Real Vision editor Jack Farley hosts Tyler Neville of Real Vision for a spirited debate about the fate of risk assets. Tyler makes the case that U.S. equities have a lot more room to run, basing his case on tight credit spreads and the Federal Reserve’s ever-expanding balance sheet. Tyler incorporates market breadth as well as venture capital funding to argue that the punch bowl may never be removed. Jack challenges Tyler’s bullish thesis, asking Tyler about the upcoming expiration of the Fed’s emergency lending programs and the possibility that the holiday season will accelerate the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Jack and Tyler then explore the future of so-called “zombie companies,” whose liabilities have swelled to over $1.2 trillion. In the intro, Real Vision’s Haley Draznin analyzes the promising developments of a coronavirus vaccine, how it impacts the markets, and why some sectors will benefit a lot more than others. For charts from Tyler as well as Jack, click here: https://rvtv.io/2URRNAH
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3l0VdvL Tyler Durden
Pennsylvania Governor Bans Alcohol Sales On The Day Before Thanksgiving Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/23/2020 – 18:20
Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf is tapping into his state’s Quaker roots to deliver an economy-sized dose of Thanksgiving disappointment. In an effort to avert a coronavirus-inspired lockdown, the governor said Monday that he would ban alcohol sales in the state on the day before Thanksgiving via executive order.
Bars and restaurants should stop selling alcohol starting at 1700ET on Wednesday until 0800ET Thanksgiving morning. Since Thanksgiving is typically “the biggest day for drinking”, the governor hopes the mandate could help slow the spread of the virus.
So, for the millions of Americans who ignored the CDC’s warnings and traveled home for the holidays anyway, the traditional pre-Thanksgiving tradition of hooking up with an old high school classmate while out at the ol’ stomping ground bars on the night before Thanksgiving will be – like pretty much everything else in 2020 – ruined, in Pennsylvania and many other states.
*CDC Urges Americans Not to Travel for Thanksgiving
Because while alcohol sales can legally continue in New York and New Jersey, those states have curfews in place or other restrictions to stop bars from opening to patrons this holiday season.
“This is an advisory,” Wolf said. “All Pennsylvanians, in order to stay safe, ought to stay home. It is vital that every single Pennsylvanian takes these mitigation steps seriously.”
The ban on alcohol sales follows orders to limit holiday gatherings to members of one’s immediate family or household. The governor warned that all of these restrictions would help the state avoid “greater strain” on its health-care system, which is more vulnerable in rural parts of the vast Keystone state.
“As our hospitals and health care system are facing greater strain, we need to redouble our efforts to keep people safe,” Wolf said in a statement. “If our health care system is compromised, it isn’t only COVID-19 patients who will suffer. If we run out of hospital beds, or if hospital staff are over-worked to the breaking point, care will suffer for every patient – including those who need emergency care for illnesses, accidents, or chronic conditions unrelated to COVID-19.”
To be sure, many Pennsylvanians had probably grown weary of Wolf’s aggressive restrictions even before this latest executive order.
They’ll have their chance to get their revenge at the polls some day. But for now, at least the Steelers game is still on.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/35ZooLr Tyler Durden
That’s the question dominating the second half of this week’s Reason Roundtable. The first 30 minutes are all about this year’s COVID-tainted Thanksgiving—recipes, serving strategies, tips for sidestepping political conversations, and grisly family traditions (including a “Cranberry Man” you cannot unhear). We also describe what we’re thankful for, in a very on-brand way.
Easy question: Is it illegal to steal an election or not?
You would have to assume that it is no big deal based on the response to claims of widespread fraud in the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden. Big Media says the evidence just doesn’t exist, and most Americans seem to be lost in a blue haze of blind acceptance that whatever they are told by the talking heads on TV must be true.
This kind of unthinking obedience to authority is a frightening harbinger of an America that is no longer a nation of laws, but rather a nation of edicts. You can already see that unfolding in the sheep-like acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions that blatantly ignore the Constitution. But if you dare do your own independent assessment of facts — whether regarding the efficacy of mask use in preventing spread of coronavirus or regarding the security of electronic voting — you will quickly come to a different conclusion than that which is approved by Big Tech, Big Media and Big Money.
