Month: June 2020

Under Armour has notified the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that it will explore options to terminate its multi-million dollar apparel and shoe deal with the university, the Baltimore-based apparel company said in a statement Saturday, reported USA Today.

In May 2016, Under Armour and UCLA inked one of the largest sports deals in American collegiate history, worth $280 million over 15 years. The deal went into effect in 2017 and ended UCLA’s partnership with Adidas.

Under Armour’s statement read: 

“Under Armour has recently made the difficult decision to discontinue our partnership with UCLA, as we have been paying for marketing benefits that we have not received for an extended time period. The agreement allows us to terminate in such an event and we are exercising that right,” the statement read per ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg. 

“We know that this has been a challenging time for athletes, sports programs and performance apparel brands alike. Under Armour will continue to preserve our strength in this challenging environment, while maintaining a strong network of partnerships with individuals, organizations and leagues that make us the on-field authority for focused performers.” 

In response, UCLA released a statement addressing Under Armour’s actions:  

“UCLA Athletics learned this week that Under Armour is attempting to terminate its 15-year apparel and footwear contract with us and the Bruin community. We are exploring all our options to resist Under Armour’s actions. We remain committed to providing our hard-working staff and student-athletes with the footwear, apparel and equipment needed to train and compete at the highest level, as they — and our loyal Bruin fans —deserve,” the statement read per Rittenberg. 

While Under Armour claims it has not ‘received marketing benefits’ from the UCLA deal – one of the reasons behind the plan to terminate the contract is because the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the company. The company’s turnaround plan (initiated in pre-corona times) has failed to boost revenue – as sales are expected to plunge this year compared with last. 

And it’s not just the sports apparel company that has fallen into financial hardships – UCLA Athletics recorded an $18.9 million budget deficit in January, just months before the virus pandemic canceled spring sporting events. 

More via The Los Angeles Times on why the Under Armour deal bankrolls UCLA’s sports programs: 

As part of the agreement, Under Armour paid UCLA $15 million up front in addition to roughly $11 million per year in rights and marketing fees. The apparel company also agreed to supply the school with an average of $7.4 million in clothing, shoes and equipment each school year while contributing $2 million over an eight-year span toward athletic facility upgrades.

Last week, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, unloaded his Washington, D.C. mansion at 41% below asking place. 

It remains to be seen if Plank will dump his 189-acre property in Glyndon in Baltimore County, called Sagamore Farm, worth around $20 million. 

Under Armour attempting to terminate its UCLA deal, failed turnaround plan, restructuring and layoffs, and collapsing revenues; this all suggests the sports apparel company is in rough shape. 

Authored by Mark Hemingway via RealClearPolitics.com,

Following accusations of widespread fraud, voter intimidation, and ballot theft in the May 12 municipal elections in Paterson, N.J., state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced Thursday he is charging four men with voter fraud – including the vice president of the City Council and a candidate for that body.

With races still undecided, control of the council hangs in the balance. Paterson is New Jersey’s third largest city and the election will decide the fate of a municipal budget in excess of $300 million, in addition to hundreds of millions more in education spending and state aid.

In the City Council election, 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections. Due to the pandemic, Paterson’s election was done through vote-by-mail. Community organizations, such as the city’s NAACP chapter, are calling for the entire election to be invalidated.

Mail-in ballots have long been acknowledged by voting experts to be more susceptible to fraud and irregularities than in-person voting. This has raised concerns from President Trump and other Republicans about the integrity of national elections in November, which are expected to include a dramatic increase in mail-in ballots. If Paterson is any guide, it ought to concern Democrats as well.

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together – including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.

The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed.

“We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said.

“This is corruption. This is fraud.”

