Tag: news

Is China Spying On Tesla?

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via Oilprice.com,

Tesla and other electric vehicle (EV) companies in China send as many as 61 real-time data points, typically without the drivers’ knowledge, to monitoring centers backed by the Chinese government, The Associated Press reports, raising questions whether the huge amount of data that China requires from automakers to transmit may be used for surveillance.

Tesla and more than 200 other carmakers – including Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Nissan, and Mitsubishi – send location information and details about battery and engine function in EVs to government-backed monitoring centers.

While many cars in the U.S., Europe, and Japan send location information back to the car manufacturers who feed the data to car-tracking and amenities apps, the data from passenger cars stops there in those markets. Government agencies and law enforcement can access more personal data in those markets only in case of a specific criminal investigation, lawyers told AP’s Erika Kinetz.

In China, the amount of real-time data sent to and collected at the monitoring centers is much larger, which sparks concerns about privacy, whether the data is used for mass surveillance, and whether proprietary car-manufacturing data about engine/hybrid/batteries could be used to the advantage of Chinese government-backed companies.

The carmakers say that they just follow local laws to send EVs sensors data to the monitoring centers, according to the AP. China claims that the data is used for data analytics to improve infrastructure planning and public safety. But critics of the vast amount of real-time data collected fear that the data goes way beyond the Chinese aims to improve safety and infrastructure.

Carmakers have initially resisted sending so many data points to Chinese monitoring centers, but then the government bound data sharing with incentives – transmitting data is a requirement for incentives, a government consultant who helped assess the policy told AP.

Fears of government surveillance may not be unfounded, considering the Communist country’s aim to keep everyone in line and the recent media attention on China’s plan to roll out a Social Credit System to rank its citizens.

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Journalists Create a Database to Track Bad New Jersey Cops

|||Screenshot via YouTube/NJ.com

An alarming number of New Jersey cops have used excessive force, but the state has done very little to track these incidents. In an effort to promote accountability and transparency in policing, NJ.com has taken up the gauntlet.

The Force Report, released this week, is a database based on 506 public records requests and 72,607 use-of-force reports from 2012 to 2016. With this information, New Jersey residents in any town can see the rates of excessive force in their town.

In Newark, for example, there were 2,580 use-of-force incidents over the course of five years—28.6 incidents for every 1,000 arrests made. That’s the largest number of these incidents in the state.

The report also allows residents to see the relevant officers’ names. Louis Weber, for example, has been identified in at least 36 excessive force incidents in Newark. In 2014, Weber was accused of planting drugs on a suspect to justify excessive force in his arrest.

The report’s metadata covers the racial breakdown of incidents, the poor incident reporting system, and the different types of force used. To read the whole thing, go here.

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WTI Tumbles Below $50 – Biggest Monthly Plunge Since 2008

Oil tanked back below $50 this morning and is headed for its biggest monthly decline in 10 years – less than a month after Goldman herded its clients into the collapsing assets, predicting Brent would hit $80 by the end of the year – as Russia reiterated it’s comfortable with current prices, just a week before it meets with OPEC to discuss possible production curbs.

“As things stand, the Russians and Saudis are still far from being on the same page over the finer details of looming output restrictions,” Stephen Brennock, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates in London, wrote in a report.

“Against this backdrop, the most likely outcome of next week’s OPEC meeting is a fudge.”

Crude’s next leg hinges on Saudi Arabia’s dilemma of busting the budget or angering Trump, but as prices plunge, China is grabbing every barrel it can get.

November is now the 2nd worst month for WTI since Jan 1991…

Meanwhile, all eyes are on energy junk bonds: as Goldman wrote overnight, “WTI below $50/bbl will unquestionably constrain risk appetite in the HY market”

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Trump And Putin Will NOT Hold “Brief Impromptu Meeting” At G-20

Update: It appears Adam Shiff didn’t like it – The White House has just confirmed that Presidents Trump and Putin will NOT have a “scheduled pull aside” meeting at the G-20 meetings.

*  *  *

As we detailed earlier, Adam Schiff isn’t going to like this.

