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With stocks headed for their worst daily drop in weeks, leaving all three major indexes on track to finish in the red, the latest widely-hyped unicorn IPO is keeping the trend alive by nearly doubling its IPO price just minutes after its trading debut.
The stock debuted at $25, but was trading at $53 just minutes later.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GORkbc Tyler Durden
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says she wants to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. That is, she wants free college for anyone willing to attend a public higher education institution.
Presumably, an important goal of this policy change — other than getting Elizabeth Warren elected, of course — would be to increase the total number of students that graduate from college.
But is there any reason to believe that “free” college would actually increase graduation rates? Not really. In fact, there are several reasons why the opposite may be true.
Indeed, in many countries with tuition-free college (or ultra-low tuition rates), there are fewer college graduates (proportionally speaking) than in countries with significantly more expensive college costs. This correlation doesn’t prove causation, of course, but when we examine how “free” colleges must control costs, we can see why tuition-free higher education ends up limiting access to higher education.
For a sense of where the net costs of college are the highest, we can consult a 2010 report by Alex Usher and Jon Medow which takes into account all college fees (not just tuition) while also including the availability of government grants which don’t directly subsidize tuition rates. Usher and Medow find, of course, that college is not truly “free” anywhere, although prices are certainly lower some places than others:
Source: Global Higher Education Rankings 2010: Affordability and Accessibility in Comparative Perspective (http://www.iregobservatory.org/pdf/HESA_Global_Higher_EducationRankings…)
Although many Americans are under the impression that higher education is “free” most everywhere outside the US, the fact is only a handful of countries offer tuition-free college. Among large countries with more than ten million people, only France and Germany qualify as “tuition-free.”1 Meanwhile, Japan, Australia, Britain, and Canada all require significant out-of-pocket payments from students. (Moreover, once we get into medium-income countries, it’s important to consider the costs shown above with the local median income. In Mexico, for example, the $8,020 price tag shown here is more than 175% of the median income in Mexico.)
But do lower college fees translate into higher graduation rates, and more education?
Well, we find that the countries with higher proportions of college graduates tend to be countries with higher college costs for students. Japan, Canada, the US, and Britain are all among the most expensive countries in terms of net cost. Yet, these countries all have higher incidence of college completion among residents.
Meanwhile, in France and Germany, the countries with “free” education, the incidence of college completion is much lower:
Source: Indicator A1, “To what level have adults studied,” in Education at a Glance, 2018.2
But how can this be? After all, pundits and politicians often tell us that higher education is open to all in most of the “industrialized world,” and at a very low price.
The problem with this reasoning — and a clue as to why college-completion is lower in the “no-tuition” countries — can be found in the inherent conflict between the two phrases “open to all” and “at a very low price.”
In the real world, no scarce resource can be both open to all, and also very inexpensive.
So, when it comes to higher education in places where institutions are mostly government-controlled, and ultra-low-tuition is mandated, the government must also intervene to restrict access to higher education, and to keep costs low through other means.
These methods include:
Lower “customer service” quality with larger class sizes and fewer amenities.
The first and easiest thing to do is limit the number of students with admissions standards. This can be done by raising requirements for test scores and mandated course work completed prior to enrollment at a higher education institution. How this is done varies considerably from place to place. Germany, for example, employs a number of fairly robust admissions requirements. France, meanwhile, employs the baccalauréat exam system, designed to reduce the number of people eligible for a college education. As Claire Lundberg at Slate has described it:
The problem here [from the student’s perspective] isn’t with the cost of the education, but with the huge amount of tracking, testing, and winnowing that is used to help keep the system free. In America, virtually anyone can get a college education so long as they have the money to pay for it. In France, you can get an excellent, free or nearly-free education but often only if you follow a prescribed set of rules and pass a series of grueling tests that often start early in high school.
French teenagers go through their first major career sorting at around age 15, when they decide on an academic or vocational course of study. This choice determines what kind of high-school graduation exam, or baccalauréat, the student will sit for, and to some extent what kind of higher education is open to them. The choice of track is also not entirely up to the students; the head of their lycée, or high school, has the final say. There’s some ability to change tracks, but it’s not particularly easy.