Unfortunately, most people don’t take the time to do their own research. They simply believe whatever is told to them. For those in thrall to the establishment media, that means they believe that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are “baseless.” Remember, the media made that declaration within hours of the election, long before any evidence had been presented in a court of law and before analysis had begun on the raw vote totals. Once that narrative was established, it didn’t matter how many affidavits were presented, how many witnesses came forward, or how much analysis suggested that the vote count may have been manipulated. The jury of the American people had already been tainted by Big Media to believe the narrative that Trump is a sore loser.
Don’t forget, the mainstream media — in the interests of public enlightenment (now known as wokeness) — have spent the past four years reporting as fact that the duly elected president of the United States is a liar, a tax cheat, a Russian puppet, and a racist. In other words, he is a con man who never should have been anywhere near the Oval Office in the first place. So why would anyone now believe his claims that Democrats used phony mail ballots, vote-counting software and foreign manipulation to steal the election? Most of the media is pretending that there is not even a real story to report in what, if true, would be one of the gravest constitutional crises in the history of our republic.
As Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in his press conference Thursday, “The coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this,” he warned the press. “You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it.”
But, the newsrooms at CNN and MSNBC are keeping it from the public. They refused to even carry Giuliani’s press conference laying out the evidence of election fraud. As for Fox News, they covered it, and then put a reporter on the air to say the claims were “simply not true” or “baseless.” Clearly, we are not going to get the truth from the media. Has there been even one reporter for a mainstream outlet such as the Washington Post asking questions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to hacking or manipulation? Is any news organization demanding that the Justice Department or FBI get to the bottom of the story?
The loss of a free and neutral press means that democracy cannot work even if its elections were completely above board. The capacity of the people to self-govern is dependent on their access to true and accurate information. Sadly, the opposite principle applies as well. When journalism abandons objectivity in favor of an agenda, then the people are in the position of cattle being led to slaughter.
Thomas Jefferson described the abuses of a free press in 1814 in a letter to his friend Walter Jones:
“I deplore … the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write for them… These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief… This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit.”
Ouch! Take that, New York Times! Take that, CNN!
Of course, it is just such a malign “party spirit” that informs almost all mainstream journalism in the Age of Trump — a spirit that is visible in the hostility towards Trump himself, but also in the accommodation towards Democrats such as Joe Biden. Last Monday’s Biden press conference was a stunning abdication of responsibility by the media for its much-vaunted role of “speaking truth to power” — or at least asking tough questions.
Three of the first four queries were merely anti-Trump questions asked in a new way. Instead of asking Trump “How do you justify your unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?” the reporters merely asked Biden what he thought about Trump’s “unprecedented attempt” blah blah blah. Then the next three questions were about COVID, which after six months of campaigning, even Sleepy Joe Biden could answer with his eyes closed.
Isn’t the media going to hold Biden accountable just like they claimed to hold Trump accountable? Why not ask about the curious patterns of vote counting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia that make millions of people think Biden tried to steal the election? Shouldn’t he be asked to support a full investigation to prove his victory was legitimate? How about a question about whether Hunter Biden will come out of hiding now that the election is over? How about asking the “president-in-waiting” to condemn the BLM and antifa violence that sent several innocent Trump supporters to the hospital two weeks ago?
How about our celebrity journalists celebrate their own crucial role as defenders of democracy? If they don’t want to “render themselves useless,” they need to swear allegiance to facts, wherever they lead, and not to one party. Or as Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put it more indelicately, “They have to be equal opportunity assholes.”
But they aren’t — and sooner or later the American people will get tired of being manipulated. Journalism is supposed to give an honest account of the facts so that people can make up their own minds what they believe to be true. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a dishonest attempt to persuade people not to examine the facts for themselves. Journalism starts with facts and allows people to reach their own conclusion. Propaganda starts with a conclusion and manipulates people into accepting it as fact. You can decide for yourself whether what we have today is journalism or propaganda.
But the bottom line is this: Whether or not Donald Trump can prove his case in court should be irrelevant to the job of the press. What honest reporters ought to recognize is the significance of the allegation itself, the historical nature of the crime being alleged, and the importance to the future of our republic that the case must be heard.