One day after President Trump said he wouldn’t be meeting with his Russian counterpart because of Russia’s refusals to return three Ukrainian ships and release two dozen sailors captured during Sunday’s confrontation near the Kerch Strait, the Kremlin is claiming that Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet for a brief “impromptu” meeting during the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, according to CNBC.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin will have a “brief impromptu meeting” with President Trump, just as he expects to meet with other leaders at the G-20 summit.

Trump

Russia said Thursday that it regretted Trump’s decision, but that it was still “ready for contact,” while also warning that by not meeting with Putin, Trump risked “indefinitely” postponing important talks about issues that affect both countries.

Assuming Putin does meet with both Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, it would mean that the three most influential figures for global oil markets will have had a chance to talk during the summit.

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The NAFTA Rewrite Is Flawed, but Not Getting It to Congress This Year Might Be an Even Bigger Mistake

For all the talk of his deal-making prowess, President Donald Trump has precious little to show for it during his nearly two years in office. Unless his administration takes quick action to get the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) before Congress, even that mild accomplishment may be relegated to legislative limbo.

This morning Trump held a high-profile signing ceremony with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the G-20 summit in Argentina. The leaders of the three countries put their signatures to the final version of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), but the deal must still be ratified by each domestic government.

If the Trump administration wants to get the USMCA through Congress solely with Republican votes, the clock is running out. Realistically, today is the deadline for getting the proposal in front of Congress. Under the terms of what’s known as “Trade Promotion Authority,” Congress granted Trump the power to unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA, but the legislative branch must ratify the agreement with an up-or-down vote after a mandatory 30-day review period. The current session of Congress ends on January 3. After that, Democrats will control the House.

The approaching Democratic takeover does not foreclose the possibility of Congress voting to ratify the USMCA, but certainly complicates the pact’s path forward. Politically, of course, Democrats may hold up the passage of the USMCA merely to deny Trump a policy win. Practically, Democratic leaders may demand changes to the agreement that Senate Republicans or the Trump administration (or the governments of Canada or Mexico) will not abide.

For that matter, it’s not clear that the USMCA would pass even with Republicans in control of both chambers. That’s because some congressional Republicans disagree with the Trump administration on trade issues and correctly see the USMCA as moving North America further from free trade.

“On balance, it leaves us with diminished trading opportunities, rather than expanded trading opportunities with Mexico and Canada,” says Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.), who has emerged as Senate Republicans’ most vocal critic of the USMCA. Toomey says he would be a “no” vote on the USMCA as currently written.

His objections are good ones. The USMCA imposes new requirements for the origin of cars and car parts, mandating that at least 75 percent of cars’ content must be produced in North America and at least 40 percent must be produced by workers earning $16 an hour (or the equivalent in other currency) in order to cross national borders tariff-free. That’s likely to raise the cost of making cars in North America and could lead automakers to move more production overseas. The agreement also sets quotas for imported cars from Canada and Mexico, and raises the threat of further automotive tariffs. Finally, Toomey objects to the USMCA’s sunset provision, which would see parts of the agreement expire automatically after 16 years. “It’s a bad idea to have a trade agreement that’s designed to go away,” Toomey says, citing the need for investor certainty.

While Toomey is alone in putting his vote on the USMCA on the record, he’s not the only senator to raise concerns with the deal. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.) has said the greement appears to be “empowering government bureaucrats rather than markets to determine the components in cars and other goods.” Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) took his complaints about “how bad the new trade deal with Mexico is for Florida” to Twitter on Wednesday—though Rubio appears to be seeking more protectionism, not freer trade.

Still, threading the needle on the USMCA will only become more difficult after January 3, when the current Congress ends.

If Democrats are willing to consider the trade deal at all—keep in mind that Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) killed a Bush-era trade deal with Colombia in 2008 by refusing even to schedule a vote on it—they may try to move it in a more protectionist direction. Some of Trump’s priorities, like the minimum wage rule and import quotas, align more closely with Democrats’ long-term views on NAFTA, but Democrats are likely to push for even more changes to avoid giving Trump an easy win and to appeal to their own progressive base. Remember, Democrats running for president in 2016 unanimously opposed the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership deal (even Hillary Clinton, who had previously supported it), while every major Republican candidate except Trump favored it.

