Tag: news

Bitcoin Tumbles To 10-Day Lows As Major Korean Bank Clamps Down On Crypto-Linked Accounts

Bitcoin prices have accelerated lower overnight, breaking below the $11,000 level and falling to 10-day lows.

Bitcoin is leading the charge lower but the rest of crypto is also sliding…

While potentially some relief from the China-US trade truce could be driving some selling in cryptos, some market participants noted that fears of further crackdowns in Asia also sparked some unwinds.

As CoinTelegraph’s Thomas Simms reports, one of South Korea’s biggest banks is planning to intensify regulations on accounts linked tocrypto exchanges, BEI News reported on July 1.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The “special measures” Shinhan Bank are proposing would reportedly involve dedicating staff to analyzing account transactions.

It is believed the bank is hoping to distance itself from claims that it is helping financial criminals, amid a rise in the number of fraud cases involving exchanges.

Later in July, the bank is also hoping to launch an artificial intelligence monitoring system that uses deep learning to identify fraudulent transactions more quickly and accurately.

BEI News quoted a Shinhan Bank spokesperson as saying:

“We have set up a comprehensive plan for the elimination of telecommunication and financial fraud… We will continue to implement preventive measures so that customers will not be harmed in the future.”

The clampdown comes as crypto exchanges continue to fall victim to hacks — including the South Korean platform Bithumb.

Bithumb has suffered several major hacks. In March, more than three million eos (worth $17.5 million at press time) was stolen from a hot wallet.

A bigger attack last summer saw $17 million stolen across 11 cryptocurrencies, predominantly bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH.)

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RMT5KU Tyler Durden

The ACA Cases Continue

On July 9, at 1pm Central time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear oral argument in Texas v. United States, the latest effort to have the Affordable Care Act struck down in federal court. The panel hearing the case (announced this morning) consists of Senior Judge Carolyn Dineen King, Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, and Judge Kurt D. Englehardt. Audio of the oral argument should be posted later that afternoon.

Many commentators have evaluated this case through a partisan prism, assuming that the best way to predict the outcome is simply by looking at the partisan affiliation of the Presidents who nominated the judges. I think this is mistaken for multiple reasons.

First, unlike the prior ACA cases to reach the Supreme Court, the underlying arguments advanced by the plaintiffs are not well grounded in conservative jurisprudential principles. Whereas the arguments in NFIB and King were rooted in aggressive enumerated powers and textualist jurisprudence, the arguments here actually cut against traditional conservative approaches to justiciability (standing in particular) and severability. As a consequence, there is less fertile ground in which the case can take root.

Second (and somewhat related), the arguments advanced by the red-state plaintiffs have not garnered support within the conservative legal or political establishment. Conspicuously absent from the filings before the Fifth Circuit are briefs from Republican lawmakers or the conservative legal intelligensia. Even more conspicuously, prominent conservative political and legal figures—including Michael McConnell and Ohio AG Dave Yost—have filed briefs on the other side. At the same time, noted ACA critics, such as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have also been quite critical of the red-state arguments. This is further evidence of the weak and unorthodox nature of the plaintiffs’ arguments, and this fact is unlikely to be lost on the judges hearing the case. What this means is that Texas v. US is more like the Origination Clause challenge to the ACA than it is like NFIB or King.

As regular VC readers know, I’ve blogged on this litigation extensively and contributed to amicus briefs before the district and circuit courts. Here’s a listing of my prior posts on this litigation:

I’ve also co-authored two New York Times op-eds on the case with Abbe Gluck, available here and here.

Texas v. US is not the only ACA case in town. While folks were focused on the Census, redistricting, and cross cases, the Supreme Court accepted certiorari in a trio of cases concerning whether the federal government owes health insurance companies risk corridor subsidy payments. The ACA declares that insurance companies are entitled to such money, but Congress pointedly refused to appropriate the money, and adopted an appropriations rider saying no money could be spent to fulfill this obligation. A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the insurance companies’ claims. At stake is a good bit of money—$12 billion—in addition to broader principles about appropriations law, and the ability of Congress to use appropriations riders to alter legal or financial obligations contained in previously enacted statutes.

Nicholas Bagley has more background on these cases here.

 

 

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French Bond Yields Slide Below Zero, Hit All Time Record Lows

Ten days ago when global bond yields tumbled amid renewed fears that the global economy was headed for a recession, we reported that a record $13 trillion in global sovereign debt was trading with a negative yield.