Naturally, if testing can be used to keep potential students out of college, this helps to control costs.
This model of restricted access, however, grows out of both administrative reality and European attitudes toward higher education. Europeans are decades behind the Americans in terms of adopting the idea of “mass education” in which more or less anyone ought to be allowed to enroll at some sort of higher education institution.
Yes, Europeans have adopted the idea of providing an education to all applicants who are “qualified,” but as sociologist Martin Trow puts it, “Universal access to postsecondary education … is not the same as open access to university for those who earn an Abitur or baccalaureate.”
This system of controlled access has endured longer in Europe which has long looked askanse at American populism in higher education. Consequently, higher education in Europe “constitutes a significant entitlement for the mostly middle and upper middle class families whose children go to university, and it is fiercely defended by them and their children.”
In recent decades, political pressure from working-class voters have forced many European gatekeepers of this higher-education system to move more in the direction of true “universal access.” But, it has proven difficult for European states to fund the expansion in higher education resources necessary to accommodate a model like this. In America, where there is more flexibility to raise tuition — and thus to expand buildings, services, and infrastructure in higher education — growth has been substantial, even if tuition rates have also increased considerably. In European no-tuition regimes, on the other hand, the political opposition to raising tuition rates — opposition provided largely by those middle and upper-middle class families who view it as an entitlement — means the problem of “underfunding” has grown “most dramatically in Europe.”3
This means higher education in countries with few-to-no tuition fees are hemmed in financially, and must either continue to limit access to institutions, or they must find ways to reduce costs while admitting more students.
This leads us to a second means of limiting enrollment: lowering quality by limiting access to faculty and staff, and providing lower quality facilities. This in itself often indirectly encourages students to leave after they’ve already been accepted.
In the United States, tuition-dependent schools have an incentive to retain students through better student-teacher ratios, and through what Trow calls “armies of para-educators, professional counselors, deans of student life, remedial specialists, and the like.”
European colleges do not employ such staff in nearly the same numbers, in part because they are less economically dependent on student retention.
In France, for example, making life difficult for students has been a time-honored method of controlling enrollments. Observers speak of “overfilled auditoria, high dropout rates, and fierce competition among students.” Class sizes of 1,500 people are not uncommon.
As one group of researchers noted: “The accessibility of French universities — both from an admissions and financial perspective — paradoxically has had negative consequences on students. In 1968, French Minister of Education Alain Peyrefitte compared undergraduate life in France to ‘organizing a shipwreck to see who can swim.'”
It appears that little has changed since then.
Nor is this experience specific to France. Many European universities — especially in jurisdictions where education is “free,” appear uninterested in catering to the students:
European universities do not feel compelled to spend millions on amenities that have nothing to do with education, such as athletics, climbing walls, and the like. European students see campuses as places to go to study, not to find a spa-like infrastructure.
But, this is all part of a strategy to control costs. Marketplace quotes German professor Frieder Wolf who notes :
“This is not to complain. I love my job and I have a lot of freedom but this is how we keep costs down — larger classrooms,” Wolf says. “We’ve got courses with 40 participants, 50 participants in the social sciences, where [American universities] might have tutorials of four or five students.”
This isn’t to say, of course, that an education can’t be had at any of these institutions. The German model, by the Germans’ own admission is “reliable quality” and they often achieve this goal — even if that means a stripped-down version of what many people (i.e., British and American students) think of as “the college experience.”
We can contrast these systems with American higher education which is far more open, fluid, and customer-oriented.
After all, virtually anyone can go to college in the US at a junior college or community college where tuition is a mere fraction of what it is at the posh liberal arts schools where many students receive grants and take out loans to attend all four years. Class sizes also tend to be quite small at these 2-year colleges where course credit can also later be transferred to 4-year institutions.
The mistake many proponents of free tuition make is they assume the current American system of highly flexible open-access colleges can be sustained in a system that also offers classes tuition free. They assume class sizes will continue to be relatively small, that current accessibility to faculty can be kept where it is, and that there will be no need to close off opportunities to students who fail to excel in high school.
