prison.

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing on behalf of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen:

• The Forward profiles a group of black “public intellectuals [who] scramble the racial lines of today’s debate” and push back on “the racial essentialism they view as ascendant in our current moment—the idea that one must prioritize race over everything else to combat racism.”

• “It is now clear that it is not the case that President Trump doesn’t want to change his behavior. It’s that he is congenitally incapable to moderate it even for a single day,” suggests former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller at The Bulwark.

• Breonna Taylor, the woman fatally shot by Louisville cops in a no-knock raid on her home, “was not killed immediately,” lawyers for her family write in a revised lawsuit. “Rather, she lived for another five to six minutes before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on the floor of her home.”

• Ugh:

• “During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called ‘the sick man of Europe.’ The United States is now the sick man of the world,” suggests Jonathan Chait. And while “the distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary—a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation,” they’re really the “products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality.”

• New game: Russian bot or British boomer?

• Protecting and serving:

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How should the U.S. respond to the Schrems II decision?

The decision of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in Schrems II is gobsmacking in its mix of judicial imperialism and Eurocentric hypocrisy. The decision invalidates the Privacy Shield agreement between the U.S. and the EU on the ground that U.S. protections for individual rights are not “adequate,” by which the court means not “essentially equivalent” to the rights provided to individuals under European law. It manages to do this while acknowledging that the court and the EU have no authority to elaborate or enforce these rights against any of the EU’s member states. That, the court says, is “irrelevant.” It is making the rules for benighted foreign lands like Canada and the United States, not for Europeans. Freed from the prospect that any of the governments that appoint them will have to live with these rules, the judges of the CJEU declare that large chunks of U.S. intelligence law—including some of America’s most productive and essential authorities, such as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—are beyond the pale.

In theory, this means that the United States is a privacy-inadequate nation, and any company sending personal data here may be fined under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) up to four percent of gross global income. (Yes, the court left open the question whether a special set of corporate contract clauses remained a legal basis for transferring data to the U.S., but very few lawyers think those clauses will actually provide any protection when challenged, since no private contract can undo the obligations of Section 702.)

It is astonishing that a European court would assume it has authority to kill or cripple critical American intelligence programs by raising the threat of massive sanctions on American companies. In so doing, the court overrode a formal executive agreement reached by the EU with the U.S.; it also rejected the view of the European Commission that U.S. law was adequate to protect individual rights.

Still, the court clearly does think it can force its views on not just the United States but the rest of the world as well. It has already told the Canadians that they don’t measure up. Australia and India have been kept in limbo for a decade due to doubts about whether their democracies dance sufficiently to the justices’ tune.

Perhaps, had the court been less stiff-necked, it might have forced a change in the laws of these countries. But now the entire project is bound for disaster. China, which is already a great power when it comes to personal data, has signaled to Europe that it will not tolerate interference with its internal affairs. Yet rather than confront a country that clearly lacks protections for individual rights, European bureaucrats have spent 20 years chivvying the United States over data transfers, signing and breaking half a dozen agreements, always asking for more and usually getting additional concessions—including appointment of a special U.S. “ombudsperson” to hear European complaints; enforcement of European law by U.S. agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Commerce Department; and a special Judicial Redress Act, passed for Europe in 2015, that grants Europeans the right to file FOIA petitions. None of that was good enough for the CJEU. This history shows that, even if the U.S. again tried to modify its law to meet the court’s rigid demands in Schrems II, more litigation and more demands—not peace—would be the result.

The time for American concessions is over. Throughout the emergence of this issue, the U.S. has insisted—and the EU has agreed—that data flows across the Atlantic should not be interrupted. Indeed, the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement signed by Europe makes clear that data flows may not be regulated in the name of privacy if the regulation is a means of “arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where like conditions prevail.” Nothing could be more discriminatory or arbitrary than 20 years of pursuing the United States for the privacy equivalent of parking tickets while ignoring similar infractions by the member states and an endless series of privacy felonies by the People’s Republic of China. It’s time for the U.S. to get serious about ending this campaign of harassment.