And while we don’t have the latest numbers from Bloomberg, pending their EOD update at the close, it is safe to say that as of this moment, there is a new all time high in negative yielding debt, because while German yields tumbled deeper into record negative territory this morning following abysmal global PMIs and comments from the ECB that the central bank was prepared for any contingency (i.e., ready to cut rates even more), it was the turn of France to follow Germany into sub-zero territory as the French 10Y yield just dropped below 0%, assuring that the total amount of negative-yielding debt just rose by a few hundred billion.

Meanwhile, the disconnect between global bonds – which are now screaming “recession is coming” – and global stocks which are partying as if the Fed can’t wait for S&P 3,000 to cut rates not by 25bps but 50bps, if not more, has never been greater.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZZ1kXi Tyler Durden

“Libya Under Turkish Invasion”: Haftar Releases Hostages But Vows War On Turkish Planes, Vessels

We’ve noted before that Libya’s new civil war has increasingly come out in the open as in reality an international proxy war, with even the White House in the past months “switching” support from the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli to the renegade General Khalifa Haftar, whose LNA forces have for months laid siege to the capital in an attempt to wrest the country from GNA authority.

And to nobody’s surprise, advanced American-made anti-tank missiles believed supplied by the UAE have recently been found among Haftar’s weapons stockpiles. All of this makes Gen. Haftar’s latest “declaration of war” on Turkey more interesting. Over the weekend the LNA threatened to shoot down Turkish airplanes found in Libyan air space and to destroy Turkish ships off the Libyan coast, in response to Turkish military support to GNA forces in Tripoli, which resulted in a significant setback for pro-Haftar militants.

Front line fighting near Tripoli, via the BBC

Haftar’s rebel force had claimed Libya is “under Turkish invasion” and that it would act against any Turkish threat, including Turkish flagged vessels found in Libyan territorial waters. 

Over the weekend Turkey threatened to attack Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya directly as a “legitimate target” if the LNA failed to release six Turkish citizens under its detention. Haftar had previously declared intent to detain all Turkish nationals in Libya, but walked back the threat while additionally releasing the six Turkish hostages on Monday. 

Ankara’s threat of attack appeared to have worked, according to Al Jazeera: “The spokesman of Haftar’s forces, Colonel Ahmed Masmari, earlier said they were detaining all Turkish nationals in Libya. But last night [Sunday], he retreated saying he does not have any knowledge of the detention of the Turkish nationals.” The Turkish Foreign Ministry has confirmed the Turkish nationals’ release on Monday. 

However, Haftar has yet to walk back LNA statements declaring Turkey “an enemy of the state”. Having such a powerful and military involved enemy as Erdogan’s Turkey could permanently stall his attempts to take all of Libya. 

Gen. Haftar — who solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by Turkey and most European countries. He holds a huge portion of the country as well as oil production. 

Haftar has long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya” — given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.

He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi’s eventual capture and field execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011.  

It was only months ago that President Trump for the first time voiced public support to Haftar’s forces. The president’s April comments signaled a complete reversal of US policy, given that up to that point the US had officially backed the GNA.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yn2MlL Tyler Durden

Drug Warriors Peddle Fears About Cocaine. Again.

Drug warriors are once again pushing a high grade of cocaine fears to willing users. It’s a market in pointless prohibitionism that just won’t go away.

Tough drug laws and brutal enforcement haven’t done much to stifle the market for illegal intoxicants, as drug-enforcement agencies around the world readily admit. But they do make the black-market production of concentrated-value products like cocaine a profitable undertaking. That’s good news for prohibitionists who need something to justify their paychecks and see a growth industry in fanning new fears.

“Current data on cocaine show that both the number of seizures and the volumes seized are at an all-time high,” the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) warns in its 2019 report. 

Not to be outdone, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) cautions that “opium production and cocaine manufacture remain at record levels. The amounts intercepted are also higher than ever, with the amount of cocaine seized up 74 per cent over the past decade, compared with a 50 per cent rise in manufacture during the same period.”

Wow! That sounds like a soaring market. And yet: “In 2017, an estimated 18 million worldwide, or nearly 0.4 per cent of the adult population aged 15–64, had used cocaine in the past year,” according to the UNODC.

A whole 0.4 percent? Are we sure they weren’t just cleaning staff for Charlie Sheen’s hotel rooms?