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

Two of the election results in Paterson were particularly close. Initially, challenger Shahin Khalique defeated incumbent Mohammed Akhtaruzzaman by 1,729 votes to 1,721. After a second recount on June 19, that race is now tied 1,730-1,730. In that race, a video posted to Snapchat has surfaced that appears to show a man named Abu Razyen unlawfully handling a large stack of ballots he indicates are votes for Khalique. Khalique’s brother, Shelim, and Razyen have been charged by the state attorney general for crimes including fraud in casting mail-in votes, tampering, and unauthorized possession of ballots.

Incumbent council member William McKoy lost by 240 votes to challenger Alex Mendez after a recount on June 1. However, the McKoy-Mendez race is far from over – in the third ward of the city where the race was decided, over 24% of all ballots were disqualified by the Board of Elections. Mendez was also charged Thursday with six different crimes related to voter fraud. (Michael Jackson, Paterson’s incumbent 1st Ward city councilman and council vice president, was the fourth man charged yesterday. Jackson faces four counts related to voter fraud.)

In a legal complaint, the McKoy campaign is alleging outright fraud on behalf of the Mendez campaign. “At least one individual, YaYa Luis Mendez, has confessed to investigators working on behalf of the [New Jersey attorney general’s] office to having stolen ballots out of mailboxes, both completed and uncompleted, on behalf of and at the direction of the [Alex] Mendez campaign,” according to the complaint prepared by McKoy attorney Scott Salmon.

The attorney for Mendez, who leads in the vote count, isn’t disputing that the election results are unreliable. “This election is a sham, regardless of who are the ultimate victors, and this process has to be reviewed by the courts to address the deficiencies in the planning and execution of the election,” Gregg Paster, the attorney, is quoted as saying in Salmon’s complaint. 

For his part, Paster alleges that the botched election has resulted in problems hurting Mendez’s chance of winning. On June 8, Paster sent a letter asking federal authorities to investigate voter intimidation on behalf of the Paterson’s mayor, Andre Sayegh, and local law enforcement.

Mendez is part of a faction opposing the mayor and hoping to gain control of the City Council and push back against the mayor’s agenda. The ensuing investigations into voting irregularities have resulted in Paterson police officers – including those assigned to the mayor’s private detail, according to Paster – knocking on doors and asking citizens about their votes. The local police department says the cops were assisting the state attorney general investigation into the election, serving as translators for differing Spanish dialects.

“Once you start having city police knocking on doors, investigating voting patterns, you’re treading awfully close to the line of banana republic type of tactics,” Paster told RealClearPolitics. “There’s an intimidation factor – you have a lot of immigrants in Paterson, a lot of people that come from places where if the police show up at your door, a lot of times, you know, nobody ever sees you again. And while we’re not alleging local cops are anything like that, this is where a lot of these people have come from and they’re afraid of the police.”

Salmon admits Paterson’s recent election is “crazy,” but points to unique aspects of living in the town that make mail-in ballot fraud more likely – it’s one of the most densely populated cities in America, with lots of residents living in high-rise buildings that have communal mailboxes that are prime targets for ballot theft.

But as noted in Salmon’s legal complaint, Paterson was just one of 31 municipalities in New Jersey that held vote-by-mail elections on May 12. The average disqualification rate for mail-in ballots in all 31 elections across the state was an alarming 9.6%. (The ballot rejection rate drops to 8.1% if Paterson’s results are excluded.)

New Jersey’s municipal elections aren’t broadly comparable to nationwide elections for a variety of reasons, but the 2016 presidential election resulted in a popular vote total with a differential of just over 2%, with fewer than 80,000 votes in a handful of swing states determining the Electoral College victor. Voting irregularities with mail-in ballots could be much less pronounced than what happened in New Jersey last month and still produce a great deal of uncertainty in a national election.

Salmon is hoping vote-by-mail problems will be resolved in the months before the November election. “In New Jersey, people found out that this is going to be an all-mail-in election only a month before, whereas obviously November is still a ways away and there’s a lot more time to educate voters on how to fill out these ballots and how to return them,” he told RCP. But he concedes that it’s “still a fair point” to look at New Jersey’s elections last month and see cause for concern about the national elections.

Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, acknowledged on the Election Law Blog last month that there’s “genuine absentee ballot fraud scandal going on in Paterson, New Jersey and it is going to get a lot of national attention.” Hasen argues that it’s not cause for concern, however, noting there were only 491 prosecutions related to absentee ballots nationwide between 2000 and 2012.

“The rise in vote by mail should lead to increased vigilance against this sort of activity,” he wrote on May 20. “But the push to expand vote by mail is worth it given the great health benefits of increased voting by mail during a pandemic, the small risk of fraud, and the likelihood that fraud will get caught.”

Despite Hasen’s sanguine attitude, the problems in Paterson have received virtually no national attention so far. Salmon and Paster say they’ve had inquiries from only two national news outlets, and almost all coverage of the problems and fraud allegations in Paterson have been confined to local news outlets.

At the same time, dozens of lawsuits have been filed across the country contesting state requirements used to certify mail-in ballots. “Among the main targets are witness and signature requirements for absentee ballots — such as signing the envelope, or getting a witness or notary to sign it, or making sure the voter’s signature is legible,” notes an NPR report earlier this month.

Those lawsuits seeking to expand vote-by-mail include one brought in Nevada earlier year, which aims to do away with signature verification on mail-in ballots altogether – even though ballot signatures not matching voter records was the reason Paterson disqualified over 2,300 ballots.

Meanwhile, the president continues to be an outspoken opponent of voting by mail. He tweeted on June 22, “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” This and other Trump claims about vote-by-mail problems are frequently contested by the press.

“We’ve literally been expecting Trump to tweet about this for the last two weeks,” says Salmon. “Within the McCoy campaign, there have been ongoing jokes about how long it’s going to take for Trump to find out about Paterson and start tweeting.”

The global coronavirus total topped 10 million late Saturday night in the US as a handful of Asian nations reported their case totals for Sunday morning, finally pushing the total over the top. To be sure, there are likely millions of cases that have gone uncounted. But reaching the eight-figure mark is certainly an important psychological milestone, particularly since daily totals for new cases continue to climb.

Roughly a quarter of these cases have been confirmed in the US, which has seen its case total pass 2.5 million, while US deaths are ~125k. JHU counted 499,342 deaths globally as of 1030ET on Sunday.

As more Republicans turn on President Trump and press him to step up and “lead”, or risk allowing Joe Biden to win the election without leaving the basement, the Atlantic-run (and Laurene Powell Jobs-funded) COVID-19 Tracking Project has made an interesting point.

The number of cases confirmed during the outbreak in the northeast represents only a small portion of the total, while the timing of the outbreak in the south and west means more of the actual case total is being captured.

It’s important to remember that diagnostic testing only captured a small % of the actual infections in the Northeast outbreak.

Though we are setting records for *confirmed cases* — there were almost certainly more total infections at the spring peak than there are right now. pic.twitter.com/fZfu8AqHTf

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

With that in mind, even when it comes to the number of cases being reported daily, the current outbreak probably isn’t as severe as the outbreaks we saw in New York City and the Greater New York area (and surrounding states), even though the daily US national case totals are ~technically~ at fresh all-time highs.

The US saw ~43k new cases reported yesterday, a near-record total and the second straight (some say fourth-straight) day of 40k+ cases.

States reported ~43k new cases today, a near record.
These numbers are a result of increased testing capturing the rapid spread of the virus across a large swath of the country. pic.twitter.com/HeMIiYVMOq

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Another round of rumors about Dr. Fauci being “muzzled” by the White House (despite the fact that he just made another round of interviews) is hitting on Sunday. At this point, the stories are nothing new.

Testing has remained above 500k tests a day, a sign that testing has continued to improve (perhaps more ‘protesters’ are finally taking Gov Cuomo’s advice and getting tested?) despite President Trump’s remarks about trying to slow testing during the early days of the epidemic (there’s no evidence he did, though the sentiment isn’t exactly encouraging).