What can the United States do? Plenty. Here are a few options that belong on the table in the interagency process.

1. Rescind the concessions the U.S. made to get the now-broken deal. This is a no-brainer. Europe has broken the deal it made, and it cannot keep the parts of the deal it likes. The U.S. attorney general should withdraw the special status of European nationals under the Freedom of Information Act and the Judicial Redress Act. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence should abolish the office of the ombudsperson created to give Europeans comfort that their complaints about intelligence collection would be heard. President Trump should rescind PPD-28, the Obama-era set of politically correct limitations on intelligence community activities, which has been kept alive as part of the Privacy Shield negotiations.

2. Prepare to retaliate in a way that shows the U.S. is serious. Americans have never paid much attention to periodic eruptions of the data transfer issue. We are always a little inclined to think that maybe Europeans have something to teach us about privacy and human rights, so righteous American anger about intrusion on our sovereignty has been slow to ignite. But now is the time to show Europe that the U.S. is serious about keeping in place effective counterterrorism measures—and keeping the right to write U.S. laws without getting permission from European governments.

Because this decision violates U.S. rights under the WTO, the executive branch has authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs and other import restrictions on the countries of the European Union. And it should. If the U.S. wants to get Europe’s attention, it needs to get Germany’s attention, which probably means heavy tariffs on German cars and perhaps car parts. Airplanes and airplane parts are also a touchpoint. As usual, the list of retaliation candidates will need to include something of great value to each member state—Irish whiskey, say, or French wines.

The retaliation process will take a few months. The goal is not to impose the tariffs but to put an end to the crisis—and to Europe’s peculiar arrogance about imposing its personal data law on the rest of the world.

3. Make common cause with the U.K., Canada, Australia and perhaps India. The U.S. doesn’t have to stand alone. The EU has been threatening the U.K. with an “inadequacy” determination as punishment for Brexit. Its court has already struck at Canadian law. And Australia and India surely know they are next. The U.S. should include these nations in any negotiation, but only if they join America in preparing sanctions against Europe.

4. Find a stopgap solution in one of the member states. The CJEU’s admission that it doesn’t have anything to say about how member states protect personal data isn’t just a confession of hypocrisy. It could be an opportunity to do an end run on the whole mess created by the court. If any one of the member states—Poland, say, or Ireland or Hungary—were willing to sign a national security agreement with the United States, it would be acting within the national security authority conferred on it by Article 4(2) of the Treaty of the European Union.

Suppose, in the pursuit of its national security interests, Poland agreed to allow personal data to flow to the United States without restriction, in exchange for which the United States agreed to share with Poland any counterterrorism data it was able to obtain by virtue of its worldwide intelligence collection. That would only apply to data transferred from Poland, of course, but companies could set up subsidiaries in Warsaw, transfer their data holdings there from elsewhere in Europe—after all, the EU is a single market—and then let them move to the United States.

Or suppose that Poland’s government and data protection authority agreed that data exports to the United States could be challenged on the ground that protections for Europeans from U.S. intelligence were inadequate—but only by a plaintiff who could demonstrate concrete economic injury. Since the European objection to U.S. law has been almost entirely theoretical, this has the double advantage of providing redress for actual human rights violations while exposing the fact that, by and large, no one in Europe can point to any.

Whether these one-country solutions would withstand the inevitable legal wrangling, I don’t know, but the court left no time for companies to adjust. Getting a Polish exit visa for data from that country would give them breathing room even if the shelter doesn’t ultimately survive its journey through the courts.

5. Negotiate an agreement that ends the threat to American companies. If the U.S. can get European governments to take seriously American objections to the notion that Europe can write U.S. law, there is a simple solution to this problem. The CJEU’s opinion, though written as though grounded in the rights of man, is in fact based on a European regulation and a European treaty. As a matter of international law, both of those can be overridden by a newer treaty. Indeed, the U.S. entered into a binding executive agreement—the international equivalent of a treaty—when it bargained for the adequacy determination that the court overturned.