The EMCDDA note that 1.2 percent of EU residents used cocaine last year. By comparison, about 2.2 percent of Americans used cocaine over the past year, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“The 2016 estimate for current cocaine use was similar to the estimates in most years between 2007 and 2015, but it was lower than the estimates in 2002 to 2006,” notes the latest U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Small and steady numbers of cocaine users? As crises go, even for those who are prone to worry, this would seem to rank alongside the Graboid menace from the Tremors franchise. So, what’s the big deal?

Part of the problem seems to be that retail prices have dropped a bit over the past decade even as purity improved, giving users more bang for their dollars/euros/whatever.

“From January 2016 through December 2016, the [price per gram pure] of cocaine decreased 20.3 percent ($177 to $141), while the purity increased 21.6 percent from 51 to 62 percent,” says the U.S. DEA.

“There is also evidence of an increase in the availability of cocaine of the highest reported purity for over a decade in the European Union,” adds the UNODC—an assessment with which the EMCDDA agrees.

More worrying for those who would save us from good times is that prices dropped and quality improved, as illicit dealers responded to consumer demand with the same flexibility and technological innovation that entrepreneurs have brought to pretty much every single industry on the planet. Notes the EMCDDA report:

Smaller groups have been able to enter the market by using a range of information technology like encryption, darknet market places, social media for dealing and cryptocurrencies. Entrepreneurship in the competitive cocaine market is evident from innovative distribution strategies, such as cocaine-exclusive call-centres. These new methods appear to reflect to some extent the type of disruption seen in other areas facilitated by the common use of smartphones — a potential ‘Uberisation’ of the cocaine trade — a competitive market in which sellers compete by offering additional services such as fast and flexible delivery options.

Drug warriors may dislike cocaine, but its users enjoy the stuff and providers like profits that they gain by keeping users happy. The result has been, despite the distortions necessitated by working around laws and governments, a dynamic and evolving market.

From a consumer-value perspective, this is a win-win! Well, except for the people arrested for engaging in underground trade, the victims of the criminals who were handed control of that trade by lawmakers, and the frustrated prohibitionists whose record seizures of bundles of happy dust can’t keep quality from rising and prices from dropping.

But what did they expect? Cocaine is almost the perfect product to illegally manufacture and smuggle. Its price reflects huge mark-ups and therefore profit margins, meaning that each successful shipment means a healthy payday.

Just three weeks after Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro enacted tougher anti-drug measures, an airman was caught smuggling 86 pounds of cocaine on the president’s own airplane. “Sergeant Rodrigues walked off the plane carrying a garment bag and a carry-on suitcase, law enforcement officials in Spain told the newspaper El País. When airport screeners inspected the bag, they found 37 bundles of cocaine and nothing else in the bag,” reported The New York Times.

That’s a multi-million-dollar shipment in terms of retail prices, and a nice windfall for people at each stage of the transaction—assuming they don’t get caught. Sergeant Rodrigues is out of action, but whoever was paying him will just find another courier willing to take the risk in return for a lot of cash. And users will barely notice a blip in their supply or the prices they pay for it.

Drug warriors have been at this business for decades, so they must know their efforts won’t keep users from enjoying cocaine and producers from supplying it, no matter what laws say. That’s especially true of a substance that packs massive profits into small packages. The stability of demand and the resistance of prices and supply to interdiction efforts demonstrate that this is a market that isn’t going away.

Then again, anti-drug bureaucrats and law enforcers are dealers in their own way, supplying endlessly repetitive reports, reams of useless data, and pointless policy proposals to lawmakers and worried members of the public who just can’t kick the prohibitionist habit. Satisfying demand keeps the warriors well-paid and in the public eye. That it does so at the cost of full prisons and empowered criminals is lost on too many people.

All things considered, the trade in prohibitionist fears offers a lot less value than that for cocaine.

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Drug Warriors Peddle Fears About Cocaine. Again.

Drug warriors are once again pushing a high grade of cocaine fears to willing users. It’s a market in pointless prohibitionism that just won’t go away.

Tough drug laws and brutal enforcement haven’t done much to stifle the market for illegal intoxicants, as drug-enforcement agencies around the world readily admit. But they do make the black-market production of concentrated-value products like cocaine a profitable undertaking. That’s good news for prohibitionists who need something to justify their paychecks and see a growth industry in fanning new fears.

“Current data on cocaine show that both the number of seizures and the volumes seized are at an all-time high,” the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) warns in its 2019 report. 

Not to be outdone, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) cautions that “opium production and cocaine manufacture remain at record levels. The amounts intercepted are also higher than ever, with the amount of cocaine seized up 74 per cent over the past decade, compared with a 50 per cent rise in manufacture during the same period.”