Too bad there are so few honest reporters left.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/398vZJF Tyler Durden
That’s the question dominating the second half of this week’s Reason Roundtable. The first 30 minutes are all about this year’s COVID-tainted Thanksgiving—recipes, serving strategies, tips for sidestepping political conversations, and grisly family traditions (including a “Cranberry Man” you cannot unhear). We also describe what we’re thankful for, in a very on-brand way.
Central Banks To Add Liquidity Worth 0.66% Of Global GDP On Average Every Month In 2021 Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/23/2020 – 17:41
Earlier we discussed why Morgan Stanley’s chief equity strategist Michael Wilson voiced concerns about the continuation of the “overcooked” equity rally, expecting a drawdown into year end for the simple reason that “both fiscal and now monetary policy have become reactive rather than proactive. For markets, that becomes the itch that needs to be scratched–i.e. market pressure is necessary and likely to get Congress and/or the Fed to act.“
And yet, once the coming period of volatility is over, Morgan Stanley sees the bull market continuing with the S&P expected to rise another 10% over the next 12 months.
Why? The answer is simple, and is the same one explaining the market’s rally over the past decade: the unprecedented liquidity injection by central banks since 2009.
As Morgan Stanley’s chief rates strategist Matthew Hornbach wrote in a note this morning, while conceding that “unforeseen obstacles to a buoyant risk environment will arise” he said that “current central bank policies are aimed at softening those blows, and will be effective at doing so.” Indeed, as Hornback predicts, “not only will central bank balance sheets continue to expand”, with the Morgan Stanley strategist expecting G4 central bank balance sheets to hit just why of $30 trillion in two years, up from $25 trillion currently…
… but additionally “very few central banks will be raising policy rates in 2021, and a few will be cutting them further.”
While it was once seen in poor form to assign a bullish thesis to central bank liquidity and intervention, those days are long gone as Hornbach shows:
Back to Liquidity
An important feature of 2021 will be the liquidity underlying economic growth. Why is liquidity important to macro markets? It both greases the wheels of transactional finance and changes the opportunity set available to investors. When it comes to liquidity, our focus is on both “narrow” and “broad” measures, as defined by Goodfriend (2000). And we expect both types of liquidity to expand in 2021.
Liquidity will come from continued central bank QE…
Central bank purchases of private sector assets (government bonds, corporate bonds, agency MBS) feature heavily in both types of liquidity injection. Exhibit 7 shows our monthly QE projections for the 8 central banks we think will be active in 2021.
We expect these 8 combined to remove US$304 billion of securities ($238 billion of which will be government bonds), on average, from private markets every month in 2021. Unsurprisingly, the Fed and the ECB will remove the most securities each month, in US dollar terms (see Exhibit 8).
In total, these 8 central banks are expected to add liquidity worth 0.66% of annual nominal GDP, on average, every month in 2021. “That is a rapid pace of global liquidity injection, the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of 2020″ Hornbach casually inserts.
And in a world in which helicopter money is the norm as government debt is now actively monetized by central banks to enable MMT, we expect the real central bank balance sheet number to be drastically higher than Morgan Stanley’s forecast.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/35Y3oov Tyler Durden
The recent announcement by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index that Tesla Inc. would join the index of large U.S. stocks is the latest reminder of the importance of immigrants to America’s success.
Tesla’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, is now the third-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk was born in South Africa but eventually came to the United States via Canada.
People may complain about Musk’s erratic tweets or the share of his company’s revenues that come from reselling regulatory credits. Even discounting for all that, though, what he has done with Tesla is a remarkable achievement. People who can afford to drive Mercedes-Benz cars or other luxury gas-powered vehicles are voluntarily (okay, with nudges of government subsidies in some cases, but more or less voluntarily) trading them in for cars from a new entrant to the market. They are doing so in such numbers as to make Musk and other Tesla shareholders extremely wealthy. In the third quarter of 2020—amid a global pandemic—Tesla produced 145,036 vehicles. Tesla’s market capitalization now exceeds that of much older companies such as JPMorganChase & Co., Coca-Cola Co., or McDonald’s Corp.
Nor is Musk an exception when it comes to America’s most valuable companies being led by immigrants. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is originally from Hyderabad, India. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, was co-founded by an immigrant from Russia, Sergey Brin. The current CEO of Alphabet is Sundar Pichai, who was born in Chennai, India, and came to the U.S. to study at Stanford and Wharton.