How could the court overturn a binding agreement, then? The Americans who negotiated the deal under the Obama administration gave a lot of binding promises about how they would handle European data, but they didn’t get a binding promise in return that U.S. law would be deemed adequate and that data flows of compliant companies would not be restricted. Maybe they got snookered. Maybe they couldn’t muster the will to draw a line in the sand. Whatever the reason, the agreement is utterly one-sided—all American concessions, plus a little European mood music.

So the U.S. should ask for the concessions it should have gotten last time: a binding assurance that U.S. protections for individual rights are not in need of European editing and that data flows will never be threatened again over this issue.

As democracies with long histories of protecting civil liberties—histories that stand up well next to those of most EU members—the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada should get the same assurances. The CJEU’s only source of power to undo the deal is the GDPR and the Treaty of the European Union (which is also the source of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). All of those instruments must yield to a binding international agreement with the United States and other democratic nations.

A version of this post also appears on Lawfare.

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Judge Says Teen Who Didn’t Finish Online Schoolwork Must Stay Locked Up Until September

EdEFliPWAAEx9Bd

Protesters ask courts to #FreeGrace. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages jails and prisons, many people are fighting to keep low-level and nonviolent offenders out. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a 15-year-old girl has been jailed since May for not doing her homework—and a judge says that the Oakland County teenager will stay that way until at least sometime in September.

The family court judge, Mary Ellen Brennan, ruled on Monday that “Grace” must remain in a juvenile detention facility and denied the girl’s motion for early release.

“Grace, a pseudonym for the juvenile, was on probation on assault and theft charges related to a November assault on her mother,” notes The Detroit News. The assault Grace was found guilty of involved biting her mom’s finger and pulling her hair; the theft, swiping another student’s phone from the school locker room.

One condition of Grace’s probation was that she must complete her coursework from her high school’s online classes. When a judge found in May that Grace was behind on this remote coursework, the girl was ruled in violation of her probation and locked up.

Grace was “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school,” Brennan wrote.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Grace’s mom told ProPublica. “Every day I go to bed thinking, and wake up thinking, ‘How is this a better situation for her?'”

On Monday, Grace told Brennan: “I miss my mom. I can control myself. I can be obedient.”

Grace’s mom also wants her home.

But Brennan seems to think she knows more about what is best for this family than they do. “The right thing is for your and your mom to be separated for right now,” she told Grace in court. “Give yourself a chance to follow through and finish something.”

Brennan also said yesterday that Grace “was not detained because she didn’t turn her homework in. She was detained because she was a threat to her mother.” But Grace’s mom doesn’t seem to feel like her daughter is a threat to her at present, and the incidents that led to Grace’s arrest are not what provoked the judge to detain her; that came later, when the judge found Grace not following the court’s homework order.

“This situation is an emotional challenge,” said Grace’s mom in a statement, “but is also a window into the brokenness that demands and deserves attention and repair as to prevent other children and families from being negatively impacted by a system that is supposed to offer protection and support.”

“Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is,” points out ProPublica, which first reported on Grace’s story last week:

But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children’s health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace’s mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Activists flanked the courthouse yesterday in protest of Grace’s treatment.

“She is 15 years old,” Cherisie Evans, a leader with the Michigan Liberation Action Fund, told The Detroit News. “Where is the counseling? Where are the resources?”

Brennan insisted in court that Children’s Village, the juvenile detention facility that Grace is in, is a “treatment program.”

Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court’s communications director said “the State Court Administrative Office is working with the Oakland Circuit Court to examine the processes in this case.”

FOLLOWUP

Portland protest updates. Demonstrations in downtown Portland continued last night, despite the aggressive response from outside agitators in the form of federal agents.

In response to recent events, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.’s non-voting congressional delegate, a Democrat) are introducing legislation to make federal law enforcement agents identify themselves.

