Bank of America: “We Have Not Seen This Movie Before”

With just months left until the global central bank liqiudity supernova finally ends, and turns into a drain of cash …

… Bank of America has published its latest Quantitative Tightening analysis, writing that whereas Quantitative easing was mostly characterized as an environment with too much money chasing too few bonds, lower interest rates, tighter credit spreads and volatility was suppressed, “there is no doubt that quantitative tightening (QT) at times will lead to the opposite – i.e. higher interest rates, wider credit spreads and very volatile market conditions (Figure 1).”

However, the reason why all hell has not yet broken loose, is that we are still in this “intermediate phase” – i.e. on the road from QE to QT – where things remain orderly although as the BofA credit team writes, “technicals of the high grade credit market have weakened notably this year due to less demand (Figure 2).

Hence, as we slowly make the transition from QE to QT, we have already witnessed higher interest rates, wider credit spreads (Figure 3) and more volatility (Figure 4). And this is just the beginning.

Of course, it will hardly come as a surprise to anyone paying attention that the reason why the markets haven’t i mploded yet, and the reason why we are not yet experiencing the full effect of QT is that foreign central banks – the ECB and BOJ in particular – are still providing tremendous monetary policy accommodation via QE and negative interest rates (Figure 5), even if these two risk-boosting stimuli are gradually fading.

This push-pull equilibrium as defined last week by Jeff Gundlach, allows the system to persist in this unstable state indefinitely, because every time US yields rose too much due to QT and rate hikes, there would be large foreign inflows. “Hence, US yields would not increase too much and fixed income volatility remains moderate” according to BofA’s Hans Mikkelsen. Preventing an out of control collapse in risk assets, whereas last week the ECB announced the end to QE, it also came out unexpectedly dovish by returning explicit calendar guidance and promising continued negative interest rates (NIRP) for a long period of time (Figure 6).

At the end of the day, the dovishness prevailed, sending the EUR plunging, as NIRP in the Eurozone works much like QE, as it encourages companies and individuals to take risk way out the maturity curve or down in quality.

But while NIRP controls the short end doesn’t the ECB needs QE to infludence the back end of the curve? Not really: with persistent negative interest rates, European investors are forced to either take a lot of interest risk or credit risk to earn even a small positive yield of 0.50% for example (Figure 9). That asserts bull flattening pressure on both rates and quality curves.

And this is where things get interesting, or as BofA notes, “we have not seen this movie before”, because as Mikkelsen writes, “while QT in itself is a rare occurrence we have never been in an environment of QT with a backdrop of major foreign QE/NIRP. Given the clear failure of the ECB and BOJ to meet their policy goals of near 2% inflation (Figure 8) the road from QE to QT may be very long – certainly years.”

What does all this mean in terms of practical credit trades? Here BofA is growing skeptical that a bullish credit trade will be appropriate as we continue to shift away from QE and closer to full-blown QT.

While we consider high grade credit spreads this year range bound – and in fact presently are at the wide end of the range due to supply pressures that will ease and Italian risks we will increasingly decouple from (although they remain severe a bit further out) – we continue to believe that the end to ECB QE means moderately wider spreads next year and in 2020.

This is because the ECB presently buys about $400bn of bonds annually, which pushes investors into the US market. Without that we get less inflow from Europe and technicals deteriorate further. Partially offsetting this will be less supply as the relative after-tax cost of debt has risen due to higher interest rates and a lower corporate rate.

The only question is when will the algos, buybacks and occasional central bank intervention in stocks (mostly the SNB  and BOJ) that set the daily trading mood, finally concede what is coming, and let fundamentals and market logic finally reassert themselves.

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The Myths We Tell Ourselves

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Your average mass media pundit regularly decries the fact Americans no longer have trust in the country’s institutions, yet simultaneously refuse to take any sort of responsibility for the situation. Government bureaucrats and other assorted supporters of our decrepit status quo tend to do the same thing. As is typically the case, I’ll take the other side.