Rep. Richard Neal (D–Mass.), who is in position to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in January, may have tipped the Democrats’ hand in October when he said that “the bar for supporting a new NAFTA will be high” and that he was “not confident at all” that the deal would clear Congress. And that was before the Democrats won the election.

As The New York Times has outlined, Democrats’ opposition to the USMCA will likely focus on upping the effective minimum wage rate for automakers, indexing it to inflation, and setting stricter environmental regulations across all three countries.

Even if Trump goes along with those demands, any changes to the USMCA that erect further barriers to trade would make pro-trade Senate Republicans more likely to jump ship.

It’s tempting to think that the USMCA falling apart in Congress is for the best. While it does include some improvements over NAFTA—freer trade of Canadian agricultural products, some sensibly updated rules for technology—the USMCA is, on the whole, a more protectionist framework than what it would be replacing. Just let it die, right?

Toomey disagrees. If the White House is unable to get the USMCA through Congress next year, he worries the president will do what he’s long threatened to: Unilaterally yank the United States out of NAFTA without a replacement ready. That would be disastrous for the economy, Toomey warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. It could also send Washington spiraling into another constitutional crisis, because it’s not clear whether Trump would have the authority to do that without congressional approval.

Still, if Trump wanted to get his NAFTA rewrite through Congress quickly and easily, the best choice would have been to dial down the protectionism and seek approval soon after a deal with struck with Canada and Mexico last month. At this late moment, the chances that the USMCA will be approved before Democrats take the House are slim to none. Getting it passed in December is “probably, sadly impractical,” Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) tells The Weekly Standard‘s Haley Byrd. The Trump administration, Cornyn says, does not seem to have any sense of urgency to get the deal done.

Depending on how cynically you view Trump, it’s possible to conclude that the president is trying to create Toomey’s nightmare scenario—where lack of congressional agreement on the USMCA gives Trump the impetus to act alone on killing NAFTA, something he wanted to do soon after taking office only to be dissuaded by aides who urged the renegotiation approach.

“The path to getting this ratified, if the administration chooses to wait, is not at all clear to me,” says Toomey. “It almost certainly means it moves in a more protectionist direction.”

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Saudi Facing OPEC Mutiny As Members Object To “Problematic” US Influence

As US stocks seesaw with every conflicting trade-war related headline, investors are fixating on tomorrow night’s dinner meeting between President Trump and President Xi with laser-like focus. But the Trump-Xi summit isn’t the only meeting that could have broad repercussions for global markets, and though it has received much less attention in the press, the planned meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (along with the Russian and Saudi energy ministers) could dictate the course of global oil prices for the foreseeable future.

Looming over the Saudi-Russia talks are suspicions that Saudi Arabia has been accelerating production of oil beyond the cuts adopted by OPEC+ in November 2016 to placate President Trump – a conspiracy “theory” first highlighted by Zero Hedge weeks ago, which has finally won acknowledgment in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream press.

But while Saudi and Russia are equipped to weather lower-for-longer oil prices (Putin has said he’s “absolutely fine” with oil at $60 a barrel), especially if it means they don’t cede market share to the booming US shale industry, other OPEC members have been frustrated by the bilateral agreement to raise output through the end of the year.

POEC

And during a meeting of OPEC producers and their non-member allies next week, it appears these other members might present their de facto leader with an ultimatum: Cut production – now – or risk a mutiny. At least that’s what a report published in the Wall Street Journal Friday morning would suggest.

Two days after Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih insisted that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t cut production if it meant going it alone, the WSJ reported that Iran and other oil producers are preparing to confront Saudi Arabia next week and demand that it bear the brunt of oil production cuts. Since the Saudis have ramped up production by 1 million barrels a day since the summer, OPEC reasons that they should bear the brunt of the expected 1.4 million barrels a day that they’re hoping to trim from the cartel’s collective production. “The Saudis made this mess – they need to clean it up,” one anonymous OPEC official reportedly told WSJ.