The reality in “free-tuition” countries often suggests this is unlikely.
Moreover, this sort of rationed higher education means it will be even more difficult for late bloomers and “second chancers” to access higher education. Economic realities will dictate those potential students will be prevented from attending higher education institutions. But they’ll still be taxed for them.
To all of this, some might object and point out that there’s surely a happy medium here somewhere. Perhaps the prudent goal is not “no tuition,” but merely “low tuition.” After all, some countries, like Canada, have quite high degree-completion rates, and also highly subsidize higher education.
But, in most respects, American higher education systems already have the same in most states. The difference in cost, it seems comes not from too little government funding — which is on par with European welfare states— but from high levels of both government and private spending lavished on higher education institutions in the United States. This “extra” cost that must be absorbed by students then goes to athletics, diversity officers, and dorm life. Part of this, as noted above, stems from efforts to increase student retention. But much of it is enabled by America’s odd system of subsidizing colleges through student loans, which means colleges compete more in terms of amenities than through prices.
These latter issues certainly deserve our attention. But the European experience suggests the problems of high prices students now face will hardly be solved by embracing a “free college” model that will serve to only make colleges less responsive to student needs while, ultimately restricting access.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DIn2Gi Tyler Durden
Finally, the New York Times opinion section has acknowledged it has a political conflict of interest. All it took was the brother of its top editor to run for president.
That’s right. New York Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, formerly a top editor at the Atlantic who was credited with turning around the magazine, has, according to a statement, recused himself from coverage of the 2020 presidential election now that his brother, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, has entered the race.
Bennet said Thursday he’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination, offering himself as a centrist alternative to the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democrats vyng to challenge Trump in 2020.
The senator’s announcement made him the 21st Democrat – and seventh sitting senator – to announce his candidacy for the 2020 nomination. Put another way, a full 15% of sitting Democrats in the Senate are now running for president – an unprecedented total, which could create problems for the party’s efforts to, you know, actually legislate during the campaign, with so many members expected to be out on the trail.
We’re at 21 Democrats running with Senator Michael Bennet’s announcement. Will have 22 after Bullock gets in. Maybe we’ll get a late entrance over the summer if the field is still unsettled, but 22 could be the highest number we see pic.twitter.com/AKraHadpTL
— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) May 2, 2019
According to the NYT’s statement, Bennet “will not discuss, assign or edit any editorials, Op-Eds, columns or other opinion pieces focused on candidates or major issues in the campaign.”
.@nytimes editorial page editor James Bennet has recused himself from 2020 election coverage following the announcement that his brother Senator Michael Bennet intends to run for president. Full statement follows. pic.twitter.com/w7UiX85gDQ
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) May 2, 2019
Of course, the fact that the brother of the NYT’s Opinion pages was a powerful sitting Democratic senator wasn’t a conflict for him, right?
However difficult it might be to believe that, the paper said James, who has been in charge of the NYT’s opinion coverage since 2016, hasn’t been involved with any decisions relating to his brother in the past, either. Deputy editors Kathleen Kingsbury and James Dao will take handle political coverage so long as Michael’s campaign is active (so probably through the Iowa Caucuses, but not much longer).
For those who are unfamiliar with Michael (as most readers probably are), here’s a rundown of his policy platform, courtesy of – who else? – the New York Times.
Immigration
Mr. Bennet may be best known for being part of the so-called Gang of Eight: four Democratic and four Republican senators who negotiated a comprehensive immigration proposal in 2013. The bill, which passed the Senate but not the House, included:
More recently, Mr. Bennet was co-author of a proposal that would have prevented the government shutdown in December by giving President Trump $25 billion for a border wall in exchange for protections for immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Education
Mr. Bennet, a former superintendent of the Denver school system, has focused heavily on education policy in the Senate. “I think we need an education president,” he told The Des Moines Register this year. “There’s no public good that’s more important than education.”
In 2015, he helped write legislation that overhauled the No Child Left Behind Act, transferring some authority from the federal government to the states and reducing the use of standardized tests to evaluate students and teachers.
