Month: May 2021

The Latest #NeverTrump Bug To Splat on the Windshield of MAGA?


BillWeld

Just as May flowers follow April showers, so too do presidential campaigns fertilize the political soil for fanciful, post-election dreams of sprouting viable new third parties.

“We … declare our intent to catalyze an American renewal,” wrote 150 mostly Republican ex-politicians and security-state veterans on May 13 in a breathless joint letter, “and to either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative.”

This new movement, posited co-founders Evan McMullin and Miles Taylor in a follow-up essay in The Economist, seeks either to wean the GOP from its “cult of personality” around former President Donald Trump or to “unify American voters who have been rendered politically homeless into a new political tribe—a resistance movement of ‘rationals’ against ‘radicals.'”

Well, good luck with that. Political independents are a fractious bunch. Building third parties from scratch without benefit of money or celebrity is an almost unfathomably dreary slog, and the last five-plus years of Republican politics has produced a series of humiliations for the #NeverTrump right.

If the American Renewal founders’ names sound vaguely familiar, it’s because they are two of the many anti-Trump bugs that have splatted on the windshield of MAGA.

McMullin, an ex-CIA officer, mounted a late-breaking independent presidential run in 2016, finishing in fifth place with 0.5% of the vote. Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, made a media stir in 2018 with an anonymous New York Times op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Few people could pick the two men out of a police lineup; meanwhile, Trump remains by far the most popular politician in his party.

Joining McMullin and Taylor are several other signatories who’ve tangled with Trump and lost: former 2016 Jeb Bush strategist Mike Murphy; short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci; and “three stooges” (in Trump’s derisive words) Bill Weld, Joe Walsh, and Mark Sanford, who ran against the 45th president in the 2020 GOP primaries and lost the popular vote by a combined 93 percentage points.

Reforming the Republican Party from within seems a tall order at a time when half the GOP congressional delegation voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, and when last names such as Cheney and Romney are radioactive. So what about some new Third Way?

Here’s where the odds really get long.

“At the risk of understatement,” Joe Bishop-Henchman, chair of the 50-year-old Libertarian Party told me in January, “starting a new political party is very hard. It requires a lot of money, a lot of work, a lot of volunteers.”

Would-be new entrants are at a massive fundraising disadvantage from the jump. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) only allows parties with “national committees” to accept individual donations as high as $35,000; the rest have to make do with checks for $5,000 apiece. In order to be recognized by the FEC as having a national committee, parties must jump through all kinds of hoops, such as holding a national convention and running a “sufficient number of party-designated federal candidates on the ballot in a sufficient number of states in different geographic areas.”

Now, you may believe as I believe that such rules are unfair, but let’s remember who writes them: officials elected and appointed by the two major political parties that together have combined for at least 97% of the presidential vote in 18 of the last 24 elections, including four of the last five. And as we’ve seen from 2021 controversies in states as varied as Georgia and New York, the partisan wrangling over re-writing election law has become an ugly exercise in brute political strength.

I, too, would love to see a Republican Party that moves on from and repudiates the worst aspects of Donald Trump. But then again, I’m not a Republican. The 74 million people who voted for the guy in 2020 are not likely to be persuaded by haughty ex-spooks and 1990s reform governors threatening to hold their breath until enough people declare Orange Man Bad.

With every week comes new developments—the debate over launching a bipartisan January 6 commission, for example—reminding us, with the ever-able assistance of the media, that many Republicans will continuously warp their principles to stay professionally viable while Trump’s spell on the party still holds. It isn’t pretty to watch.

But nor is looking the other way as a Democratic-run Washington zooms through record spending bills without much in the way of scrutiny. If it’s true that Republicans can’t quite quit Trump, it may also be true that neither can the media nor the #NeverTrump right.

As evidenced by the fundraising prowess of the Lincoln Project, the Trump-tweaking political action committee, several of whose co-founders have signed onto American Renewal, there is a market out there for selling Democrats the dream of a fractured GOP. As if on cue, the new movement has already been invited onto MSNBC and saluted by Stephen Colbert.

Turns out that’s the easy part. Ask the 35 GOP House members who voted for the January 6 commission whether they think the “rationals” will soon win over the “radicals.” As for a meaningful new party, even McMullin and Taylor acknowledge “it would be the Mount Everest of political challenges.”

If American Renewal is going to be more than a fundraising vehicle, better start climbing now.

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

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Systemic Risks Abound

Systemic Risks Abound

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If you wanted to design a system guaranteed to collapse in a putrid heap, you’d make moral hazard ubiquitous and you’d make the system 100% dependent on a hubris-soaked faux savior.

