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1/4/2012: President Obama makes three appointments to the NLRB. The Supreme Court would find these appointments unconstitutional in NLRB v. Noel Canning.
The post Today in Supreme Court History: January 4, 2012 appeared first on Reason.com.
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1/4/2012: President Obama makes three appointments to the NLRB. The Supreme Court would find these appointments unconstitutional in NLRB v. Noel Canning.
The post Today in Supreme Court History: January 4, 2012 appeared first on Reason.com.
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WeWork Founder Adam Neumann Has Become A Real-Estate Mogul
WeWork founder Adam Neumann has burned through billions of dollars in his rash attempts at scaling WeWork. Yet somehow, he is still a multimillionaire, and he has decided that he’s not done trying to “re-billionize” – at least, not yet.
Over the past year or so, Neumann has been quietly acquiring majority stakes in buildings with more than 4,000 apartments, with an aggregate value of more than $1 billion. He reportedly owns buildings in Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other US cities, according to court and property records and people familiar with the transactions. Many of these investments occurred within the past year, according to WSJ.
And so, after trying to shake up the sleepy corporate real estate market, Neumann has pivoted to focus on the rental market.
One family friend who spoke with WSJ said Neumann is “excited” about multifamily housing.
D.J. Mauch, a partner in Mr. Neumann’s family office, said: “Since the spring of 2020, we have been excited about multifamily apartment living in vibrant cities where a new generation of young people increasingly are choosing to live, the kind of cities that are redefining the future of living. We’re excited to play a role in that future.”
Another individual identified only as a source close to Neumann told WSJ that he has invested in “a number” of startups, many related to real-estate.
This isn’t Neumann’s first foray into renting housing. During his time at WeWork, the company briefly ran a side business called “WeLive” where industrious young people could live together in a sprawling, dorm-like environment. The WeLive pods became notorious for the excessive partying by their tenants, and issue that was reflected in the culture at WeWork.
WeLive had buildings in New York and Virginia, but the company shut down the service after Neumann left in late 2019, before the pandemic would hammer the company’s business, forcing it to effectively shut down while nickle-and-diming its customers to produce badly needed cash. Plans for an IPO disintegrated due to concerns about Neumann’s erratic behavior and management style. Many investors raised concerns about the concentrated control that rested with Neumann and his family.
WeWork finally went public via the SPAC route late last year at a fraction of the company’s peak valuation.
His real-estate holdings include two apartment buildings in Atlanta and are mostly recently built properties with more than 200 units and lots of common amenities.
An entity tied to Neumann owns Society Las Olas, a residential building in booming Fort Lauderdale, Fla. according to court records. The 639-unit apartment building includes a co-working space, a putting green and a barber shop.
Neumann acquired his first stakes in buildings while he was at WeWork, which incentivized him to pursue this new line of business. His properties also include buildings in suburban areas, which has grown rapidly as more workers move to remote working environments. He owns one building in Norwalk, Conn., a bustling suburb in Connecticut.
Neumann isn’t only investing in the buildings themselves: In 2020, be bought a big stake in Alfred Club, a company that provides concierge services such as picking up and dropping off groceries and laundry, mostly at “luxury” rental buildings.
This all would suggest that the WeWork founder hasn’t given up on repairing his shattered reputation.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/04/2022 – 07:03
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eR28qS Tyler Durden
Gun control laws are wrong because they violate the right to self-defense. Gun control laws are wrong because they were historically crafted with discriminatory intent and create racially disparate outcomes today.
These are two distinct arguments against laws that limit private gun ownership. Libertarians, typically among the staunchest of fans of self-defense and self-determination, have tended to focus on the first. But the second is also important, both on its own merits and because it helps people otherwise concerned about discrimination understand why it is inconsistent to support such laws.