He has supported expanding Pell Grants and is a co-sponsor of the Finish Act, which would provide funding for colleges and universities to “increase access to higher education for high-need students, increase degree attainment and improve efficiency in our higher education systems.”
In materials provided to The New York Times, his campaign did not make any concrete education proposals but said Mr. Bennet would work to ensure that “college students can pursue their studies without incurring the crushing burden of debt; more people seeking an alternative to college can pursue high-quality apprenticeships and job training; and Americans throughout their lives can advance their careers by improving their existing job skills or learning new ones.”
Climate change
Mr. Bennet is in line with the rest of the Democratic field in calling for recommitting to the Paris Agreement and preserving Obama-era climate regulations that Mr. Trump is reversing. He has also supported regulating methane emissions and creating a standardized metric for the federal government to measure the cost of greenhouse gas emissions.
In March, he helped create the Senate Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, and last month, he was co-sponsor of a bipartisan billthat would provide tax incentives for energy storage.
In other areas, though, he has diverged from the party’s left wing. In a USA Today op-ed essay in 2017, he said some Democrats had played into Republicans’ portrait of them as “job killers fundamentally out of touch with most Americans.”
“It is not enough to call for less coal or oil without having meaningful work to replace lost jobs,” he wrote, and “when Democrats oppose natural gas, we fail to appreciate both its importance to small-town economies and its pivotal role in reducing coal production.”
He also suggested that instead of opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, Democrats should have negotiated a deal that approved the pipeline in exchange for emission reduction measures.
Economics and health care
Mr. Bennet is a co-sponsor of the American Family Act, a Senate proposal that would give every family with children a refundable tax credit of $250 to $300 per month. He also supports expanding the earned-income tax credit.
And his campaign outlined the broad strokes of an economic platform involving infrastructure improvements, high-speed broadband in rural areas, and investments in “advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, superconductors and quantum computing.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GOKcLY Tyler Durden
The northeastern U.S. is in the midst of a natural gas shortage that a terrible, cronyist federal law is making it harder to solve. It appeared in April that President Donald Trump was thinking of easing the problem, but the latest news suggests otherwise.
The issue here is the Jones Act, a 100-year-old protectionist law that requires cargo being transported between U.S. ports to be put on U.S.-built ships and crewed by Americans.
Natural gas being produced in Southern states could be transported by ship up to the north. There are not enough pipelines to deliver it by land. There also aren’t enough Jones Act–compliant ships to comply with the law and deliver the gas domestically.
This has led to a particularly absurd outcome. Despite the fact that we produce our own natural gas, Massachusetts was left with little choice but to import it from Russia last year in order to meet demand. Bloomberg reports:
Oil industry leaders argue that the Jones Act restrictions undermine Trump’s American “energy dominance” agenda, by encouraging imports of foreign oil and gas despite abundant supplies inside the U.S. Russian LNG was delivered to Massachusetts last year to help supply consumers in the Northeast U.S. And inland oil refiners argue requirements to use U.S.-flagged vessels boost the costs of obtaining raw crude, effectively subsidizing foreign competitors.
“The Jones Act is completely contrary to the president’s energy agenda, in large measure because it encourages the importation of energy—diesel from Europe, LNG from Russia—rather than the use of energy made in America and developed and refined by American workers,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican energy strategist. “If you’re in favor of the Jones Act, you’re in favor of damaging consumers and helping very specific interests line their pockets at consumers’ expense.”
Those “very specific interests” are the domestic shipping industry and the lawmakers who represent them. They continue to prop up the law despite the fact that it punishes American consumers, particularly those who live in areas that depend on ports to receive goods. Hawaii and Puerto Rico pay exorbitant amounts of money to ship in goods from the mainland. It costs more to ship something from the continental U.S. to Puerto Rico than to nearby Jamaica, thanks to the Jones Act.
As with tariffs, the Jones Act doesn’t really accomplish the effects its supporters say it does. As the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow notes, the Jones Act’s rules make it cost five times as much to build ships in the United States, so it’s just not worth it. The end result of the law has actually been a decline in domestic shipping even as the economy grows.