Crude

Even as the Saudis and Russia helped boost crude prices by raising the possibility of a tandem production cut, other OPEC members worry that the Kingdom won’t be able to undo the pain of its production ramp so easily. Given that it’s now pumping more than 11 million barrels a day, analysts are skeptical about whether a 500,000 bbl/day cut would make a difference.

But questions of supply and demand, while important, distract from a bigger issue: That other OPEC members are deeply uncomfortable with the perceived US influence over the cartel’s de facto leader. Cartel members described Saudi Arabia’s perceived deference to the US as “problematic.”

OPEC officials say the Saudis’ decision to keep pumping at full tilt is the result of pressure from the U.S., which has threatened to retaliate over the killing of dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives.

While President Trump said this week he wanted to keep a strategic alliance with the kingdom, the U.S. government and Congress have been looking at possible sanctions against Saudi Arabia, including legislation that would make membership of OPEC an antitrust violation.

An African OPEC delegate said the Saudis’ role as the cartel’s kingpin is problematic “because they follow instructions from the U.S.” An Iranian oil official said “whether they cut or not, the decision should be made in OPEC, not in the White House.”

Over the past few years, OPEC members have set aside their individual differences and worked with outsiders like Russia to rescue crude prices from their 2014-2015 collapse. But with this accomplishment fading from view, the notion that resentments about perceived US influence could lead to the dissolution of the cartel are ironic. After all, the breakup of OPEC would only cede more influence to the US.

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“Absent Hard News, Take Everything With A Grain Of Salt” One Trader’s G20 Trade Plan

The headline-hypersensitivity continues ahead of the G-20 meetings with an overnight drift lower instantly erased by algo panic buying on confusing lighthizer headlines.

So, how is one to manage through the next 48-72 hours of market rumors, innuendo, and news? Former fund manager and FX trader Richard Breslow has some thoughts…

Via Bloomberg,

Ahead of whatever the G-20 meetings deliver, markets have tried to do as little as possible. And that makes perfect sense. Still, we couldn’t avoid some subdued movements as hints, unsubstantiated comments, or just the ebb and flow of emotions about the likelihood of a particular result from the shared list of potential outcomes. Sad to say for something so important, and entirely under human control, it remains just a guessing game.

But for those who want to partake in the speculation, there is certainly no shortage of people using some kind of game theory to posit what will happen. Or more importantly for traders, what will happen after.

It has actually been a somewhat interesting day because the seeming fluctuating handicapping of possible results hasn’t been in sync between assets. There have been no signs of student body right, student body left behavior. Which strongly suggests that, so far, each individual market is clearing the business they have to rather than expressing any newfound conclusions.

Absent hard news, take everything with a grain of salt. It certainly hasn’t been a good day trading strategy to assume, as one would typically do, that the Shanghai Composite’s nice afternoon rally would spill over to the likes of emerging markets, S&P 500 futures or the Australian dollar. Leave that for early Monday.

One thing to remember as you strategize about how to react to the news is that all markets don’t open at the same time. Foreign exchange will be the only game in town from the get-go.

There will be a lot of proxy trading going on, which will need to get swapped out as other assets become available to trade. Potentially with large gaps.

It could all be quite sloppy and fun. But it might not be friendly. And, while it probably won’t matter at the beginning of the week, you can’t ignore the implications for central banks. Not that I think they are going to intervene but tailwinds versus headwinds will matter as you price future rate changes. Not to mention that the dinner also holds potential implications for European auto tariffs.

Even a deal, or the promise to delay tariffs and work toward one down the road, isn’t going to instantly cure what has been ailing the Chinese economy. Risk assets could fly without taking away the speculation surrounding a near-term PBOC cut to the reserve requirement ratio. Conversely, you might want to reread Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s latest speech. It’s a bitterly sad commentary that no deal might end up being the less ambiguous side to trade. Although, no matter what happens the knee-jerk reactions should be pretty straightforward. Famous last words, I know.