One can make the rights argument a couple of different ways. The first is to start from the belief, shared by many, that human beings are endowed by their Creator (or nature, or their shared humanity, or the universe, or even cultural patrimony) with certain inalienable rights, the right to self-defense among them. Once that is established, protections for those who wish to buy, keep, and use the tools of self-defense, including guns, follow close behind.
The Founders, not ones to pussyfoot around, put keeping and bearing arms right there in the Bill of Rights (although there, as in so many other places in the founding documents, one last pass by an especially pedantic copy editor could have saved the nation in general and the Supreme Court in particular quite a bit of trouble). The Founders were, at best, imperfect scribes of whatever rights people might in fact possess. But they did an astonishingly good job of capturing a laundry list of rights that the state ought not abridge, and they got them written down rather clearly and in short order, all things considered.
One need not be convinced of the existence of God-given rights to conclude that the harsher forms of gun control are unacceptable and unjust rights violations. “I contend that individuals have a prima facie right to own firearms, that this right is weighty and protects important interests,” the philosopher Michael Huemer wrote in one of the more famous modern arguments against such restrictions. While “the right to own a gun is both fundamental and derivative,” he suggests, “it is in its derivative aspect—as derived from the right of self-defense—that it is most important.”
The argument that the existence of a competent police force obviates the self-defense justification for private gun ownership was made laughable twice over last summer, first as citizens marched in protest of police misconduct and second as law enforcement proved wholly inadequate to the task of defending lives and businesses in the corridors of cities where riots broke out.
And rights can and should be applied as equally as possible across the population, with as few exceptions as possible.
This basic rights argument is often laid out at length in part because it deserves the real estate. But it is not the only argument against gun control. And in emphasizing the rights argument, those who seek to protect the practice of armed self-defense risk being unpersuasive to the not-insignificant percentage of Americans who don’t already happen to agree on a list of rights and their scope.
Most, but not all, of that group is concerned instead with harmful consequences. And it’s easy enough to see the harm that guns are involved in every day in America. It’s harder to see the harm that gun prohibition causes.
In “Gun Control Is Just as Racist as Drug Control” (page 18), Senior Editor Jacob Sullum makes this second type of argument, noting that it seems to be much easier for politicians, pundits, and activists on the American left to see how the war on drugs hurts everyone, but especially black people, and to move from there toward strategies for ending or reducing that harm. Yet too many remain stubbornly unconvinced on guns. “Progressive politicians nowadays overwhelmingly oppose marijuana prohibition and criticize the war on drugs,” Sullum writes, “in no small part because of its bigoted origins and racially skewed costs. Yet they overwhelmingly favor tighter restrictions on guns, even though such policies have a strikingly similar history and contemporary impact.”
It is unlikely, to say the least, that the United States has eradicated racism entirely from its police forces. But one need not believe that there is a single bona fide racist remaining anywhere in law enforcement to be concerned about the racial implications of gun control. Historically, the fact that the burdens of enforcement and sentencing tend to fall heavier on black Americans often struck officials as a feature, not a bug. And we live in a world shaped by the policies those officials adopted.
Disparate outcomes are not themselves definitive evidence that a law is unjust or that a legal remedy is needed, but they are a helpful clue that something may be wrong in the system and that the way we are building and applying our principles deserves more scrutiny.
There are many different reasons to engage in political argumentation. One is to rally the troops—to both firm up and confirm preexisting views. This is not merely signaling or recreation, though it can be both those things. Human beings enjoy repetition—lots of it, if most people’s Spotify, churchgoing, and movie-viewing habits are any indication—and there’s nothing wrong with that. Reason often returns to the same topics, rehearsing the case for and paths to a freer and fairer world in ways that will appeal to readers with whom we are already in broad agreement. Longtime subscribers may even remember a 1985 cover story titled “Gun Control: White Man’s Law” that made many of the same points we’re making 37 years later.
But there’s also the much harder task of changing minds. The way to do this—perhaps the only way to do this—is to use a shared underlying view as the thin end of a wedge. In this case, the thin end of a very important wedge has been honed by concerns about harm, and the way to change minds is to probe for inconsistencies in the views of those who do not yet share your conclusions. Rights talk doesn’t always have the same power to leverage existing beliefs into new insight and interpretations.