For the past 22 years, every time the stock market whimpered, wheezed or whined, the Federal Reserve rushed to soothe the spoiled crybaby. There are two consequential results of the Fed as savior:

1. The Fed has perfected moral hazard.

Everyone from the money manager betting billions to the punters gambling their stimmy money is absolutely confident I can’t lose because the Fed will always push the market higher.

What happens when participants are confident they can’t possibly lose? They make ever-riskier and ever-larger bets. The entire nation is in the grip of a moral hazard mania, all based on the confidence that the Fed will always push every market higher–always, without fail.

2. Organic (i.e. non-manipulated) market forces have been extinguished. 

There is now only one consequential force, the Fed. All markets are now 100% dependent on the Fed responding to every bleat from every punter who’s recklessly risky bet is about to go bad.

The Fed is now the perfect union of quasi-religious savior and Helicopter Parent:

oh dear, our little darling got high and crashed the Porsche? Quick, let’s save our precious market from any consequences!

Every day, Fed speakers take to the pulpit to spew another sermon about the Fed’s god-like power and wisdom. 

The true believers soak up every word: golly-gee, the Fed is better than any god–it’s guaranteeing I can get rich if I just leverage up any bet in any market!

The financial media obediently bows and scrapes to their savior, the Fed. 

With a savior like the Fed, you don’t need a real economy or a real market–all you need is the assurance that the Fed will save every market from every consequence.

All this hubris is jolly while it lasts, but since risk cannot be dissipated, it can only be transferred, the Fed has transferred decades of fast-rising risk to the entire system. 

The entire system now rests on the Fed, a dependency that raises its own risks. By imposing moral hazard and crushing consequences, the Fed has stripped the entire financial system of self-correcting mechanisms. This is a surefire recipe for systemic failure and collapse.

There is no way to wean the system off its dependence on the Fed, and no way to restore organic market functions. 

The slightest reduction in the Fed’s spew of trillions will crash the market, because there is literally nothing holding it aloft but Fed spew–monetary and verbal.

The problem with becoming 100% dependent on the Fed is any wobble will crash the system– and diminishing returns guarantee a wobble. 

Consider this analogy: as the human body loses sensitivity to insulin, this triggers increasing overproduction of insulin, a feedback loop which eventually breaks down.

The system’s sensitivity to the Fed’s spew of trillions of dollars and claptrap preaching is diminishing, which is why the Fed has moved from spewing hundreds of billions to trillions, and why Fed speakers who we once heard from once a month are now out in force every single day.

Remarkably, few anticipate any consequence from the Fed’s perfection of moral hazard and the system’s 100% dependence on the Fed’s spew even as diminishing returns gnaw away at the efficacy of the Fed’s ever more grandiose policies and pronouncements.

If you wanted to design a system guaranteed to collapse in a putrid heap, you’d make moral hazard ubiquitous and you’d make the system 100% dependent on a hubris-soaked faux savior. Hey, that describes America’s economy and financial system perfectly.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/27/2021 – 06:30

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An $86 Billion Moral Hazard


TOPICSPOLITICS

The $1.9 trillion emergency spending bill Congress passed in early March was full of items that had little to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, the ostensible justification for the package. Perhaps the most indefensible provision was an $86 billion bailout for unions’ private pension funds. This unprecedented handout could pave the way for a much more expensive bailout of public-sector pensions.

The American Rescue Plan Act creates a new federal grant program to support multiemployer pension funds. There are more than 1,400 of these retirement plans, which are jointly funded by unions and the private companies that contract with them through collective bargaining agreements. All told, this arrangement serves more than 10 million current and retired workers. Most of the funds are doing fine, but 124 of them are in “critical” financial condition, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a federal entity created in the 1970s as a financial guarantor for multiemployer pension plans, which is itself on pace to be insolvent by 2027.

Unlike COVID-19, this crisis didn’t suddenly pop into existence. Democrats in Congress have been seeking federal aid for these retirement plans for years, while Republicans have been pushing for reforms in exchange for new loan or grant programs to prop up the pension system. The American Rescue Plan granted aid with no strings attached.

“It’s a very expensive way to not solve a problem,” says Gordon Gray, director of fiscal policy for the American Action Forum, a free market think tank. While the troubled multiemployer pension funds now have enough cash to pay full benefits through 2051, he says, “congressional Democrats have decided to forgo a lasting solution to the challenge and simply write these plans a check to cover their costs for the next 30 years.”

Anyone who has followed the slow-burning public-sector pension crisis will recognize the fundamental problem plaguing the multiemployer pension funds. Both systems overestimate future investment returns even as they underperform their past projections.