Not only do I think it’s completely sane for Americans to have zero faith in their institutions, including but certainly not limited to the three-letter agencies, Congress and the Federal Reserve, I’ll take it a step further and argue we as citizens remain far too naive and trusting for our own good. If nothing else, the recent Justice Department Inspector General’s (IG) report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server should underscore the point.

First, there’s the now infamous text exchange between between Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page. The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary of the IG report:

continue reading

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Echoes of Reagan in Trump’s Clashes With Allies: New at Reason

The French foreign minister accuses the American president of furthering a “divorce” between the United States and its European allies.

“Deep Trade Rift With Allies Seen,” is a headline at The New York Times. “The Roots of Western Disunity” is the headline over another Times piece observing, “Over the last few years, trans-Atlantic differences on foreign policy have become so frequent that most of us regard them as the normal state of affairs.”

“Rising Trade Barriers Stir Memories of U.S. Depression,” is another Times headline, over an article that begins, “A surge of aggressive economic nationalism, as strong as any in the last half century, threatens to overwhelm the free trade policies that have underwritten the postwar prosperity of industrialized nations.” It quotes a House staffer who called the situation “the most dangerous since 1930,” which the Times reminded readers referred to “the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which some say triggered the Great Depression.”

The Times also writes about the president’s “killing off of top foreign-policy officials,” noting that so far the president “has had three national security advisers and two Secretaries of State.”

That may all sound like it is recent press coverage of the Trump administration. Actually, though, it was all coverage of President Ronald Reagan, from back in 1982 and 1983, writes Ira Stoll.

View this article.

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Michael Avenatti Shifts Gears From Stripper Porn Star To Separated Migrants

Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti has found his new gig – offering to represent illegal immigrants separated from their children at the U.S. border, according to a Sunday night tweet followed by an appearance on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”

Avenatti – whose estranged wife testified that he threatened to have them both arrested so their son would be placed in child protective services – is now a full-fledged social justice warrior. We’re sure he can point us to all the separated migrant families he helped under Obama when the kids were put in actual cages, and that this isn’t some shameless publicity stunt to land more face time on CNN. 

Avenatti directed his newfound humanitarian outrage at Trump aide Stephen Miller – who is widely credited with Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, tweeting to Miller, who is Jewish, “Stephen Miller: Congrats, the separation policy that you sold to your boss Mr. Trump will result in images that will crater you both. We will ensure you will never escape them. In your fascist zeal, you forgot that mothers are mothers first, regardless of their politics.”

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller told the New York Times. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Avenatti, whose company fired a woman for being pregnant, clearly cares about families – as we’re sure he’ll let us know on his next CNN junket. 

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Trump Announces Plans for a ‘Space Force.’ Seriously

President Donald Trump says he supports the idea of creating a Space Force as a co-equal branch of the military in order to project U.S. dominance beyond the reaches of Earth’s gravity.

“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said at a Monday meeting of his National Space Council. “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”

The idea of a Space Force admittedly sounds pretty badass. However, it is also likely unnecessary, unwise, and runs counter to the recommendation of Trump’s own Defense chief.

When a bipartisan group of lawmakers tried to include language creating a new “Space Corps” in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis strongly opposed the idea, writing in a letter, “I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions.”

This “Space Corps” was a notably less ambitious proposal than what Trump seems to be describing. It called for the new Corps to have its own seat on the Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, but still report to the Department of the Air Force, similar to the Marine Corps’ relationship with the Navy.

In contrast, Trump said today that his Space Force would be a co-equal branch, saying, “we are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

Whatever form it takes, the creation of a new branch of the military will only invite more waste in a Department of Defense bureaucracy that continues to siphon off billions of taxpayer dollars while rarely being held accountable for how it spends its massive budget.

As recently as February 2018, an audit of the Defense Logistics Agency obtained by Politico found that the agency—which functions as the military’s supply arm—failed to account for as much as $800 million. In December 2016, it was revealed that the Defense Department buried an internal study finding $125 billion in administrative waste. (Then there’s the money frittered away by the Defense Department on smaller scale boondoggles, like the $43 million compressed natural gas station we built in Afghanistan.)