This issue of Reason is full of arguments that ask readers—in this case, mostly left-leaning readers—to think about the consistency in the formulation and application of their beliefs, not just about gun and drug control, but also about income inequality (“Against Champagne Socialists,” page 28) and the proper role of the courts (“What Progressives Get Wrong About Judicial Review,” page 42).
Ralph Waldo Emerson may have insisted that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, a notion that has given aid and comfort to hypocrites for more than a century. But a desire for internal consistency can also drive meaningful change.
Not every argument offered as a way to bridge those gaps in consistency can or should rest on the same deep principles. Instead, the goal (an ambitious one, to be sure) is to figure out how to talk to each other and come to shared conclusions about how to move forward.
The post Defending Armed Self-Defense appeared first on Reason.com.
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America: Not Looking So ‘Exceptional’ In 2022
Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via GoldSwitzerland.com,
Below, we look at the converging market forces, policies and math which portend a re-thinking of American Exceptionalism for 2022.
As expected, the Fed is an essential starting theme in any conversation of this nature.
Officially, the Fed has two primary mandates: 1) containing inflation and 2) ensuring full employment.
But for those who understand even the most rudimentary (and sordid) history of central bank origins and operations, its real mandate is serving (controlling?) the banking and market masters from whom it was not-so-immaculately conceived on Jekyll Island…
Critical to this rigged-to-fail charade is the Fed’s artificial manipulation of otherwise natural supply and demand forces with regard to Uncle Sam’s increasingly unloved IOU’s—aka: U.S. Treasuries.
Stated simply: There is far more supply than there is demand for America’s exceptional promises.
To fill this gap, the Fed desperately adds zeros to its balance sheet (QE) to purchase these increasingly unpopular credits.
Of course, any meaningful taper of this “gap financing” (i.e., Fed accommodation) would create what Powell euphemistically described in December as a “market dysfunction,” the occurrence of which would violate the Fed’s unofficial yet openly obvious (and primary) mandate of propping stocks not citizens.
The mathematical syllogism behind such a potential “market dysfunction” is algebraically quite simple, namely:
Less Fed bond purchases would = lower bond prices.
Lower bond prices = higher bond yields.
Higher bond yields = higher interest rates.
Higher interest rates = higher costs of debt…
…and for nations and corporations hitherto living exclusively off cheap debt, such higher debt costs = a severe “uh-oh” moment in the risk asset bubbles (stocks, bonds and real estate) which the financial world has confused with an “economic recovery.”
Based on such domino effects, the Fed now finds itself in a pickle.
If it tapers, rates rise and asset bubbles tank, which is bad for the markets which the Fed so loyally serves.
However, if the Fed doesn’t taper, inflation continues its steady rise, which is bad for everyone else.
Given such options, the choice for the always self-serving, public-ignoring and market-supporting Fed would seem to be against a taper, no?
So, why is Powell forward-guiding a taper into 2022?
As we’ve argued in various articles and interviews, we feel that the much-telegraphed 2022 taper will be short-lived, publicly hawkish yet ultimately dovish.
Optically, of course, Powell needs to look tough on inflation in the same way certain politicians like to appear a tough on crime (despite a reality in which both inflation and crime keep rising).
A 2022 taper gives the Fed the chest-puffing surface shine of seeking to combat inflation by reducing its balance sheet and allowing rates to rise in a comically pseudo, Volker-like manner.
But as Wall Street already knows, the Fed will quietly keep feeding the bond market its needed liquidity via trillions of Standing Repo Facility and FIMA swap line support.
More importantly, the Fed will simultaneously keep real rates increasingly negative to reduce Uncle Sam’s debt to GDP ratio while calmly gut-punching the middle class with deliberate inflation.