Trump had reportedly been considering a 10-year waiver from the Jones Act for natural gas shipping. But according to the Washington Examiner, Trump has now told Louisiana’s Republican senators that he won’t follow through.
As you read the defense of the Jones Act by these two Louisiana lawmakers below, again, keep in mind that one of the results of this law was that Massachusetts had to import gas from Russia:
“We cannot let the United States become dependent on foreign countries to transport energy and critical products within the United States,” [Sen.] Bill Cassidy said. “The Jones Act is essential to preserve our domestic shipping industry and protect our national and economic security.”
Sen. John Kennedy, also of Louisiana, released a similar statement, saying “after talking to President Trump, I am confident that he realizes how important the Jones Act is to Louisiana’s maritime industry and that no changes will be made.”
Other lawmakers who recognize that the Jones Act is essentially forcing the entire country to subsidize the private shipping industry have been trying to get rid of the antiquated law, but it’s got a tough road ahead.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WiXSoV
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The northeastern U.S. is in the midst of a natural gas shortage that a terrible, cronyist federal law is making it harder to solve. It appeared in April that President Donald Trump was thinking of easing the problem, but the latest news suggests otherwise.
The issue here is the Jones Act, a 100-year-old protectionist law that requires cargo being transported between U.S. ports to be put on U.S.-built ships and crewed by Americans.
Natural gas being produced in Southern states could be transported by ship up to the north. There are not enough pipelines to deliver it by land. There also aren’t enough Jones Act–compliant ships to comply with the law and deliver the gas domestically.
This has led to a particularly absurd outcome. Despite the fact that we produce our own natural gas, Massachusetts was left with little choice but to import it from Russia last year in order to meet demand. Bloomberg reports:
Oil industry leaders argue that the Jones Act restrictions undermine Trump’s American “energy dominance” agenda, by encouraging imports of foreign oil and gas despite abundant supplies inside the U.S. Russian LNG was delivered to Massachusetts last year to help supply consumers in the Northeast U.S. And inland oil refiners argue requirements to use U.S.-flagged vessels boost the costs of obtaining raw crude, effectively subsidizing foreign competitors.
“The Jones Act is completely contrary to the president’s energy agenda, in large measure because it encourages the importation of energy—diesel from Europe, LNG from Russia—rather than the use of energy made in America and developed and refined by American workers,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican energy strategist. “If you’re in favor of the Jones Act, you’re in favor of damaging consumers and helping very specific interests line their pockets at consumers’ expense.”
Those “very specific interests” are the domestic shipping industry and the lawmakers who represent them. They continue to prop up the law despite the fact that it punishes American consumers, particularly those who live in areas that depend on ports to receive goods. Hawaii and Puerto Rico pay exorbitant amounts of money to ship in goods from the mainland. It costs more to ship something from the continental U.S. to Puerto Rico than to nearby Jamaica, thanks to the Jones Act.
As with tariffs, the Jones Act doesn’t really accomplish the effects its supporters say it does. As the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow notes, the Jones Act’s rules make it cost five times as much to build ships in the United States, so it’s just not worth it. The end result of the law has actually been a decline in domestic shipping even as the economy grows.
Trump had reportedly been considering a 10-year waiver from the Jones Act for natural gas shipping. But according to the Washington Examiner, Trump has now told Louisiana’s Republican senators that he won’t follow through.
As you read the defense of the Jones Act by these two Louisiana lawmakers below, again, keep in mind that one of the results of this law was that Massachusetts had to import gas from Russia:
“We cannot let the United States become dependent on foreign countries to transport energy and critical products within the United States,” [Sen.] Bill Cassidy said. “The Jones Act is essential to preserve our domestic shipping industry and protect our national and economic security.”
Sen. John Kennedy, also of Louisiana, released a similar statement, saying “after talking to President Trump, I am confident that he realizes how important the Jones Act is to Louisiana’s maritime industry and that no changes will be made.”