Wow! That sounds like a soaring market. And yet: “In 2017, an estimated 18 million worldwide, or nearly 0.4 per cent of the adult population aged 15–64, had used cocaine in the past year,” according to the UNODC.

A whole 0.4 percent? Are we sure they weren’t just cleaning staff for Charlie Sheen’s hotel rooms?

The EMCDDA note that 1.2 percent of EU residents used cocaine last year. By comparison, about 2.2 percent of Americans used cocaine over the past year, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“The 2016 estimate for current cocaine use was similar to the estimates in most years between 2007 and 2015, but it was lower than the estimates in 2002 to 2006,” notes the latest U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Small and steady numbers of cocaine users? As crises go, even for those who are prone to worry, this would seem to rank alongside the Graboid menace from the Tremors franchise. So, what’s the big deal?

Part of the problem seems to be that retail prices have dropped a bit over the past decade even as purity improved, giving users more bang for their dollars/euros/whatever.

“From January 2016 through December 2016, the [price per gram pure] of cocaine decreased 20.3 percent ($177 to $141), while the purity increased 21.6 percent from 51 to 62 percent,” says the U.S. DEA.

“There is also evidence of an increase in the availability of cocaine of the highest reported purity for over a decade in the European Union,” adds the UNODC—an assessment with which the EMCDDA agrees.

More worrying for those who would save us from good times is that prices dropped and quality improved, as illicit dealers responded to consumer demand with the same flexibility and technological innovation that entrepreneurs have brought to pretty much every single industry on the planet. Notes the EMCDDA report:

Smaller groups have been able to enter the market by using a range of information technology like encryption, darknet market places, social media for dealing and cryptocurrencies. Entrepreneurship in the competitive cocaine market is evident from innovative distribution strategies, such as cocaine-exclusive call-centres. These new methods appear to reflect to some extent the type of disruption seen in other areas facilitated by the common use of smartphones — a potential ‘Uberisation’ of the cocaine trade — a competitive market in which sellers compete by offering additional services such as fast and flexible delivery options.

Drug warriors may dislike cocaine, but its users enjoy the stuff and providers like profits that they gain by keeping users happy. The result has been, despite the distortions necessitated by working around laws and governments, a dynamic and evolving market.

From a consumer-value perspective, this is a win-win! Well, except for the people arrested for engaging in underground trade, the victims of the criminals who were handed control of that trade by lawmakers, and the frustrated prohibitionists whose record seizures of bundles of happy dust can’t keep quality from rising and prices from dropping.

But what did they expect? Cocaine is almost the perfect product to illegally manufacture and smuggle. Its price reflects huge mark-ups and therefore profit margins, meaning that each successful shipment means a healthy payday.

Just three weeks after Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro enacted tougher anti-drug measures, an airman was caught smuggling 86 pounds of cocaine on the president’s own airplane. “Sergeant Rodrigues walked off the plane carrying a garment bag and a carry-on suitcase, law enforcement officials in Spain told the newspaper El País. When airport screeners inspected the bag, they found 37 bundles of cocaine and nothing else in the bag,” reported The New York Times.

That’s a multi-million-dollar shipment in terms of retail prices, and a nice windfall for people at each stage of the transaction—assuming they don’t get caught. Sergeant Rodrigues is out of action, but whoever was paying him will just find another courier willing to take the risk in return for a lot of cash. And users will barely notice a blip in their supply or the prices they pay for it.

Drug warriors have been at this business for decades, so they must know their efforts won’t keep users from enjoying cocaine and producers from supplying it, no matter what laws say. That’s especially true of a substance that packs massive profits into small packages. The stability of demand and the resistance of prices and supply to interdiction efforts demonstrate that this is a market that isn’t going away.

Then again, anti-drug bureaucrats and law enforcers are dealers in their own way, supplying endlessly repetitive reports, reams of useless data, and pointless policy proposals to lawmakers and worried members of the public who just can’t kick the prohibitionist habit. Satisfying demand keeps the warriors well-paid and in the public eye. That it does so at the cost of full prisons and empowered criminals is lost on too many people.

All things considered, the trade in prohibitionist fears offers a lot less value than that for cocaine.

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It’s No Bitcoin: Facebook’s Libra Currency Is Tied to Government Currencies

Authored by Ralph Fucetola via The Mises Institute,

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek was, as he says in the 1990 introduction to his Denationalization of Money: The Argument Refined, one of the chief “gold bugs” of the 20th century. And he reminded us, so long as politicians want to control money, gold-backed currency is essential to protect our liberty from the politics of inflation.