Mattis argued that the Pentagon’s priority should be focusing on getting its own shop in order before it goes about creating whole new branches.

Indeed, the idea of militarizing space with a brand-new Space Force departs from some positive noises the Trump administration has made about letting the private sector take the lead in space development.

In February, the Administration floated the idea of converting the International Space Station into a semi-private facility and zeroing out NASA funding for the station by 2025. The space agency has already saved big bucks partnering with private companies to resupply the station. Other private enterprises are getting ever closer to launching manned space flights.

The Trump Administration would do well to let these peaceful, private initiatives develop, as opposed to crowding them out by launching the government’s most bloated bureaucracy into space.

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Ron Paul Asks “Why Can’t We Sue The TSA For Assault?”

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

When I was in Congress and had to regularly fly between DC and Texas, I was routinely subjected to invasive “pat-downs” (physical assaults) by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). One time, exasperated with the constant insults to my privacy and dignity, I asked a TSA agent if he was proud to assault innocent Americans for a living.

I thought of this incident after learning that the TSA has been compiling a “troublesome passengers” list. The list includes those who have engaged in conduct judged to be “offensive and without legal justification” or disruptive of the “safe and effective completion of screening.” Libertarian journalist James Bovard recently pointed out that any woman who pushed a screener’s hands away from her breasts could be accused of disrupting the “safe and effective completion of screening.” Passengers like me who have expressed offense at TSA screeners are likely on the troublesome passengers list.

Perhaps airline passengers should start keeping a list of troublesome TSA agents. The list could include those who forced nursing mothers to drink their own breast milk, those who forced sick passengers to dispose of cough medicine, and those who forced women they found attractive to go through a body scanner multiple times. The list would certainly include the agents who confiscated a wheelchair-bound three-year-old’s beloved stuffed lamb at an airport and threatened to subject her to a pat-down. The girl, who was at the airport with her family to take a trip to Disney World, was filmed crying that she no longer wanted to go to Disney World.

The TSA is effective at violating our liberty, but it is ineffective at protecting our security. Last year, the TSA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), conducted undercover tests of the TSA’s ability or detect security threats at airports across the country. The results showed the TSA staff and equipment failed to uncover threats 80 percent of the time. This is not the first time the TSA has been revealed to be incompetent. An earlier DHS study fund TSA screenings and even the invasive pat-downs were utterly ineffective at finding hidden weapons.

The TSA’s “security theater” of treating every passenger as a criminal suspect while doing nothing to stop real threats is a rational response to the incentives the TSA faces as a government agency. If the TSA puts up an appearance of diligently working to prevent another 9/11 by inconveniencing and even assaulting as many travelers as possible, Congress will assume the agency is doing its job and keep increasing the TSA’s budget. Because the TSA gets its revenue from Congress, not from airline passengers, the agency has no reason to concern itself with customer satisfaction and feels free to harass and assault people, as well as to make lists of people who stand up for their rights.

Congress should end the TSA’s monopoly on security by abolishing the agency and returning responsibility for security to the airlines. The airline companies can contract with private firms that provide real security without treating every passenger as a criminal suspect. A private security firm that assaults its customers while failing to detect real dangers would soon go out of business, whereas the TSA would likely have its budget and power increased if there was another attack on the US.

If shutting down the TSA is too “radical” a step, Congress should at least allow individuals to sue TSA agents for assault. Anyone who has suffered unfair treatment by the TSA as a result of being put on the “troublesome passengers” list should also be able to seek redress in court. Making TSA agents subject to the rule of law is an important step toward protecting our liberty and security.

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Germany Flops on Climate Change Goals

State-sponsored ventures into renewable energy have hit a wall in Germany, the supposed leader of the war on climate change.