A 2017 study by the Government Accountability Office found that the Central States Pension Fund, one of the largest and most deeply indebted private multiemployer funds, would have 91 percent of the assets necessary to cover future costs if it had achieved its target annual financial return of 7.4 percent every year since 2000. Instead, the fund has earned an average of less than 5 percent annually and was on pace to run out of money by 2025.

Democrats who championed this year’s bailout, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio), say federal funding is necessary to prevent painful cuts to retirees’ income. Brown is right that workers are not to blame for the pension funds’ fiscal problems. But a federal bailout won’t encourage troubled plans like Central States, which provides retirement benefits for truck drivers, to invest more wisely.

The American Rescue Plan “is likely to breed what economists call ‘moral hazard’ as plan managers and sponsors realize there are no consequences to underfunding and overpromising,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said on March 5 during the Senate’s floor debate over the bill. A “no-strings bailout” of the pension funds, he added, means “the American taxpayer will be left footing the bill for a private-sector retirement system.”

Grassley, who had been working with Senate Democrats on a rescue plan for the multiemployer pensions, proposed amending the bailout to include stricter capitalization rules and more oversight by the PBGC. Grassley’s amendment was defeated in a party-line vote. The American Rescue Act passed both chambers of Congress without a single Republican vote for it.

That moral hazard also could manifest in other ways. Critics of the bailout worry that congressional Democrats are telegraphing their intent to put federal taxpayers on the hook for underfunded public-sector pension plans. “If politicians will bail out truckers’ and coal miners’ pensions, why would they turn away from teachers and firefighters?” asked Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The price tag of such an effort would make this year’s pension bailout look small by comparison. America’s various state and city pension plans are an estimated $4 trillion in the red.

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An $86 Billion Moral Hazard


TOPICSPOLITICS

The $1.9 trillion emergency spending bill Congress passed in early March was full of items that had little to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, the ostensible justification for the package. Perhaps the most indefensible provision was an $86 billion bailout for unions’ private pension funds. This unprecedented handout could pave the way for a much more expensive bailout of public-sector pensions.

The American Rescue Plan Act creates a new federal grant program to support multiemployer pension funds. There are more than 1,400 of these retirement plans, which are jointly funded by unions and the private companies that contract with them through collective bargaining agreements. All told, this arrangement serves more than 10 million current and retired workers. Most of the funds are doing fine, but 124 of them are in “critical” financial condition, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a federal entity created in the 1970s as a financial guarantor for multiemployer pension plans, which is itself on pace to be insolvent by 2027.

Unlike COVID-19, this crisis didn’t suddenly pop into existence. Democrats in Congress have been seeking federal aid for these retirement plans for years, while Republicans have been pushing for reforms in exchange for new loan or grant programs to prop up the pension system. The American Rescue Plan granted aid with no strings attached.

“It’s a very expensive way to not solve a problem,” says Gordon Gray, director of fiscal policy for the American Action Forum, a free market think tank. While the troubled multiemployer pension funds now have enough cash to pay full benefits through 2051, he says, “congressional Democrats have decided to forgo a lasting solution to the challenge and simply write these plans a check to cover their costs for the next 30 years.”

Anyone who has followed the slow-burning public-sector pension crisis will recognize the fundamental problem plaguing the multiemployer pension funds. Both systems overestimate future investment returns even as they underperform their past projections.

A 2017 study by the Government Accountability Office found that the Central States Pension Fund, one of the largest and most deeply indebted private multiemployer funds, would have 91 percent of the assets necessary to cover future costs if it had achieved its target annual financial return of 7.4 percent every year since 2000. Instead, the fund has earned an average of less than 5 percent annually and was on pace to run out of money by 2025.

Democrats who championed this year’s bailout, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio), say federal funding is necessary to prevent painful cuts to retirees’ income. Brown is right that workers are not to blame for the pension funds’ fiscal problems. But a federal bailout won’t encourage troubled plans like Central States, which provides retirement benefits for truck drivers, to invest more wisely.

The American Rescue Plan “is likely to breed what economists call ‘moral hazard’ as plan managers and sponsors realize there are no consequences to underfunding and overpromising,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said on March 5 during the Senate’s floor debate over the bill. A “no-strings bailout” of the pension funds, he added, means “the American taxpayer will be left footing the bill for a private-sector retirement system.”

Grassley, who had been working with Senate Democrats on a rescue plan for the multiemployer pensions, proposed amending the bailout to include stricter capitalization rules and more oversight by the PBGC. Grassley’s amendment was defeated in a party-line vote. The American Rescue Act passed both chambers of Congress without a single Republican vote for it.