Former Fed Vice Chair, Stan Fisher, by the way, effectively foreshadowed this scenario in August of 2019, confessing that once any nation’s debt to GDP ratio hits 130%, its only options are: 1) sustained periods of inflation to inflate away its debt, or 2) a deep restructuring of its debt.
This just means that in either scenario, bond-holders get crushed in either real or nominal terms, something almost impossible for investors (or the media) to imagine on the tails of a 40-year bull market for bonds.
This, again, is bad for the real world but good for the policy makers.
That is, the Fed gets to have its cake (tough-guy taper talk) and eat it too (by inflating away debt).
The reality, rather than optics of such central bank realpolitik explains why even the most hawkish talk from Powell pre-Christmas saw a positive rather than negative market reaction—especially from industrial equities, commodities, gold and BTC.
When the much anticipated “taper” does kick-in, small caps, growth stocks, tech names and other risk asset “speed boats” will likely flounder in the coming market turbulence, which will likely create the kind of panic to necessitate a rapid course reversal on the taper, as we’ve seen many times in the past (i.e., early 2019).
With so much smoke and mirrors in play, the next few months should therefore be interesting as we watch market reality collide with central bank fantasy.
As for fantasy, many investors (and the media pipers who guide them) simply refuse to consider that American exceptionalism (from Afghanistan to twin-deficits, external financing and unpayable entitlements) just aint that exceptional anymore…
As I argued recently, the harsh reality of these mathematical facts makes the U.S. more reminiscent of Weimar Germany than that debt-to-GDP monster otherwise known as Japan.
This, however, doesn’t mean wheel barrels of money and hyper-inflation are around the “exceptional” American corner.
The World Reserve U.S. currency of 2022 is not the Deutschmark of 1923 Germany; nevertheless, the directional similarities are impossible to ignore for those not burying their heads in the comfortable sands of cognitive dissonance or an otherwise “cancelled” history.
Unless US policy makers miraculously achieve magical productivity growth (in a locked-down world?) or get honest about the need for the kind of severe spending cuts which kill their re-electability (good luck), the coming years will see the harsh consequences of the “strongest economy in the world’s” fiscal sins.
In all fairness to Uncle Sam, his first and second cousins in the EU are also feeling (as I am feeling in my oil bill in France) the pre-recessionary (as well as inflationary) pinch of an energy crisis, as oil and gas prices mount in the backdrop of headline-making forecasts of output declines out of Saudi.
Natural gas benchmarks on the European side of the Atlantic closed at record high settlement prices heading into Christmas.
Meanwhile, as the West plays checkers with lockdowns, mandates, central bank optics, climate change virtue/fear-signaling and moral concern (?) for the Ukraine, Russia’s Mr. Putin is playing Chess while media darlings in the US condescendingly compare Russian GDP to that of one or two American states.
But what the West is ignoring, as always, is the painful yet patient long-game–something Putin in particular, and Russia in general, know all too well.
Putin’s Russia, for example, has lots of oil and far less foreign debt than his smug detractors in DC and elsewhere.
Equally worth noting, and not surprising to us, is that Russia is also playing the long game in physical gold.
Just one year ago, the following chart confirmed that its nearly $600B in FX reserves hold more gold than U.S. Dollars.
Hmmm.
Why the rising love for this long-game precious metal from a long-game political and economic player like Putin?
Whatever one can say or think of Putin (and there’s a lot…), perhaps this reputed Chess player knows more about debt, basic economic history, energy demand and real money than Powell, and he is calling the bluff on American exceptionalism?
In short: Perhaps that U.S. Dollar just aint what it used to be, and perhaps Putin sees the longer play?
In such a global chess match, most of us already know who would win, and when it comes to gold vs. the USD, the checkmate is already obvious.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/04/2022 – 06:30
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/332eDx6 Tyler Durden
Gun control laws are wrong because they violate the right to self-defense. Gun control laws are wrong because they were historically crafted with discriminatory intent and create racially disparate outcomes today.