Other lawmakers who recognize that the Jones Act is essentially forcing the entire country to subsidize the private shipping industry have been trying to get rid of the antiquated law, but it’s got a tough road ahead.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WiXSoV
via IFTTT
Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.) announced today he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Bennet is one of 22 Democrats running, so he could have trouble setting himself apart.
“I think this country faces two enormous challenges,” Bennet tells CBS This Morning. “One is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”
Bennet has been a U.S. senator since 2009. Prior to that, he was the superintendent of Denver’s public school system. The 54-year-old announced last month that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer; he has since undergone surgery to have it removed.
To say that Bennet faces an uphill climb if he really wants to be president would be a massive understatement. He’s one of the seven incumbent U.S. senators seeking the nomination, meaning that nearly 15 percent of the Democratic-caucusing senators are running. And candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Cory Booker (D–N.J.), and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) undoubtedly have significantly more national name recognition than Bennet. Even lower-profile candidates, such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), have an advantage over Bennet by virtue of having announced their runs more than a month ago.
And that’s not even considering former Vice President Joe Biden, who announced he was running last week and leads in most national polls. Bennet is not even the only Coloradoan running—former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who used to employ Bennet as his chief of staff, has also thrown his hat in the race. A list of the Democrats running—with the exception of Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam—is below. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will reportedly announce his own presidential bid in the coming weeks as well.
Running for President?
Beto ✔️
Yang ✔️
Ryan ✔️
Biden ✔️
Inslee ✔️
Harris ✔️
Bernie ✔️
Gravel ✔️
Castro ✔️
Booker ✔️
Bennet ✔️
Warren ✔️
Delaney ✔️
Moulton ✔️
Swalwell ✔️
Gabbard ✔️
Buttigieg ✔️
Gillibrand ✔️
Klobuchar ✔️
Williamson ✔️
Hickenlooper✔️Abrams ????
de Blasio ????— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) May 2, 2019
Bennet realizes he doesn’t have the name recognition of some of the other candidates. “You probably don’t know me because I don’t go on cable news every night,” he says in a campaign announcement video. How does he feel about the sheer number of Democrats running? “This is the opportunity for us to show what we stand for, for us to have a competition of ideas,” he tells CBS. “I think it’s phenomenal that we’ve got as diverse an array of candidates as we have, in all respects, and that we’ve got the number that we have.”
So what does Bennet stand for? He’s something of a moderate—by 2019 standards, anyway—since he opposes Medicare for All and universal free college. “I don’t think 180 million Americans want to give up the insurance they already have through their work or their union,” he says in his announcement video. Bennet and Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) previously introduced “Medicare X,” a plan that “would create a new public option for health insurance—an idea that was originally part of Obamacare but was jettisoned for being seen, at the time, as too progressive,” Politico reported in March.
Bennet wants to focus on “investing in education, from pre-school through college,” as well as in job training. “But I’m not going to pretend free college is the answer. I’m not going to say there’s a simple solution to a problem if I don’t believe there is one,” he says.
Other platform planks include reforming the campaign finance system, ending gerrymandering, and prohibiting members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after they leave office.
While Bennet is not one of the better-known 2020 presidential candidates, he has made headlines several times in recent months. In January, while parts of the federal government were shut down, he accused Sen. Ted Cruz of shedding “crocodile tears” after the Texas Republican said it was Democrats’ fault that federal employees weren’t being paid. In March, he slammed President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for using eminent domain to build a wall on the U.S. Mexico border. Trump’s past remarks on eminent domain were “the kind of language you’d expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy,” Bennet said.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Lik3e8
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After waffling between slight gains and losses for most of the morning, stocks have tumbled into the European close, possibly prompted by a story published by Outlook India claiming that trade talks between US and China have hit an impasse.
The drop leaves the Dow on track for its second straight weekly close in the red. And after the late-day tumble on Wednesday prompted by the Fed’s ‘transitory’ hawkishness, stocks are on track to finish lower for the second day in a row.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Vao6h8 Tyler Durden
Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.) announced today he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Bennet is one of 22 Democrats running, so he could have trouble setting himself apart.