I had an interesting debate with myself last night about how to view monthly charts with such a significant event coming on the Saturday after we close November’s books. I’ve concluded, for better or worse, that today’s is the relevant close. The reason being that if things get motoring, the important longer-term chart points will be the best guide to where there should be liquidity to source. Even if it doesn’t stop things. Just remember, momentum algorithms don’t care about my technical levels.

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Gartman: “It May Be Time To Re-Enter The Short Side”

This may come as a shock to some, but Dennis Gartman may soon be 3 for 3 in his latest market-timing recos.

Back on November 8, following the mid-term election market surge when trader hopes for another BTFD moment briefly peaked (before being promptly snubbed) and JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic tripled down on his bullish call for stocks, one prominent contrarian voice emerged when Dennis Gartman said that he was “officially recommending shorting this rally.” In retrospect he was spot on with stocks tumbling, broadly ignoring the JPM bullish case.

Then, on Monday, just ahead of a broad market rebound and Wednesday’s Powell-inspired surge, Gartman flipped again, and said he was covering his “material short position for a very short while”, although as he added “covering our short positions does not mean even for a moment that we are turning bullish of shares and shall be buying them to be long for we are not and we shall not.”

Indeed it did not, because on Friday morning with futures set to slide ahead of tomorrow’s G-20 dinner between Trump and Xi, Gartman U-turned again, and as he wrote in his latest daily note, the time has come to short stocks again, if for now only in his retirement account, and not yet “officially” as a recommendation. To wit:

We are reiterating the point one more time… truly putting redundancy to test yet again… that covering our short position earlier this week did not mean then and does not mean now that we are turning bullish of shares and that we shall be buying stocks for the long term for we are not; we have not and we will not. Being as clear as possible, we state once again for the record that this is a bear market in broad, global terms and as we have said all week this week, in bear markets one can have but one of three possible positions: very short of shares; modestly short of shares or, finally, neutral of them. So it has been… and is still… to the sidelines for us, where we have been all week. But it may be time to re-enter the short side. We’ve actually done so in an exploratory and thus very small fashion in our retirement account although we are not “officially” making that as a recommendation… yet.

Will this mark the 3rd consecutive time that Dennis Gartman has been correct in the span of just three weeks? If so, it would be a 12-sigma, but more importantly, it could put an entire industry of Gartman-fading algos out of business.  Stay tuned.

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Putin’s Potential Penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow Launches Investigation: Reason Roundup

While Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, lawyer Michael Cohen was negotiating not just for a massive Trump-branded hotel in Moscow but also for Vladimir Putin to get a $50 million penthouse there, reports Buzzfeed.

Now the newly Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is itching to investigate. “We’re way beyond bribery,” says Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “If a candidate for president is offering a foreign adversary a $50 million gift while that adversary through his own backchannels is offering support of the campaign, that’s betrayal at the highest level; that’s conspiracy.”

Swalwell and other members of the House Intelligence Committee say they will investigate beginning in January.

According to Buzzfeed, Cohen and Felix Sater “worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the Moscow deal finished—despite public claims that the development was canned in January, before Trump won the Republican nomination.” The idea behind giving Putin the penthouse was to attract other wealthy and important Russians there, Sater says.

Trump insists the deal was all “very legal and very cool.”

“….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia,” Trump tweeted at 4:59 a.m. Friday morning. “Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

On Thursday, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project. This comes on the heels of his August plea to tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations related to his work paying off Trump’s former lovers. Now, Cohen admits that he and others in the Trump organization were still negotiating with Russia through at least June of 2016 and that Cohen regularly briefed Trump and his family on the matter.

When asked shortly after inauguration, Trump had said he had “nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia. … I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”

Conor Friedersdorf suggests why this may be so damning: it means Russia had leverage over Trump since then. “That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians,” writes Friedersdorf.

But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday [by Cohen], who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.

Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant.