The Associated Press reports that Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, said that the country will probably not meet its carbon emission reduction goals for 2020. This follows the government’s official decision to abandon these goals in January.

Germany set out to establish itself as a leader in the international fight against man-made climate change by promising to cut carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and up to 95 percent in 2050, relative to 1990 levels. The German government now says it will miss the 2020 target by eight percent.

Moving towards cleaner, sustainable energy is certainly a noble goal, but Germany’s attempted green revolution doubled residential energy rates for consumers in the form of greater surcharges. This does little for lower income households who now face much larger electricity bills and much smaller disposable incomes. Furthermore, the higher costs take money away from more productive sectors of the economy, inhibiting innovation and production.

Germany’s failed endeavor shows that fossil fuels are still very much a part of our near future. Alternative energy sources may have potential that can best be explored through the market, but as of now, they simply cannot compete, in terms of efficiency and reliability with fossil fuels, which have played, and continue to play, a huge role in human development. Even after the effort to boost alternative energy, over one-third of Germany’s energy still comes from coal. This slow transition, coupled with Germany’s growing aversion to nuclear power, make it highly unlikely green energy will help Germany meet its carbon emission goals.

Even so, Germany appears adamant about its energy goals, and followed its setback with an even more sweeping promise of achieving a 55 percent reduction in its carbon emissions by 2030. Considering Germany’s failure, American legislators should be wary of similar proposals.

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Tesla Severance Packages Set To “Chill Valid Employee Complaints” About Safety Issues

Tesla is trying to silence former employees from speaking out about workplace safety issues, it appears from language being included in new severance packages.

Bloomberg reported today that Tesla is trying to curb former employees from speaking out about safety issues that they may have incurred on the job, and it is doing so by including new language in severance packages that it is issuing to 9% of its employee workforce that it is laying off.

Those employees who are accepting severance packages are being asked to give up certain rights as it relates to speaking publicly about workplace safety issues. The Bloomberg article noted:

Language in a confidential severance agreement Tesla Inc. is using as part of the biggest job cut in its history is likely to deter dismissed employees from going public with worker safety concerns, according to employment-law experts.

A proposed severance agreement Tesla presented to one of the more than 3,000 workers dismissed last week required acknowledgment that the employee “had the opportunity to raise any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities against the company, and that if any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities were raised during your employment, they were addressed to your satisfaction.”

The document obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg News also barred the former worker from sharing “business-related” information; required that the ex-employee assist Tesla’s defense against claims; released any claims made against Tesla; and dictated that any disputes under the agreement will be handled in individual arbitration.

The article continued with Tesla’s response. Apparently the company has stated that the “language about safety matters to ensure that issues get addressed, according to a spokesman, who added that employees who don’t believe those words apply to their case should come forward and share their concerns.”

Experts consulted by Bloomberg seem to agree that regardless of whether or not the language is the industry standard or not, it’s likely being done to help absolve Tesla of any legal liabilities:

“I do think the agreement will chill valid employee complaints,” said Brishen Rogers, a law professor at Temple University. “A reasonable worker would just keep their mouth shut, rather than risk losing their severance pay.”

Some employment lawyers say the language offered by Tesla doesn’t depart much from what’s become standard in such situations. The agreement probably goes into greater detail about safety issues because they’ve been a subject of controversy for the company, said Paul Secunda, who directs Marquette University’s Labor & Employment Law Program.

“It might be — because of some history with safety issues — that they want to make sure that they’re not leaving unresolved safety issues with severed employees to be resolved later — they’re trying to make this as final as possible,” said Secunda, who previously worked on severance agreements as an attorney for companies.

“When you’re an attorney working for a company like Tesla, what you’re trying to figure out is what kind of legal exposure does Tesla have, and what kind of certainty, predictability, and closure are you seeking to buy through these severance agreements,” he said. “Because you don’t want to have to deal with these in the future.”

This development comes after a  lawsuit was filed just two weeks ago by the former Safety Director of Tesla. We reported on that development here.