But his concern for money and market reached back to his earlier work, as noted in a number of articles posted in recent years at mises.org. As noted by Nikolay Gertchev:

In a series of five lectures delivered in 1937, and published under the title Monetary Nationalism and International Stability, Hayek offers an in-depth analysis of the main deficiencies of the present-day monetary system. In a nutshell, he identifies two factors that disrupt international economic relations: the fractional reserve commercial banks and the national central banks. The former are the primary source for the international transmission of the business cycles, while the attempts of the latter to correct the imbalances de facto amplify the resulting instability.

And Demelza Hays writes:

In 1975 Hayek eventually gave a lecture entitled “Choice of Currency,” in which he articulated for the first time the provocative demand that the state monopoly on money should be repealed. The publication of the monographs Free Choice in Currency and The Denationalization of Money followed a year later, in which he expanded in greater detail on his ideas on competition between private money issuers. …

What shape would an order reflecting these power-sharing principles take, and how could it emerge? Hayek argues that such an order would take shape if the following liberties were granted:

Fast forward nearly a half century and Hayek’s call for the denationalization of money seems to be a real possibility, not just a crank libertarian position safely ignored by the monetary authorities.

The coming of the block chain technology and cryptocurrencies certainly suggest that the original post-World War II Bretton Woods “settlement” of the status of money, that gold and US dollars, redeemable in gold, were the basis for international settlements, failed. As have later revisions of the idea. Thus, an era of monetary uncertainty may give rise to possibilities for market-oriented reforms.

Bitcoin, as an example of “virtual gold,” gains its value from the limited number of units of that cryptocurrency and the expense in “mining” more of those units, not unlike real gold. While Bitcoin is the best known of the cryptocurrencies, CoinMarketCap.com lists over a thousand crypto currencies that are traded (though a significant percentage of these are actually ICOs — Initial Crypto Offerings — a way to raise funds for a particular project). Much of the power of the cryptos is that they can be easily, and privately, bought, sold, and exchanged.

Hayek predicted that normal market forces would apply to the goods we use to facilitate exchange (“currencies”) if only governments would get out of the way. In a free market for money he suggested that major financial institutions would sponsor competing currencies, probably defined by “baskets” of commodities. He speculates on how the market would maintain the value and stability of such currencies, far better than any political system of legal tender.

To some degree, this seems to be happening with cryptocurrencies.

And then along comes the 900 pound gorilla. Facebook, with two billion users, has decided to enter the cryptocurrency market with its Libra coin. Since the Libra would be usable as a currency on Facebook itself, the company probably has calculated that it will have a strong competitive advantage over any of the competing currencies.

Ah, but … and here is the rub, the Libra is not a naturally limited good, as Bitcoin is, but can be multiplied to infinity. It is not stabilized by reference to a basket of commodities as Hayek recommended. Rather, it will be defined by a changeable basket of fiat currencies!

That’s right. Facebook and Libra’s cooperating founding organizations (including PayPal, Visa, Uber …) hope to provide a stable cryptocurrency by tying it to a group of government currencies! According to Techcrunch:

A Libra is a unit of the Libra cryptocurrency that’s represented by a three wavy horizontal line unicode character ≋ like the dollar is represented by $. The value of a Libra is meant to stay largely stable, so it’s a good medium of exchange, as merchants can be confident they won’t be paid a Libra today that’s then worth less tomorrow. The Libra’s value is tied to a basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities for a slew of historically stable international currencies, including the dollar, pound, euro, Swiss franc and yen. The Libra Association maintains this basket of assets and can change the balance of its composition if necessary to offset major price fluctuations in any one foreign currency so that the value of a Libra stays consistent.

Well, that’s it. Zuckerberg is no Hayek. And the Libra is no Bitcoin.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2J0OToi Tyler Durden

US Manufacturing Surveys “Paint A Worrying Sign Of Marked Declines”

Overnight saw surveys confirm that factory activity collapsed in June across Asia and Europe. China’s manufacturers saw sales, exports and production fall, while Germany suffered from weaker foreign demand. Exports from South Korea plunged almost 14%, and Japan’s Tankan confidence index dropped to a three-year low.

This comes on the heels of the total, broad-based collapse in US regional Fed manufacturing business surveys…

So, expectations were for a downshift in US Manufacturing ISM/PMI headline surveys (Goldman warned that a simple analysis based on the historical deviations between the ISM and our survey tracker suggests slightly more than a one in three chance of the ISM manufacturing index falling into contractionary territory).