Our daily update is published. States reported 591k completed tests today.

The nation hadn’t ever hit 500k tests in a day before June, and has now surpassed that number 9 of the past 10 days.

For details, see: https://t.co/PZrmH4bl5Y pic.twitter.com/riLqzU8WPe

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Deaths declined for the fourth day in a row, according to the numbers reported yesterday (which – remember – are reported with a 24-hour delay).

Deaths have continued to fall, even as cases and hospitalizations spike across the South and West.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about the death trends: https://t.co/ZXFERIyS6I pic.twitter.com/MiUJmyD4aN

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Florida reported a record jump in cases yesterday, its second record increase in a row, and at least the third in the past five days.

Florida also reported a record number of cases today—close to 10k.

Florida remains one of the few states that does not report how many people are currently hospitalized. pic.twitter.com/1k6DhZBtew

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 27, 2020

Outside of the US, perhaps the biggest news overnight arrives from China, where the Xiongan New Area south of Beijing has been locked down on Saturday, with measures including closing villages, communities and buildings to anyone who doesn’t legally reside in the area, . Hebei province surrounds the federally administered capital city of Beijing. More than half a million people have been placed on a strict lockdown due to this latest outbreak.

Beijing has ramped up coronavirus testing efforts and has tested about one-third of the capital city’s population. It’s believe this outbreak is an extension of the cases stemming from the Xinfadi food market in southwestern Beijing, detected earlier this month.

As of midnight in the US on Sunday, Beijing had run nearly 8 million tests according to, Zhang Qiang, an official from the Beijing municipal committee.

The governor Australia’s second-most-populous state said Sunday that his government is considering targeted stay-at-home orders and locking down suburbs to contain coronavirus clusters in Melbourne. Australia reported 53 new cases on Sunday, 49 of them in Victoria, which raised the country’s total to 7,686 cases and 104 deaths. The latest cluster comes as Australia and neighboring New Zealand had mostly eradicated the virus. Victoria, the state which Melbourne serves as the capital, has reported new cases during 5 of the last 6 days, and was regularly reporting 0 cases a day as recently as June 9. About 40k residents of the state have been tested since Friday.

Iran is also struggling through a rebound in cases, and the hard-hit country is making masks mandatory in public. But the WHO on Sunday declared that the Philippines has seen the fastest increase in COVID-19 cases in the Western Pacific region. According to GMA News Online, between June 16 and 28, the total number of new cases in the Philippines was 9,655; that’s nearly 4x Singapore, which came in second with 2,610 new cases.

Americans hit the streets in huge numbers over the past couple of weeks, calling for an end to systematic racism and radical police reform.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center outlines just who the protestors were. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that Pew polled 9,654 U.S. adults, of which 6 percent said they attended a protest or rally related to race/racial equality over the past month, a sizeable share given that the U.S. is experiencing a deadly pandemic.

You will find more infographics at Statista

615 of Pew’s respondents attended a such protest or rally and 46 percent of that total were White, 22 percent were Hispanic, 17 percent were Black and 8 percent were Asian.

Pew states that protestors tended to be nonwhite given the total number of adults polled, 64 percent of whom were White, 15 percent of whom were Hispanic, 11 percent who were Black and 5 percent who were Asian. Around 4-in-10 of people who demonstrated were under 30 years of age while older Americans were underrepresented at the protests.

Most participants, 79 percent, leaned towards or identified with the Democratic party.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

An interesting couple of posts from Southfront.org this week gives us some insight as to what’s happening in international oil markets.

Demand for Russian Urals grade oil is so strong that is has been trading at a pretty steep premium to Brent Crude this month. Southfront references this report from Argus research.

This means that the Russian Urals crude is trading at a premium to the European benchmark Brent. The premium is $1.55 per barrel in North-Western Europe and $2.55 – in the Mediterranean.