“I think this country faces two enormous challenges,” Bennet tells CBS This Morning. “One is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”
Bennet has been a U.S. senator since 2009. Prior to that, he was the superintendent of Denver’s public school system. The 54-year-old announced last month that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer; he has since undergone surgery to have it removed.
To say that Bennet faces an uphill climb if he really wants to be president would be a massive understatement. He’s one of the seven incumbent U.S. senators seeking the nomination, meaning that nearly 15 percent of the Democratic-caucusing senators are running. And candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Cory Booker (D–N.J.), and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) undoubtedly have significantly more national name recognition than Bennet. Even lower-profile candidates, such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), have an advantage over Bennet by virtue of having announced their runs more than a month ago.
And that’s not even considering former Vice President Joe Biden, who announced he was running last week and leads in most national polls. Bennet is not even the only Coloradoan running—former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who used to employ Bennet as his chief of staff, has also thrown his hat in the race. A list of the Democrats running—with the exception of Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam—is below. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will reportedly announce his own presidential bid in the coming weeks as well.
Running for President?
Beto ✔️
Yang ✔️
Ryan ✔️
Biden ✔️
Inslee ✔️
Harris ✔️
Bernie ✔️
Gravel ✔️
Castro ✔️
Booker ✔️
Bennet ✔️
Warren ✔️
Delaney ✔️
Moulton ✔️
Swalwell ✔️
Gabbard ✔️
Buttigieg ✔️
Gillibrand ✔️
Klobuchar ✔️
Williamson ✔️
Hickenlooper✔️Abrams ????
de Blasio ????— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) May 2, 2019
Bennet realizes he doesn’t have the name recognition of some of the other candidates. “You probably don’t know me because I don’t go on cable news every night,” he says in a campaign announcement video. How does he feel about the sheer number of Democrats running? “This is the opportunity for us to show what we stand for, for us to have a competition of ideas,” he tells CBS. “I think it’s phenomenal that we’ve got as diverse an array of candidates as we have, in all respects, and that we’ve got the number that we have.”
So what does Bennet stand for? He’s something of a moderate—by 2019 standards, anyway—since he opposes Medicare for All and universal free college. “I don’t think 180 million Americans want to give up the insurance they already have through their work or their union,” he says in his announcement video. Bennet and Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) previously introduced “Medicare X,” a plan that “would create a new public option for health insurance—an idea that was originally part of Obamacare but was jettisoned for being seen, at the time, as too progressive,” Politico reported in March.
Bennet wants to focus on “investing in education, from pre-school through college,” as well as in job training. “But I’m not going to pretend free college is the answer. I’m not going to say there’s a simple solution to a problem if I don’t believe there is one,” he says.
Other platform planks include reforming the campaign finance system, ending gerrymandering, and prohibiting members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after they leave office.
While Bennet is not one of the better-known 2020 presidential candidates, he has made headlines several times in recent months. In January, while parts of the federal government were shut down, he accused Sen. Ted Cruz of shedding “crocodile tears” after the Texas Republican said it was Democrats’ fault that federal employees weren’t being paid. In March, he slammed President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for using eminent domain to build a wall on the U.S. Mexico border. Trump’s past remarks on eminent domain were “the kind of language you’d expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy,” Bennet said.
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Oil prices have plunged to one-month lows since President Trump tweeted against OPEC’s “artificially high prices” thanks to soaring inventories and a surprising (high) Russian production print.
The drop was triggered by rising supply concerns (Russia production and US inventories) and demand worries (green shoots in China and US fading fast).
“U.S. inventories have come in quite high and there was already evidence and anticipation that they will be supplying more oil,” said Frances Hudson, a global thematic strategist at Aberdeen Standard Investments in Edinburgh. “I don’t think we’re particularly bullish on prices from here.”
Russia missed a target for production cuts in April, dampening the impact of its agreement with OPEC to prop up prices.
US crude stockpiles are at two-year highs…
“When the U.S. crude-oil warehouses bulge to their highest levels since September 2017, while production continues to set new high-water marks, warning signals should be flashing red,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading at SPI Asset Management.
And don’t forget, speculators are positioned extremely long once again…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2LjFQ57 Tyler Durden
It looks like Joe Biden isn’t the chosen one after all.