“The bill would require on-duty federal agents to display not just the name of their agency but also the individual agent’s last name and identification number,” notes The Nation. “It would also mandate a new form of oversight for the Justice Department, requiring its inspector general to conduct routine audits to ensure compliance with the legislation. The results of these audits would then be reported to Congress.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump seems mighty pleased with the work his secret police force is doing:

For more Reason takes on the situation, check out yesterday’s Reason Roundtable podcast, read Billy Binion on Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian’s Schatz’s hypocritical concerns that libertarians aren’t outraged, and check out C.J. Ciaramella on the Trump administration’s plans to take their Portland performance to Chicago.

QUICK HITS

• Kanye West is going through… something.

(More on the potential West candidacy here.)

• Whistleblower Reality Winner has contracted COVID-19 in prison.

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing on behalf of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen:

• The Forward profiles a group of black “public intellectuals [who] scramble the racial lines of today’s debate” and push back on “the racial essentialism they view as ascendant in our current moment—the idea that one must prioritize race over everything else to combat racism.”

• “It is now clear that it is not the case that President Trump doesn’t want to change his behavior. It’s that he is congenitally incapable to moderate it even for a single day,” suggests former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller at The Bulwark.

• Breonna Taylor, the woman fatally shot by Louisville cops in a no-knock raid on her home, “was not killed immediately,” lawyers for her family write in a revised lawsuit. “Rather, she lived for another five to six minutes before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on the floor of her home.”

• Ugh:

• “During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called ‘the sick man of Europe.’ The United States is now the sick man of the world,” suggests Jonathan Chait. And while “the distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary—a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation,” they’re really the “products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality.”

• New game: Russian bot or British boomer?

• Protecting and serving:

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How should the U.S. respond to the Schrems II decision?

The decision of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in Schrems II is gobsmacking in its mix of judicial imperialism and Eurocentric hypocrisy. The decision invalidates the Privacy Shield agreement between the U.S. and the EU on the ground that U.S. protections for individual rights are not “adequate,” by which the court means not “essentially equivalent” to the rights provided to individuals under European law. It manages to do this while acknowledging that the court and the EU have no authority to elaborate or enforce these rights against any of the EU’s member states. That, the court says, is “irrelevant.” It is making the rules for benighted foreign lands like Canada and the United States, not for Europeans. Freed from the prospect that any of the governments that appoint them will have to live with these rules, the judges of the CJEU declare that large chunks of U.S. intelligence law—including some of America’s most productive and essential authorities, such as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—are beyond the pale.

In theory, this means that the United States is a privacy-inadequate nation, and any company sending personal data here may be fined under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) up to four percent of gross global income. (Yes, the court left open the question whether a special set of corporate contract clauses remained a legal basis for transferring data to the U.S., but very few lawyers think those clauses will actually provide any protection when challenged, since no private contract can undo the obligations of Section 702.)

It is astonishing that a European court would assume it has authority to kill or cripple critical American intelligence programs by raising the threat of massive sanctions on American companies. In so doing, the court overrode a formal executive agreement reached by the EU with the U.S.; it also rejected the view of the European Commission that U.S. law was adequate to protect individual rights.

Still, the court clearly does think it can force its views on not just the United States but the rest of the world as well. It has already told the Canadians that they don’t measure up. Australia and India have been kept in limbo for a decade due to doubts about whether their democracies dance sufficiently to the justices’ tune.

Perhaps, had the court been less stiff-necked, it might have forced a change in the laws of these countries. But now the entire project is bound for disaster. China, which is already a great power when it comes to personal data, has signaled to Europe that it will not tolerate interference with its internal affairs. Yet rather than confront a country that clearly lacks protections for individual rights, European bureaucrats have spent 20 years chivvying the United States over data transfers, signing and breaking half a dozen agreements, always asking for more and usually getting additional concessions—including appointment of a special U.S. “ombudsperson” to hear European complaints; enforcement of European law by U.S. agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Commerce Department; and a special Judicial Redress Act, passed for Europe in 2015, that grants Europeans the right to file FOIA petitions. None of that was good enough for the CJEU. This history shows that, even if the U.S. again tried to modify its law to meet the court’s rigid demands in Schrems II, more litigation and more demands—not peace—would be the result.