But that’s not what happened!!

Markit US Manufacturing PMI beat expectations, rising from 50.1 to 50.6 in June (this was nonetheless the second-lowest figure since September 2009).

However, under the hood, not everything was awesome with employment expanding at its slowest rate since Aug 2016.

Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at IHS Markit said:

“US manufacturers reported business conditions to have remained the toughest for nearly a decade in June. The past two months have seen the lowest readings since the height of the global financial crisis in 2009.

“The survey provides accurate advance indicators of comparable official data, and paints a worrying picture of marked declines in both output and jobs. The June survey sub-index readings are consistent with manufacturing output contracting at a quarterly rate of 0.7% and factory payrolls falling by 18,000.

“A major development in recent months has been the deteriorating performance of larger companies, where the last two months have seen the lowest PMI readings for a decade. After inventories rose sharply earlier in the year, large companies have moved to destocking in May and June amid a sharp slowing in new order inflows.

“Although business optimism about the future lifted slightly higher, it remained close to survey lows to indicate persistent low morale. Worries centred on signs of slowing demand both at home and internationally, weaker sales, and geopolitical uncertainty.

“Tariffs meanwhile continued to push up prices, but weak demand often limited the ability of firms to pass higher prices onto customers, suggesting overall inflationary pressures have weakened compared to earlier in the year.”

Additionally, ISM’s Manufacturing PMI beat expectations, printing 51.7 (better than the 51.0 expected) but still down from the 52.1 level in May – to the weakest since October 2016.

New orders fell to 50, from 52.7 – the lowest since Dec 2015 (and new export orders also slowed).

Respondents are unhappy:

“China tariffs and pending Mexico tariffs are wreaking havoc with supply chains and costs. The situation is crazy, driving a huge amount of work [and] costs, as well as potential supply disruptions.” (Computer & Electronic Products)

“Demand for the remainder of 2019 has softened significantly, due to issues in the aerospace industry. The 2020 outlook is looking stronger. Overall, state and local economies remain strong. Recruiting for open positions still requires time to find the right candidates.” (Transportation Equipment)

Is this “bad” enough to help The Fed?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Jcb0ac Tyler Durden

Some Democrats Ditch Biden After First Round of 2020 Debates

Harris up, Biden down, while Bernie gets mixed results. For many American voters, last week’s debates between the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls served as a first introduction to candidates other than former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). As a result, Biden’s dominance among Democratic voters may have slipped.

Biden is still the top choice among Democratic primary voters, according to a new Morning Consult poll. But he’s down five points in the organization’s first post-debate survey, while Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) gained points.

The poll, conducted last Thursday night and Friday among 2,407 Democrats, found Harris—who raised $2 million in 24 hours with a t-shirt quoting her debate swipe at Biden—up 6 percent from Morning Consult’s June 17-23 poll. In the latest poll, 12 percent of respondents now cast her as their first choice. (All those whoppers must have worked.)

Meanwhile, Biden went from top choice among 38 percent of respondents to top choice among 33 percent.

Numbers for Sanders stayed the same post-debate (19 percent say he’s their top choice), but he did see a 7 percent drop in favorability, the largest favorability drop of any candidate. Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) also remained steady at 3 percent.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg each saw a drop of 1 percent (less than the poll’s margin of error). Warren stands at 12 percent now, and “Mayor Pete” at 6 percent.

Polls this early don’t tell us much about what will ultimately happen, but they do give us a hint at how liberal moods might shift with more exposure to the Democratic candidates.

“The post-debate survey has a 2-point margin of error, compared with a 1-point margin of error for the pre-debate survey conducted among 16,888 registered voters who indicated they may vote in the Democratic primary or caucus in their state,” notes Morning Consult.

QUICK HITS

  • President Donald Trump is once again meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
  • Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong are reaching a new intensity, as crowds “smashed the windows of Hong Kong’s legislature on Monday [and] attempted to storm the building,” reports CNBC. While “citizens of Hong Kong—a Special Administrative Region of China—rally on this day each year to demand for democracy,” today’s events follow a round of “recent protests, which started in early June, against the government’s proposed extradition bill. The controversial law would pave the way for people arrested in Hong Kong to stand trial in mainland China.”
  • Antifa is at it again.
  • Some deep cuts on Biden and busing.
  • Russians are rejecting American fashion.
  • Sigh: “The notion that the law should treat a fetus like a person is widely held in Alabama.”

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