That moral hazard also could manifest in other ways. Critics of the bailout worry that congressional Democrats are telegraphing their intent to put federal taxpayers on the hook for underfunded public-sector pension plans. “If politicians will bail out truckers’ and coal miners’ pensions, why would they turn away from teachers and firefighters?” asked Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The price tag of such an effort would make this year’s pension bailout look small by comparison. America’s various state and city pension plans are an estimated $4 trillion in the red.

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EU Investigates Whether UK Banks Have Moved Enough Workers To Europe

EU Investigates Whether UK Banks Have Moved Enough Workers To Europe

As London and Brussels continue talks over potentially expanding the access for London-based bankers in Europe, something that Britain sacrificed as part of the Brexit trade agreement, and which has inspired an exodus of banking jobs to cities like Dublin and Warsaw, the ECB is stepping up a “desk mapping” review of global investment banks’ back-office employees to ensure that enough of them are situated within the bloc.

Because of Brexit, international banks with operations in London and on the Continent need to ensure that key staff who book trades and help manage risk are accounted for within the bloc, where they can be properly “overseen” (ie held accountable ie punished) by European regulators with minimal interference from the Brits.

The review encompasses the European units of Goldman, Citi, JPM, Bank of America, Barclays and Morgan Stanley, among others. The ECB has asked the banks to answer detailed questions about their risk-management setup including where traders and associated risk staff sit and how they process trades, according to Bloomberg‘s sources.

Five years after the Brexit vote, the EU is making an effort to achieve comparability of current practices at the banks it supervises and ensure they meet certain benchmarks. The review isn’t over yet.

“The desk-mapping exercise is at an early stage and still ongoing. Thus the ECB has not yet given feedback to individual banks on its outcome,” an ECB spokeswoman said in a statement to Bloomberg.

In recent years, hundreds of billions of dollars in assets and thousands of jobs have shifted to Paris, Frankfurt, Dublin and Amsterdam and other cities. While that hasn’t yet threatened London’s status as a global financial center, the EU says it expects these trends to continue.

Banks have been slow to meet certain targets to move personnel to Europe since London and Brussels are still talking about a deal to expand regulatory reciprocity in the financial services industry, which could expand access for British banks in exchange for certain allowances on the British side. Meanwhile, the restrictions caused by the pandemic have slowed the transfer of some employees.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/27/2021 – 05:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3wzWTT8 Tyler Durden

More Than 50% Of UK Oil Jobs Could End Up In Renewables By 2030

More Than 50% Of UK Oil Jobs Could End Up In Renewables By 2030

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

More than half of the people currently employed in the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry could by 2030 be working on low-carbon energy projects, research from Robert Gordon University in Scotland has suggested.

According to the research, the great majority of these jobs will go from oil and gas into offshore wind farms.

The British offshore wind energy is the largest in the world, the report noted, and could employ up to 90,000 people by 2030.

Another 40,000 jobs will be created in other low-carbon energy segments of the industry, including hydrogen production as well as carbon capture and storage, the Robert Gordon University researchers also suggested.

One of the key findings of the report was that:

“Over 90% of the UK’s oil and gas workforce have medium to high skills transferability and are well positioned to work in adjacent energy sectors.”

The UK government recently struck a deal with the country’s oil and gas industry, under which the industry pledges to decarbonize by 2050. Per the deal, oil and gas field operators in the North Sea undertook to reduce emissions from the production of oil and gas by 50 percent by 2030 and capture 10 million tons of carbon dioxide annually by the same year.

The industry also committed to building 5 GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030 and to invest $19-22 billion in low-carbon energy by that year.

At the time, Wood Mackenzie analysts argued the undertaking is a challenging one that would require massive electrification. However, this may not be economical in the current circumstances for many fields, and operators may instead simply shut them in.

“Achieving 50% lower emissions by 2030 will require either full electrification of the west of Shetland and central North Sea or earlier-than-expected field cessations,” said Europe upstream principal analyst Neivan Boroujerdi said as quoted by Offshore magazine at the time.

Commitments to invest in low-carbon energy, however, will likely be followed through thanks to state government plans to decarbonize the whole UK economy. This will certainly involve the creation of new jobs in low-carbon energy projects that could absorb some of the jobs lost with the shrinkage of the North Sea oil and gas industry.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/27/2021 – 05:00

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Brickbat: Tough Lesson


kidmask_1161x653

A Fremont, Colorado, school bus driver has been charged with harassment, assault causing injury and child abuse after slapping a 10-year-old student on his bus for having her mask down beneath her nose. Video shows the driver pull the girl’s mask up and appear to argue with her before slapping her. The driver was suspended, and the school began the process to fire him. The termination letter the school system sent to the driver said this was the second time he touched a student in anger. The first time was in August 2020 and was also because of a dispute over a mask. The driver resigned before he could be fired.