After getting that whole ‘groping’ thing out of the way and announcing his 2020 bid for the White House, Biden emerged as the Democratic frontrunner this week according to several polls.
Alas for Biden, his past is catching up with him, again.
While Politico and Marketwatch have dinged Biden over free-trade fails and comments on China, perhaps most damning is a late Wednesday article in the New York Times slamming the former vice president’s major Ukraine conflicts. We reported on this nearly four weeks ago following reporting and interviews with key players by The Hill‘s John Solomon, and it looks bad for Joe.
At the heart of the matter is Biden’s role in threatening Ukraine if they didn’t immediately fire their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin – who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm – Burisma Holdings – which Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.
Biden openly bragged about this at a January CFR event.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. –The Hill
Biden’s campaign maintains that the former vice president carried out US policy without regard to Hunter’s activities, and that the two never discussed the matter. Biden claims he found out his son was on the board of Burisma “from news reports.” Incredible.
It goes much deeper though…
As the Times notes, “new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight.”
Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of nonprofit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. He would be paid as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company, Burisma Holdings. –New York Times
HUNTER BIDEN’s partners recruited firms to diffuse Ukrainian investigations into an oligarch whose company was paying Hunter Biden $50k/month.
The cases were closed in 2017, but now they’ve been reopened.@JoeBiden‘s campaign says it’s a political attack. https://t.co/tblUPYPJMG— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 2, 2019
In fact, the Obama State Department at the time were concerned that Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma would pose a conflict for his father’s diplomatic efforts, according to the report which cites former officials.
“I have had no role whatsoever in relation to any investigation of Burisma, or any of its officers,” said Hunter Biden in a Wednesday statement. “I explicitly limited my role to focus on corporate governance best practices to facilitate Burisma’s desire to expand globally.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have seized – pounced if you will – on the Bidens’ Ukraine conflicts. Leading the charge has been Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who last week told Fox News “I ask you to keep your eye on Ukraine.”
Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on any such phone call with Mr. Trump, but acknowledged that he has discussed the matter with the president on multiple occasions. Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.
Mr. Giuliani said he got involved because he was seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry. –New York Times
“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” said Giuliani. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated, but without the prejudgments that infected the collusion story.”
For 5 years, HUNTER BIDEN was on the board of a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch accused of enriching himself using his position in the Russia-aligned YANUKOVYCH gov’t.
BIDEN stepped down last month, as his dad was preparing to run for president. https://t.co/tblUPYPJMG— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 2, 2019
The decision to reopen the Burisma investigation was made in March by Ukraine’s current prosecutor general – who had previously cleared Hunter Biden’s employer over two years ago. The announcement was made following a contentious presidential election, and was seen in some quarters as a bid by the prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, to curry favor from the Trump administration on behalf of his boss – incumbent president Petro O. Poroshenko.
Poroshenko lost his re-election bid last month to a comedian who played a president on TV, Volodymyr Zelensky – who says he will replace Lutsenko as prosecutor general. Zelensdky has not indicated whether Lutsenko’s replacement will be asked to continue the investigation.
Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, a deputy for Mr. Lutsenko who was handling the cases before being reassigned last month, told The New York Times that he was scrutinizing millions of dollars of payments from Burisma to the firm that paid Hunter Biden.
…
Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine appears to have been well compensated. Burisma paid $3.4 million to a company called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC from mid-April 2014, when Hunter Biden and Mr. Archer joined the board, to late 2015, according to the financial data provided by the Ukrainian deputy prosecutor. The payments continued after that, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
Rosemont Seneca Bohai was controlled by Mr. Archer, who left Burisma’s board after he was charged in connection with a scheme to defraud pension funds and an Indian tribe of tens of millions of dollars. Bank records submitted in that case — which resulted in a conviction for Mr. Archer that was overturned in November — show that Rosemont Seneca Bohai made regular payments to Mr. Biden that totaled as much as $50,000 in some months. –New York Times
Now to see if Ukraine’s new president, Zelensky, keeps the investigation alive.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wjf91x Tyler Durden