The time for American concessions is over. Throughout the emergence of this issue, the U.S. has insisted—and the EU has agreed—that data flows across the Atlantic should not be interrupted. Indeed, the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement signed by Europe makes clear that data flows may not be regulated in the name of privacy if the regulation is a means of “arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where like conditions prevail.” Nothing could be more discriminatory or arbitrary than 20 years of pursuing the United States for the privacy equivalent of parking tickets while ignoring similar infractions by the member states and an endless series of privacy felonies by the People’s Republic of China. It’s time for the U.S. to get serious about ending this campaign of harassment.

What can the United States do? Plenty. Here are a few options that belong on the table in the interagency process.

1. Rescind the concessions the U.S. made to get the now-broken deal. This is a no-brainer. Europe has broken the deal it made, and it cannot keep the parts of the deal it likes. The U.S. attorney general should withdraw the special status of European nationals under the Freedom of Information Act and the Judicial Redress Act. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence should abolish the office of the ombudsperson created to give Europeans comfort that their complaints about intelligence collection would be heard. President Trump should rescind PPD-28, the Obama-era set of politically correct limitations on intelligence community activities, which has been kept alive as part of the Privacy Shield negotiations.

2. Prepare to retaliate in a way that shows the U.S. is serious. Americans have never paid much attention to periodic eruptions of the data transfer issue. We are always a little inclined to think that maybe Europeans have something to teach us about privacy and human rights, so righteous American anger about intrusion on our sovereignty has been slow to ignite. But now is the time to show Europe that the U.S. is serious about keeping in place effective counterterrorism measures—and keeping the right to write U.S. laws without getting permission from European governments.

Because this decision violates U.S. rights under the WTO, the executive branch has authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs and other import restrictions on the countries of the European Union. And it should. If the U.S. wants to get Europe’s attention, it needs to get Germany’s attention, which probably means heavy tariffs on German cars and perhaps car parts. Airplanes and airplane parts are also a touchpoint. As usual, the list of retaliation candidates will need to include something of great value to each member state—Irish whiskey, say, or French wines.

The retaliation process will take a few months. The goal is not to impose the tariffs but to put an end to the crisis—and to Europe’s peculiar arrogance about imposing its personal data law on the rest of the world.

3. Make common cause with the U.K., Canada, Australia and perhaps India. The U.S. doesn’t have to stand alone. The EU has been threatening the U.K. with an “inadequacy” determination as punishment for Brexit. Its court has already struck at Canadian law. And Australia and India surely know they are next. The U.S. should include these nations in any negotiation, but only if they join America in preparing sanctions against Europe.

4. Find a stopgap solution in one of the member states. The CJEU’s admission that it doesn’t have anything to say about how member states protect personal data isn’t just a confession of hypocrisy. It could be an opportunity to do an end run on the whole mess created by the court. If any one of the member states—Poland, say, or Ireland or Hungary—were willing to sign a national security agreement with the United States, it would be acting within the national security authority conferred on it by Article 4(2) of the Treaty of the European Union.

Suppose, in the pursuit of its national security interests, Poland agreed to allow personal data to flow to the United States without restriction, in exchange for which the United States agreed to share with Poland any counterterrorism data it was able to obtain by virtue of its worldwide intelligence collection. That would only apply to data transferred from Poland, of course, but companies could set up subsidiaries in Warsaw, transfer their data holdings there from elsewhere in Europe—after all, the EU is a single market—and then let them move to the United States.