That lawsuit accuses Tesla of “unsafe and unhealthy working conditions and work practices,” including chemical and oil spills, chemical fires, workplace injury rate discrepancies and inaccuracies, and a failure to report or document workplace injuries.”

Questions and concerns about workplace safety incidents at Tesla continue, with the latest chapter in the story coming from the company’s former safety director who is suing the company. In a lawsuit that was first reported by Jalopnik, the company’s former safety director alleges that he was fired in retaliation for bringing up concerns about safety and incident reporting – the same types of concerns that were detailed in a Reveal expose that was published in April. The Reveal expose prompted a safety investigation from California regulators. 

According to Jalopnik, Director of Environmental Health, Safety and Sustainability Carlos Ramirez – who had previously worked as Vice President of Safety for SolarCity – was fired in June 2017. Allegedly, in order to embrace his new job as director of safety at Tesla, he needed to audit the company’s incident reporting system, which is essentially a database of accidents and injuries.

As he details in the lawsuit, once he looked into this incident reporting system that he found “numerous instances of lack of treatment of Tesla employees that suffered workplace injuries, recordkeeping violations, and improper classification of workplace injuries to avoid treating and reporting workplace injuries.”

He then reported all this to Tesla, who subsequently fired him weeks later in order to shut him up. He also alleges in the lawsuit that Tesla simply made untrue statements to the state and the public regarding safety at their Fremont plant.

As Jalopnik adds, workplace safety issues came to light after Reveal’s expose in April:

Issues surrounding Tesla’s workplace records came to light in April, after the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting’s publication Reveal put out a story that said Tesla improperly classifies injuries on the OSHA 300 report—paperwork by the government required to log serious work-related injuries and illnesses—which effectively bolstered its safety record.

California regulators launched an investigation the next day, without saying whether it was in response to Reveal’s report. Tesla vehemently denied the allegations and insisted its workplace injury rate is better than the auto industry’s average. (Incredibly, the automaker went so far as to label Reveal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news outlet, of being an “extremist organization.”)

Among other things, the Reveal article questioned the lack of the color yellow – used to mark risky areas or hazards in a factory setting. Reveal was told that this was because “Elon does not like the color yellow.” Photos in the Reveal expose show plenty of red…

…but no little yellow.

The new Jalopnik article notes that Ramirez seemed to be front and center in noticing these very same issues, as well as questionable incident reporting standards. For instance, it was reported that during May he attended a workplace meeting where he reported unsafe working conditions. Weeks after that, according to the lawsuit, he was fired.

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Surprise! Taxpayers Have Been Footing The Bill For Sexual Misconduct In Congress

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On January 23, 1995, President Bill Clinton signed into law a piece of legislation that had been almost unanimously approved by both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.

It was called the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 – CAA.

The idea behind the CAA was to force Congress to abide by the same rules of workplace health and safety that private companies have to follow.

And one notable example was sexual harrassment; until the CAA was passed, sexual harrassment rules didn’t really apply to Congress.

Here’s where it gets crazy, though: the CAA established an agency called the Office of Compliance to adjudicate various workplace complaints.

And the law further directed the Treasury Department to allocate taxpayer funds to pay claims and damages resulting from such workplace complaints.

In other words, for nearly a quarter of a century, taxpayers have been footing the bill to settle monetary damages every time a member of Congress was caught groping an intern.

What’s more, section 416 of the CAA requires that all mediation, hearings, and deliberation in sexual harrassment claims (or any other workplace complaint) be kept strictly confidential, i.e. NOT disclosed to the public.

Plus a lot of the settlements come with strings attached. In one case of sexual harrassment against former Congressman John Conyers, the legal settlement required the complainant sign an agreement with strict non-disparagement clauses:

“Complainant agrees that she will not disseminate or publish, or cause anyone else to disseminate or publish, in any manner, disparaging or defamatory remarks or comments adverse to the interests of Representative John Conyers . . .”

They’re finally in the midst of passing a law to change this.