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Reid: When Debt Doesn’t Matter…

Reid: When Debt Doesn’t Matter…

As Jim Reid advises readers of his daily Chart of the Day, yesterday saw the spread of Greek 10-year yields over bunds fall to its narrowest level since 2008, at just 107bps. That was a far cry from the peak in the early 2010s when the restructuring of debt and the European sovereign crisis saw spreads spiral.

What’s even more remarkable however, according to the top credit strategist at Europe’s largest bank, is that “this tightening has come in spite of the fact that Greece’s public debt has continued to climb since then, and now stands at more than 200% of GDP thanks to the pandemic.”

However, since much of this debt is held by the “official” sector – i.e., ECB – and is concessional, it makes traditional debt/GDP metrics much less relevant. Indeed, with central banks holding huge shares of other countries’ bonds this could also be argued to be the case in many highly indebted countries, according to Reid.

According to Reid, “this ‘official’ sector intervention in government bonds has changed the orthodoxy from the immediate post-GFC years. Back then, governments were forced into rapid austerity to ensure they didn’t see a disastrous sovereign crisis. Today, with debt much higher but with huge “official” sector involvement, no serious commentator is talking about short to medium-term sovereign risk.”

As the DB strategist concludes, “this likely makes it much easier for fiscal policy to stay much looser post pandemic than it did post-GFC with all the associated growth, inflation and long-term implications.”

Of course, in the “long-term” some other politician will be in control and as such it is irrelevant for those in control now. Which is why now debt no longer matters and it won’t matter until such time as central banks – which monetize it all – lose their last shred of credibility.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/27/2021 – 04:15

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3fS9YjS Tyler Durden

Brickbat: Tough Lesson


kidmask_1161x653

A Fremont, Colorado, school bus driver has been charged with harassment, assault causing injury and child abuse after slapping a 10-year-old student on his bus for having her mask down beneath her nose. Video shows the driver pull the girl’s mask up and appear to argue with her before slapping her. The driver was suspended, and the school began the process to fire him. The termination letter the school system sent to the driver said this was the second time he touched a student in anger. The first time was in August 2020 and was also because of a dispute over a mask. The driver resigned before he could be fired.

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European Court Of Human Rights Rules Mass-Spying Was Illegal; Snowden Vindicated

European Court Of Human Rights Rules Mass-Spying Was Illegal; Snowden Vindicated

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights has declared that bulk communications gathering by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency was illegal, proving whistleblower Edward Snowden right, and prompting more calls for the former NSA contractor to be pardoned.

The court noted that there were “fundamental deficiencies” in the GCHQ’s interception of communications, namely that no politician or independent body had authorised the data gathering, that search terms GCHQ used to trawl through the data had not been included in a warrant application, and that individual names, email addresses, and phone numbers had not been authorised to be used by the spooks.

Former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who had to destroy hard drives given to him by Snowden in 2013 before the government seized them, lauded the ruling:

Snowden revealed that the GCHQ was scouring all online and telephone data in the UK via a program code named ‘Tempora’.

Snowden responded, saying that he couldn’t have done what he did without journalists and human rights lawyers:

The ruling led to new calls for Snowden, still hiding out in Moscow, as well as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, languishing in prison, to be given their lives back:

Big Brother Watch Director @silkiecarlo:

“This judgment confirms that the UK’s mass spying breached citizens’ rights to privacy and free expression for decades.”

“Today, Mr @Snowden’s courageous whistleblowing is vindicated as is the tireless work of Big Brother Watch and our allies in this pursuit of justice. Mr Snowden clearly deserves the protection of democratic nations across Europe for his selfless defence of human rights.

“Mass surveillance damages democracies under the cloak of defending them, and we welcome the Court’s acknowledgement of this. As one judge put it, we are at great risk of living in an electronic “Big Brother” in Europe.”

“We welcome the judgment that the UK’s surveillance regime was unlawful, but the missed opportunity for the Court to prescribe clearer limitations and safeguards mean that risk is current and real.”

“We will continue our work to protect privacy, from parliament to the courts, until intrusive mass surveillance practices are ended.”

The GCHQ continues to spy on British citizens, as we reported last November it has been monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions.

According to reports, the spy agency embedded a ‘cell’ within Number 10 Downing Street in order to provide Prime Minister Boris Johnson with real time information pertaining to the public’s movements.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/27/2021 – 03:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3uszdi5 Tyler Durden