Or suppose that Poland’s government and data protection authority agreed that data exports to the United States could be challenged on the ground that protections for Europeans from U.S. intelligence were inadequate—but only by a plaintiff who could demonstrate concrete economic injury. Since the European objection to U.S. law has been almost entirely theoretical, this has the double advantage of providing redress for actual human rights violations while exposing the fact that, by and large, no one in Europe can point to any.

Whether these one-country solutions would withstand the inevitable legal wrangling, I don’t know, but the court left no time for companies to adjust. Getting a Polish exit visa for data from that country would give them breathing room even if the shelter doesn’t ultimately survive its journey through the courts.

5. Negotiate an agreement that ends the threat to American companies. If the U.S. can get European governments to take seriously American objections to the notion that Europe can write U.S. law, there is a simple solution to this problem. The CJEU’s opinion, though written as though grounded in the rights of man, is in fact based on a European regulation and a European treaty. As a matter of international law, both of those can be overridden by a newer treaty. Indeed, the U.S. entered into a binding executive agreement—the international equivalent of a treaty—when it bargained for the adequacy determination that the court overturned.

How could the court overturn a binding agreement, then? The Americans who negotiated the deal under the Obama administration gave a lot of binding promises about how they would handle European data, but they didn’t get a binding promise in return that U.S. law would be deemed adequate and that data flows of compliant companies would not be restricted. Maybe they got snookered. Maybe they couldn’t muster the will to draw a line in the sand. Whatever the reason, the agreement is utterly one-sided—all American concessions, plus a little European mood music.

So the U.S. should ask for the concessions it should have gotten last time: a binding assurance that U.S. protections for individual rights are not in need of European editing and that data flows will never be threatened again over this issue.

As democracies with long histories of protecting civil liberties—histories that stand up well next to those of most EU members—the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada should get the same assurances. The CJEU’s only source of power to undo the deal is the GDPR and the Treaty of the European Union (which is also the source of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). All of those instruments must yield to a binding international agreement with the United States and other democratic nations.

A version of this post also appears on Lawfare.

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Is The EU Project Now Too Big To Succeed?

Is The EU Project Now Too Big To Succeed?

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 09:30

Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorrisge.com,

“Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan..”

The big news this morning is the EU reaching an agreement on its’ Euro 750 bln rescue fund and a total €1.1 trillion EU budget, after its longest ever, five-day, marathon negotiating session.  Ode to Joy is blasting round the halls of Berlaymont, but it’s hardly the symbol of solidarity Macron, Merkel et al are claiming between the member states. Its pragmatism in action as the frugal four/five (depends if you count Finland) were bought into line with promises of rebates, Hungary got away with Orban’s war on democracy, while Poland wriggles out of carbon neutrality by 2050 and can keep burning coal. 

It would be easy to pick holes across the whole conflabulated deal, but why snipe?  We should celebrate Europe reaching agreement. The market loves it…

The major point of friction over recent days was grants versus loans. The deal splits into €360 of loans and €390 of grants to aid Covid recovery across Europe, with the costs to be borne by all the members, in practice meaning the 12 net contributors.

The Frugal North wanted Italy – because this is mostly about bailing out Italy – to be on the line for any money it receives. Instead, Italy gets €82 bln of handouts from Brussels, which will help enormously…. to finance all sorts of murky goings-on? Or, who knows… some of it might even go to boosting Italian employment as the virus recession deepens.. Italian bonds have tightened on the news. Italy will claim a victory.

Let’s not be negative..  This morning’s agreement is another step in the EU’s slow and painful path towards a Federal Europe. Much to the chagrin of Brexit-supporting, EU-hating Tory skeptics – Europe is getting there, plod by agonising plod.  Sure, there are massive cracks in the edifice, which are disguised by slapping on a veneer of Polyfilla that will need fixed again in a few years time.. but its slowly happening.. 

But…. 

My big concern for Europe is that’s it’s becoming just too huge a project to succeed. European unity was working well, through closer economic ties and friendly political links, open borders and a common market boosting recovering post war economies, but then it suddenly became a confused rush and embrace an ill-conceived common currency and unwished for political union. 