Some big companies that aren’t immigrant success stories are children-of-immigrant success stories. Abdulfattah Jandali was a Syrian professor of political science who came to America and gave his son up for adoption; the son became Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the son of an immigrant to the U.S. from Cuba.
All this is worth thinking about now as an incoming presidential administration looks at how it might support economic growth amid the effects of the pandemic. Joe Biden’s temptation will be to try to handle this via executive order, as President Obama did with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and as President Trump did with rolling it back.
But if Republicans are to do a proper reckoning with where Trump went wrong, part of it has to be a clear-eyed look at the mixed signals he sent on immigration. At moments, such as the naturalization ceremony staged at the Republican National Convention, Trump welcomed immigrants. The more dominant message, though, was that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants and refugees, were a threat—”rapists.” Some of that was press bias, seizing on Trump’s negative statements and ignoring the positive ones. But the signals were clear enough from the policies of building the wall, reducing refugee admissions, and separating children from parents at the border.
As Matthew Yglesias writes in an excellent new book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, U.S. immigration policy needn’t be “an act of kindness toward strangers.” Rather, it can be “a strategy for national growth and national greatness.”
With more people, America will have more innovative, job-creating companies like Apple and Tesla and Alphabet and Amazon.
A recently retired CEO recalled the other day that during a visit to China he had tried to curry favor by telling his hosts that with the talent of 1.4 billion people to draw on, China would be formidable. The Chinese interlocutor had replied, wisely, that the U.S. could draw on the best talents of the world’s 7-and-a-half billion people.
Musk is but one example.
The best way for Senate Republicans to put the Trump era behind them would be to work with Biden on immigration legislation that will throw open America’s doors to the next generation of immigrant and child-of-immigrant entrepreneurs. They are worthy descendants of the Thanksgiving Pilgrims.
What those new innovators will invent is impossible to imagine, but anyone with retirement savings in an S&P 500 Index fund—and anyone invested in the future of the United States—will want it to happen here.
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These appeals present the question of whether the Election Code requires a county board of elections to disqualify mail-in or absentee ballots submitted by qualified electors who signed the declaration on their ballot’s outer envelope but did not handwrite their name, their address, and/or a date, where no fraud or irregularity has been alleged. Pursuant to our longstanding jurisprudence, central to the disposition of these appeals is whether the information is made mandatory by the Election Code or whether the inclusion of the information is directory, i.e., a directive from the Legislature that should be followed but the failure to provide the information does not result in invalidation of the ballot….
[W]e conclude that the Election Code does not require boards of elections to disqualify mail-in or absentee ballots submitted by qualified electors who signed the declaration on their ballot’s outer envelope but did not handwrite their name, their address, and/or date, where no fraud or irregularity has been alleged….
I agree with the conclusion that no mail-in or absentee ballot should be set aside solely because the voter failed to hand print his or her name and/or address on the declaration form on the ballot mailing envelope. These items are prescribed not by statute but by the Secretary of the Commonwealth under legislatively delegated authority. Absent evidence of legislative intent that what in context amounts to redundant information must be furnished to validate a mail ballot, their omission alone should not deny an elector his or her vote. But I part ways with the conclusion reflected in the Opinion Announcing the Judgment of the Court (“OAJC”) that a voter’s failure to comply with the statutory requirement that voters date the voter declaration should be overlooked as a “minor irregularity.” …
[I]n future elections, I would treat the date and sign requirement as mandatory in both particulars, with the omission of either item sufficient without more to invalidate the ballot in question. However, under the circumstances in which the issue has arisen, I would apply my interpretation only prospectively. So despite my reservations about the OAJC’s analysis, I concur in its disposition of these consolidated cases….
I concur in the decision to affirm the lower courts’ orders pertaining to ballots where the qualified electors failed to print their name and/or address on the outer envelope containing their absentee or mail-in ballots. However, I cannot agree that the obligation of electors to set forth the date they signed the declaration on that envelope does not carry “weighty interests.” I therefore respectfully dissent from the holding at Section III(2) of the OAJC which provides that the undated ballots may be counted….
I can’t opine on the merits of the matter, since I’m not up on the relevant Pennsylvania law (and this is a question of state law, not of the U.S. Constitution); but I thought I’d pass along the opinions. Thanks to Howard Bashman (How Appealing) for the pointer.