There’s a new bill that was recently introduced in the Senate called the CAA Reform Act which aims to heavily revise the originaly 1995 bill.

Among other provisions, section 111 of the CAA Reform Act will require members of Congress to pay their own damn legal settlements… so they’ll no longer be able to grope interns on the taxpayer’s dime.

It’s amazing that this was actually the law of the land for more than two decades.

The United States fancies itself as having the most advanced republican democracy in the world. But this is banana republic stuff, plain and simple.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Apology to Maajid Nawaz Is Bad News for Free Speech

SPLCThe Southern Poverty Law Center has apologized to Maajid Nawaz for including him on a list of anti-Muslim extremists. Nawaz is a liberal who works to de-radicalize Islamists, and characterizing him as an anti-Muslim extremist was a serious error in judgment on the part of the SPLC, which purports to combat hate, racism, and bigotry.

Even so, this outcome—a result of Nawaz threatening the SPLC with a defamation lawsuit—is concerning on free speech grounds.

The SPLC has agreed to pay a settlement of $3 million to Nawaz and his foundation, Quilliam, which will be used to fund “work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.” In exchange, Nawaz won’t sue the SPLC for defamation.

The SPLC really screwed up here, and it was right to apologize. But unfairly characterizing Nawaz is not defamation, because opinions cannot be defamatory. That’s part of what makes them opinions.

Don’t take my word for it: read Popehat‘s Ken White:

One of the most basic principles of defamation law, mandated by the First Amendment, is that pure opinion can’t be defamatory. Only statements of provable fact — or statements that imply provable fact — can be defamatory. I write about this constantly. An opinion, however moronic or unfair, is absolutely protected by the First Amendment unless it implies that the speaker is relying on undisclosed provable facts. So, for instance, “look at what this guy wrote, he’s a bigot” is by definition not defamatory; it’s based on an interpretation of a disclosed fact, the thing the guy wrote. “I’ve listened to this guy’s conversations and, let me tell you, he’s a bigot” might be defamatory, because it implies undisclosed facts — whatever you claim you heard.

Here, the SPLC’s fatuous Field Guide appeared to be classic opinion based on disclosed facts. The SPLC offered its opinion that certain people were “anti-Muslim extremists” based on facts it set forth and linked. Their conclusion appears unfair, narrow-minded, and uttered in bad faith, but opinions are absolutely protected whether or not they’re unfair, narrow-minded, and in bad faith.

Again, the SPLC backed down due to the mere threat of a defamation lawsuit. The organization has every right to admit defeat, and agree to pay up, even though the theoretical case against it would rest on weak legal ground. The SPLC is an advocacy organization, and it’s possible that it didn’t want bad press, and admitting defeat was the swiftest way to move on from this episode. The organization has occasionally been very sloppy about who gets labelled an extremist, failing to draw distinctions between Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a survivor of religious violence—and anti-Muslim crazy woman Pamella Geller. (I recently criticized the SPLC for warning about the evils of cultural appropriation.)

And yet I’m worried that this settlement could end up chilling free expression. The answer to bad speech—like wrongly labelling people extremists—is more speech, not endless defamation lawsuits.

Nawaz is represented by Libby Locke of Clare Locke LLP, the same defamation lawyer who handled University of Virginia Dean of Students Nicole Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone. Eramo, you will recall, prevailed in court. That verdict, which I covered at Reason, seemed well-founded to me. Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn’t just make errors of opinion—she made factual assertions about Eramo that were false. The magazine refused to correct these errors for so long—in the face of overwhelming evidence that Erdely’s trust in her single source, Jackie, was misplaced—that the significant line of actual malice was crossed. Rolling Stone‘s actions were truly extraordinary.

The SPLC matter is clearly different. The organization expressed a really bad opinion about Nawaz, and was rightly criticized for having done so. But the First Amendment protects our right to express bad opinions—and the integrity of this important constitutional principle is undermined whenever someone surrenders to an unfounded defamation threat.

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