It’s now become even more complex than building La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and less well defined in terms of plans.. 

All the energy that’s been expended on the “Project” is effort that, perhaps, could have been used better to create wealth, jobs and prosperity across a Europe of diverse but closer links, allowing the process of gradual integration, generation by generation to meld us together.  Instead, the EU has become a massive state bureaucracy primarily concerned with consolidation and re-distribution rather than the creation of national wealth.  

Europe’s economy is still limping from the last Global crisis in 2008 – hamstrung by the interlinked failures of Austerity, Debt and the Euro. To get Europe back on a growth track it has to be honest about why its underperforming – and that’s broadly because the Euro was adopted to early and without any understanding of its consequences. 

The long-term success of Europe will depend on creating a vibrant economy right across the continent. If they are planning to get there.. then they should not be starting from here. Go back. Start again.

Let’s not kid ourselves that handing €82 bln to Italy and sloshing another €300 bln of dosh around Europe is going to cure the Virus recession, solve youth unemployment or create a level productivity playing field. European Unity is a fantastic idea – but in practice its difficult. Very difficult when you have such a range of diverse and sometimes defunct economies with different tastes for democracy, law, order and occasional levels of pandemic graft. But… long-term, little steps move the European project forward.. step-by-tiny-step. 

Generation by generation Europe will become a single state. 

Meanwhile.. back to the deal: Last night’s agreement will be financed by allowing the European Commission to issue bonds of 3-30 year maturities on behalf of the European Union to directly fund loans and grants to member states. That is the critical step forward.  The bonds are direct and unconditional obligations of the EU – there is no joint and several liability. The EU has established itself as a sovereign borrower in its own right. Funds raised under the programme are lent or granted back to back to the beneficiary country. 

Apparently, it was a cracking meeting – full of drama and bluster. France and Austria haven’t had a dust-up like that for decades. The point of friction was loans vs grants. There will be some noise in the EU parliament as the deal is rubber-stamped, but EU voters don’t get a say – at least until their next elections. That’s going to be interesting as Anti-EU parties exploit the narrative the rich 12 net contributor nations shouldn’t be paying for their southern and eastern brethren. 

The EU is rated AAA/Aaa/AA by Fitch, Moody’s and S&P. Fitch expects member states will provide extra funding above budget contributions to repay EU debt, and that guarantees by member states have been provided. Moody’s notes the EU’s balanced budget principle (!). S&P focuses on the fact it’s relying on the 12 wealthiest net contributor nations to effectively pay for all 27 members. 

The ECB will be able to buy the bonds.. and who knows… get a taste for yield curve control of its very own yield curve! Where should EU bonds price? A slight discount to Germany? 

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

Bahamas Bans American Tourists As Florida Becomes Epicenter Of Pandemic 

Bahamas Bans American Tourists As Florida Becomes Epicenter Of Pandemic 

Tyler Durden

Tue, 07/21/2020 – 09:05

The US has recorded more than 3,809,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began. Another grim statistic is that the death toll stands at around 138,000. The reemergence of the virus pandemic has resulted in the Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minni banning American tourists from entry. 

Minni announced the ban over the weekend and also declared flights to the US would be halted. 

He said the virus pandemic in the Bahamas has worsened “at an exponential rate” since the country, located within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Caribbean, reopened its international border in early July. 

“International commercial flights and commercial vessels carrying passengers will not be permitted to enter our borders, except for commercial flights from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union,” Minnis said in a National Address on Sunday.

He said, “Bahamasair will cease outgoing flights to the United States of America, effective immediately.”

Minnis’ decision to close the international border with the US follows recent developments of Florida becoming the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. 

He said, “As a country, we have to do what is right and necessary. If we do not take these measures now, we will pay a higher and deadlier price later. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we acted early to prevent widespread sickness and death.” 

Closing the international border with the US will only amplify the recession in the Bahamas, considering the tourism industry is more than half the country’s GDP. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32Mca7w Tyler Durden