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In Reversal, General Motors Backs Biden, Withdraws Support For Trump Emissions Rollbacks Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/23/2020 – 17:20
By Linda Baker, of FreightWaves
General Motors will no longer support President Donald Trump’s battle to roll back California’s fuel economy rules designed to slow global warming, CEO Mary Barra wrote in a letter on Monday. In the correspondence, delivered to leaders of environmental groups, Barra sided with President-elect Joe Biden, who has expressed strong support for vehicle electrification.
“President-elect Biden recently said, ‘I believe that we can own the 21st century car market again by moving to electric vehicles.’ We at General Motors couldn’t agree more,” Barra wrote.
“We believe the ambitious electrification goals of the President-elect, California, and General Motors are aligned to address climate change by drastically reducing automobile emissions,” she said.
“We are confident that the Biden Administration, California, and the U.S. auto industry, which supports 10.3 million jobs, can collaboratively find the pathway that will deliver an all-electric future. To better foster the necessary dialogue, we are immediately withdrawing from the pre-emption litigation and inviting other automakers to join us.”
The recent announcement by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index that Tesla Inc. would join the index of large U.S. stocks is the latest reminder of the importance of immigrants to America’s success.
Tesla’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, is now the third-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk was born in South Africa but eventually came to the United States via Canada.
People may complain about Musk’s erratic tweets or the share of his company’s revenues that come from reselling regulatory credits. Even discounting for all that, though, what he has done with Tesla is a remarkable achievement. People who can afford to drive Mercedes-Benz cars or other luxury gas-powered vehicles are voluntarily (okay, with nudges of government subsidies in some cases, but more or less voluntarily) trading them in for cars from a new entrant to the market. They are doing so in such numbers as to make Musk and other Tesla shareholders extremely wealthy. In the third quarter of 2020—amid a global pandemic—Tesla produced 145,036 vehicles. Tesla’s market capitalization now exceeds that of much older companies such as JPMorganChase & Co., Coca-Cola Co., or McDonald’s Corp.
Nor is Musk an exception when it comes to America’s most valuable companies being led by immigrants. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is originally from Hyderabad, India. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, was co-founded by an immigrant from Russia, Sergey Brin. The current CEO of Alphabet is Sundar Pichai, who was born in Chennai, India, and came to the U.S. to study at Stanford and Wharton.
Some big companies that aren’t immigrant success stories are children-of-immigrant success stories. Abdulfattah Jandali was a Syrian professor of political science who came to America and gave his son up for adoption; the son became Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the son of an immigrant to the U.S. from Cuba.
All this is worth thinking about now as an incoming presidential administration looks at how it might support economic growth amid the effects of the pandemic. Joe Biden’s temptation will be to try to handle this via executive order, as President Obama did with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and as President Trump did with rolling it back.
But if Republicans are to do a proper reckoning with where Trump went wrong, part of it has to be a clear-eyed look at the mixed signals he sent on immigration. At moments, such as the naturalization ceremony staged at the Republican National Convention, Trump welcomed immigrants. The more dominant message, though, was that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants and refugees, were a threat—”rapists.” Some of that was press bias, seizing on Trump’s negative statements and ignoring the positive ones. But the signals were clear enough from the policies of building the wall, reducing refugee admissions, and separating children from parents at the border.
As Matthew Yglesias writes in an excellent new book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, U.S. immigration policy needn’t be “an act of kindness toward strangers.” Rather, it can be “a strategy for national growth and national greatness.”
With more people, America will have more innovative, job-creating companies like Apple and Tesla and Alphabet and Amazon.
A recently retired CEO recalled the other day that during a visit to China he had tried to curry favor by telling his hosts that with the talent of 1.4 billion people to draw on, China would be formidable. The Chinese interlocutor had replied, wisely, that the U.S. could draw on the best talents of the world’s 7-and-a-half billion people.
Musk is but one example.
The best way for Senate Republicans to put the Trump era behind them would be to work with Biden on immigration legislation that will throw open America’s doors to the next generation of immigrant and child-of-immigrant entrepreneurs. They are worthy descendants of the Thanksgiving Pilgrims.
What those new innovators will invent is impossible to imagine, but anyone with retirement savings in an S&P 500 Index fund—and anyone invested in the future of the United States—will want it to happen here.
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