Argus names competition as the reason of Urals reaching such a high price. After the United States imposed sanctions against Venezuelan oil, American refineries began to willingly buy Russian heavy oil, very similar to the one exported by the Venezuelan PDVSA. In addition, demand for Russian oil in Asia is growing.

Traditionally, Urals trades at a discount to Brent because of a lack of a unified benchmark price for it. The July Shanghai Crude Oil futures contract closed at ¥299 (or $42.30) per barrel this week, putting it at a ~$1.70 premium to Brent Crude.

Russian Urals is far closer to the Medium Sour oil the Shanghai contract represents than the Light Sweet Brent.

At the same time the Saudi Arabian plan to flood the market with oil to gain market share has failed entirely.

Despite record oil exports in April as Saudi Arabia flooded the market with oil, the value of the Kingdom’s crude exports plunged by US$12 billion from April 2019 levels as the lowest oil prices in years hit revenues.

In April, the value of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports plummeted by 65.4%, or US$12 billion (45.3 billion Saudi riyals), severely affecting the value of the total exports of the world’s top oil exporter, data from Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Statistics showed on Thursday.

China was Saudi Arabia’s main trading partner for merchandise trade in April 2020, with Saudi exports to China valued at US$1.9 billion (7.16 billion riyals).

The Saudis flooded the market with oil after the collapse of the previous OPEC+ deal in early March, exporting a record 10.237 million barrels per day (bpd) in April 2020, up from 7.391 million bpd in March, according to data from the Joint Organisations Data Initiative (JODI).

They shipped out 50% more oil and revenues plunged by 65%. They practically gave the stuff away in April. They had to. With the Riyal tied to the dollar they had to undercut Russian oil which trades in freely-floated rubles.

In March and April the ruble spiked to a high of RUB81.66 per dollar and has steadily fallen since then. Today it is still trading around 5% weaker against the U.S. dollar than it was pre-crisis.

That then becomes an even bigger source of profit given that now Urals grade is trading at a premium to Brent Crude while U.S. exports continue to lag behind.

And the Saudis are now still price takers rather than price makers since they immediately had to go back and adhere to production cuts in like with the rest of OPEC+’s agreement.

This dynamic highlights a couple of interesting points:

1. Russia has emerged as a more trusted partner overall than Saudi Arabia in the Eurasian oil market. Europe is willing to pay a premium for Urals because of both reliability and pricing advantages when currency fluctuations are considered.

2. China is willing to be a big buyer of Saudi oil while it eschews U.S. imports in order to gain leverage over Saudi policy. As their biggest customer China will at some point dictate terms rather than be dictated to.

3. Subtle shifts in the supply chain by major importers could also be a leading indicator of political unrest in the Arabian peninsula. The Saudi economy is in shambles and the Southfront report notes significant layoffs at Saudi Aramco.

I’ve been steadfast in my assessment that Russia holds all the cards in the global oil market at this point. This position will only strengthen as long as oil prices stay in this price range.

And don’t think Iran isn’t okay with this pricing regime since it thoroughly undermines the Saudis, which, in turn, exposes Israel’s soft underbelly. Iran is using the turmoil in the U.S. to, effectively, smuggle oil around the world, including to China.

*  *  *

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Believe it or not, people are actually drinking less now that they are quarantined.

What many thought would be an inevitability – people who are forced to stay home would start hitting the bottle more than usual – has actually turned out to be just the opposite. People are certainly buying more booze to stock themselves up at home, but this doesn’t offset the “gaping hole” from restaurants and bars, according to Bloomberg. 

In fact, global alcohol consumption isn’t expected to hit pre-Covid levels until 2024. 

Recall, we wrote in April 2019 that Gen Z would likely ditch alcohol and become the “ultimate” marijuana consuming generation. The business of booze was already dealing with these types of headwinds heading into the pandemic. There is concern in the industry that even post-pandemic, Americans will continue to cut back on their alcohol consumption.