[…] As it would turn out, that was merely the beginning of their leverage. In September 2017, Donald Trump Jr. gave sworn Senate testimony that may be contradicted by Thursday’s revelations, raising the prospect that the Russians have been in possession of evidence suggesting that the president’s son may have committed a felony. And once Cohen lied to Congress about the matter, the Russians were in a position to expose the unlawful behavior of Trump’s personal attorney.

Lawyer Ken White (aka Popehat) writes that once again, we’re faced with “developments that would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency,” and there’s a chance that “they still might.”

FREE MINDS

CNN is taking some heat for firing Marc Lamont Hill, a regular contributor who on Wednesday advocated for a boycott of Israel and a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” From Mediaite:

His comments sparked an immediate backlash, with many noting “from the river to the sea” is a phrase used by Hamas and other anti-Israel terror groups. The phrase implies the replacement of Israel by a Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—though Hill disputes this characterization of his comments.

Hill responded:

FREE MARKETS

Links between life expectancy decline, opioid pills, and prohibition. Life expectancy in the U.S. is down again, for the third year in a row, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “After peaking at 78.9 years in 2014, it has dropping to 78.6 years in 2017,” notes Ron Bailey. “This follows decades of increases.” What gives?

While a fiercer than usual outbreak of influenza contributed to the decline last year, the main causes are rising suicides rates and the increasing number of deaths from drug overdoses associated with opioids. Overdose deaths in 2017 rose to 70,237, up from 63,632 the year before. But overdose deaths associated with legal opioids did not significantly change from 2016. The increase came almost entirely from street drugs. And why was there a rise in the use of black market fentanyl and heroin? The biggest reason is most likely the drug war.

People in government have been keen to blame—and sanction—prescription pill makers and sellers, when it’s their own prohibition policies driving this opioid-related death trend.

“Of the 47,600 opioid-related deaths the CDC counted in 2017,” writes Jacob Sullum, “60 percent involved the drug category that consists mainly of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its analogs” while just “30 percent involved the category that includes the most commonly prescribed pain medications…and some of those deaths also involved fentanyl or heroin.” A dramatic rise in opioid deaths last year can be attributed almost entirely to to fentanyl and its analogs. Sullum:

The Trump administration nevertheless wants to reduce opioid prescriptions by a third during the next three years. But opioid prescriptions, measured by total morphine milligram equivalents (MME) sold, have already fallen by a third since 2010, as indicated by the green area in the chart (with units, in billions of MME, on the right axis). During that period, opioid-related deaths more than doubled. Does this seem like a winning strategy? Far from reducing deaths involving opioids, the crackdown on pain pills has pushed nonmedical users into the black market, where the drugs are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable.

QUICK HITS

• Clive and Ammon Bundy are condemning Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric:

• Illegal immigration is at a 10-year low.

• An effort to rechristen the street in front of the Saudi embassy as Jamal Khashoggi Way just got approval from a neighborhood commission in D.C. It must now be approved by the city council, mayor, and Congress.

• Happy holidays from Jacobin magazine!

• In case you want a refresher: “Everyone Who’s Been Charged as a Result of the Mueller Investigation.”

• The latest G-20 summit kicks off in Buenos Aires toady:

• A New York City Councilman wants to fight racism by banning cash-free restaurants.

• A good thread on Section 230:

• Conservative Twitter personality Laura Loomer chained herself to the company’s New York City headquarters door yesterday to protest the decision to ban her from the site. The cops showed up but Twitter is declining to press charges.

• College majors are shifting:

• Huh.

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Chicago PMI Explodes Near Record High

Amid sliding national PMIs, plunging home and auto sales data, collapsing oil prices, and disappointing headlines everywhere, the purchasing manager of Chicago are ebullient…

Just as the ‘soft’ survey data was starting to catch down to the reality of hard economic data, Chicago PMI explodes from 58.4 to 66.4 in October…

 

This is well above the forecast range (50.3 – 60) from 28 economists surveyed:

The number of components rising vs last month was five.

  • Business barometer rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Prices paid rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • New orders rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Employment rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Inventories rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • Supplier deliveries rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Production rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Order backlogs rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

We await November’s crash back to reality.

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