Mark Meek, Chief Executive Officer of IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, said: “The pandemic is set to cause a deeper and more long-lasting after-effect to the global drinks industry than anything we’ve experienced before. In many ways, 2019 was perhaps the last ‘normal’ year for the drinks industry.”

The U.S. craft beer boom that has driven the industry for the last decade has given way to hard seltzers like White Claw. And non-alcoholic beer continues to sell well. Non-alcoholic beer is forecasted to grow by 33% this year despite an overall 3.7% drop in the beer category. This is due to brewers putting more time and focus into N/A drinks that retain the qualities of regular beers. 

Jonathan Bennett, executive vice president for merchandising and supply chain for Total Wine, said: “You can have the amazing taste experience of an IPA, but it just doesn’t have the alcohol in it.”

“If this is going to be the end of alcohol, we’re going to be great at it,” Bennett said about non-alcoholic options and low calorie drinks like hard seltzers. 

Non-alcoholic brewer Athletic Brewing Co. says its sales this year have already passed 2019. CEO Bill Shufelt said: “It’s an acceleration of a movement that was already in place toward healthier lifestyle. Sure, many Americans might have drank heavily early on during shelter-in-place orders, but being hungover at home probably got old pretty fast.”

Many athletes still drink Michelob Ultra, which started the low-carb beer trend back in the early 2000’s. But other entrants into the niche, like WellBeing Brewing, are starting to pitch their drinks as perfect after sports. WellBeing even makes a beer with electrolytes, like those found in Gatorade. 

Jeff Stevens, founder of WellBeing and a recovering alcoholic, said: “I was just out all the time, and there was never anything to drink. None of the choices, even then, were good. And it was like: Why isn’t anyone doing craft beer in this space?”

Authored by Guillaume Durocher via The Unz Review,

Bad news for southern Europe. It looks like coronavirus will further entrench the European Union’s long-standing disparities between north and south.

According to the European Commission’s estimates, the economies of Italy, Spain, and Greece will all shrink over 9%. By comparison, the EU average is 7.4%. France will shrink 8.2%, while most Nordic/Germanic countries will shrink less than 6.5% (that’s Germany, the Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Finland).

EU unemployment expected to rise from 6.7% to to 9% this year. Unemployment will rise to 9.7% in Portugal, 10.1% in France, 11.8% in Italy, 18.9% in Spain, and 19.9% in Greece. Germany will have 4%.

Deficits are going through the roof, from 0.6% of GDP in 2019 to 8.3% this year. Debt will rise to over102% of GDP, with huge disparities: over 115% for Spain and France, and almost 160% for Italy and 200% for Greece. By contrast, Germany’s debt will rise to 75% of GDP and Great Britain’s to 102%.

In terms of jobs and debt reduction, all of the hard-won gains of the past five years or so have been annihilated.

Nominal GDP per capita (in euros) in selected European countries (source: Eurostat). Italy and Greece never recovered the standards of living of the early 2000s. Note France and Germany decoupling since 2010.

Unemployment (%) in selected European countries (source: Eurostat). Southern European countries never recovered from the 2010 eurozone crisis. Notice that France’s performance has been noticeably worse than Germany’s and Britain’s since then as well.

Macroeconomically, France is now effectively part of southern Europe. From around 1965 to 2000, France was, uncharacteristically, significantly richer than Britain. In the 90s, France was about as rich as Germany, which was then hobbled by the annexation of formerly communist eastern Germany. Today, not having its own currency (unlike Britain) and having an enormous welfare and overregulated labor market (relative to Germany), there is no denying that France is falling behind.

Even before the COVID recession, southern Europe was barely on track for slowly growing out of debt. Now these hopes are completely dashed.

The economic disparities between northern and southern Europe – which have been manifest at least since the late nineteenth century and particularly since the Second World War – are going to become deeply entrenched.

This is part of the reason that I am skeptical of short or even medium term race war scenarios in Western Europe. The fact is that the most diverse and, most often, zealously diversitarian parts of the Western world – Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Great Britain, the United States, and the former White Dominions, mostly of north-west European and Germanic background – continue to be more economically dynamic.

Northern Europe and its colonial offshoots continue to be better at creating economic wealth – despite being hobbled by African, Islamic, and Hispanic minority populations which represent an economic drag relative to the natives – than comparatively homogeneous southern European nations and their colonial offshoots (namely the Whitish nations of Argentina and Chile, which have a fair amount of Amerindian blood).

In the 90s and early 2000s, the European Union could still confidently hope that, despite considerable inequalities, its nations would gradually converge to the same standard of living and level of development.

These hopes were encouraged by peculiarly Boomer assumptions: that wealth grows on trees and everyone is equal. When the euro common currency was created in 1999-2002, the European Central Bank declared that the public debt of southern European countries was just as credit-worthy as that of Germany and investments in them were effectively be subsidized. German and, especially, French banks jumped at the opportunity make massive investments in southern Europe, leading in particular to a hypertrophied public sector in Greece and a huge property bubble in Spain. The bubble burst circa 2010.

All this has great political ramifications. The scale of the economic disaster in southern Europe is presumably why German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to a remarkable doubling of the EU budget by €500 billion over the next three years, raising EU loans to fund transfers to countries hit by coronavirus, particularly southern Europe.

This improvized quasi-federal scheme is quite unprecedented, in terms of speed and scale, in EU history. As Jean Quatremer observes, given that the new budget would be financed by relatively painless loans, European leaders may have strong incentives to resort again to such plans in order to find the concluding fudge during their interminable summit negotiations.

Significantly, it appears that the German establishment – not counting the German Constitutional Court – has basically accepted the ECB’s adoption of Anglo-style mass lending to shore up the economy. If continued indefinitely, this will presumably prevent a 2010-11-style financial panic in southern Europe, but this has controversial redistributionary and inflationary implications in the medium term.

Today, even not accounting for highly-fertile immigrants, northern Europe’s fertility seems to be somewhat higher than that of southern and eastern Europe, I suspect because (potential) parents enjoy superior childcare/welfare services and higher/more secure incomes in northern Europe.

If southern Europe does not recover economically, we can expect continued depopulation as their fertility rates remain depressed and their more enterprising youth, particularly the educated, head north. These nations’ financial and political dependence on the north will grow. North-European economies will of course benefit from the inflow of southern European immigrants, partly counteracting the effects of Afro-Islamic immigration.

Politically, we have fertile ground for instability. The Macron régime is already barely able to keep the more uppity elements of the (neo-)French population – whether white gilets-jaunes or Afro-Islamic BLM marchers – at bay.

Italy looks to be on the verge of explosion. Both the political establishment and the people at large are becoming anti-EU. The inchoate populist-leftoid Five-Sar Movement has collapsed. Matteo Salvini’s nationalist Lega is being outflanked . . . by the even more nationalist Brothers of Italy.

Imagine that the euro-globalist establishment in these countries will now have to manage these pressures with additional grinding years of mass unemployment and belt-tightening. Italy has strong prospects for decisively flipping to a national-populist regime in the coming years and joining the ranks of Visegrád. (I am less optimistic for France.)

In the long run, I am talking 30-40 years, we can expect that northern Europe will become so dysfunctional that people prefer living in southern or eastern Europe. Non-Whites currently make up around 20% of the north-west European population. When this rises to 40 or 50%, we can expect the situation to get very unstable indeed.

Hopefully, by then , the southern and eastern Europeans will have taken note of their brethren’s mistakes and start taking the necessary measures. I mean the adoption of enlightened biopolitics: the preservation their ethno-national identities (accepting only assimilable immigrants, including fellow Europeans) and systematic policies to ensure their nations reproduce and, more than that, do so with a view to improving genetic and phenotypic quality. European nations will be so marginal in the world by then that we will really have no room for yet more excuses, delusions, and half-measures.