These are two distinct arguments against laws that limit private gun ownership. Libertarians, typically among the staunchest of fans of self-defense and self-determination, have tended to focus on the first. But the second is also important, both on its own merits and because it helps people otherwise concerned about discrimination understand why it is inconsistent to support such laws.
One can make the rights argument a couple of different ways. The first is to start from the belief, shared by many, that human beings are endowed by their Creator (or nature, or their shared humanity, or the universe, or even cultural patrimony) with certain inalienable rights, the right to self-defense among them. Once that is established, protections for those who wish to buy, keep, and use the tools of self-defense, including guns, follow close behind.
The Founders, not ones to pussyfoot around, put keeping and bearing arms right there in the Bill of Rights (although there, as in so many other places in the founding documents, one last pass by an especially pedantic copy editor could have saved the nation in general and the Supreme Court in particular quite a bit of trouble). The Founders were, at best, imperfect scribes of whatever rights people might in fact possess. But they did an astonishingly good job of capturing a laundry list of rights that the state ought not abridge, and they got them written down rather clearly and in short order, all things considered.
One need not be convinced of the existence of God-given rights to conclude that the harsher forms of gun control are unacceptable and unjust rights violations. “I contend that individuals have a prima facie right to own firearms, that this right is weighty and protects important interests,” the philosopher Michael Huemer wrote in one of the more famous modern arguments against such restrictions. While “the right to own a gun is both fundamental and derivative,” he suggests, “it is in its derivative aspect—as derived from the right of self-defense—that it is most important.”
The argument that the existence of a competent police force obviates the self-defense justification for private gun ownership was made laughable twice over last summer, first as citizens marched in protest of police misconduct and second as law enforcement proved wholly inadequate to the task of defending lives and businesses in the corridors of cities where riots broke out.
And rights can and should be applied as equally as possible across the population, with as few exceptions as possible.
This basic rights argument is often laid out at length in part because it deserves the real estate. But it is not the only argument against gun control. And in emphasizing the rights argument, those who seek to protect the practice of armed self-defense risk being unpersuasive to the not-insignificant percentage of Americans who don’t already happen to agree on a list of rights and their scope.
Most, but not all, of that group is concerned instead with harmful consequences. And it’s easy enough to see the harm that guns are involved in every day in America. It’s harder to see the harm that gun prohibition causes.
In “Gun Control Is Just as Racist as Drug Control” (page 18), Senior Editor Jacob Sullum makes this second type of argument, noting that it seems to be much easier for politicians, pundits, and activists on the American left to see how the war on drugs hurts everyone, but especially black people, and to move from there toward strategies for ending or reducing that harm. Yet too many remain stubbornly unconvinced on guns. “Progressive politicians nowadays overwhelmingly oppose marijuana prohibition and criticize the war on drugs,” Sullum writes, “in no small part because of its bigoted origins and racially skewed costs. Yet they overwhelmingly favor tighter restrictions on guns, even though such policies have a strikingly similar history and contemporary impact.”
It is unlikely, to say the least, that the United States has eradicated racism entirely from its police forces. But one need not believe that there is a single bona fide racist remaining anywhere in law enforcement to be concerned about the racial implications of gun control. Historically, the fact that the burdens of enforcement and sentencing tend to fall heavier on black Americans often struck officials as a feature, not a bug. And we live in a world shaped by the policies those officials adopted.
Disparate outcomes are not themselves definitive evidence that a law is unjust or that a legal remedy is needed, but they are a helpful clue that something may be wrong in the system and that the way we are building and applying our principles deserves more scrutiny.
There are many different reasons to engage in political argumentation. One is to rally the troops—to both firm up and confirm preexisting views. This is not merely signaling or recreation, though it can be both those things. Human beings enjoy repetition—lots of it, if most people’s Spotify, churchgoing, and movie-viewing habits are any indication—and there’s nothing wrong with that. Reason often returns to the same topics, rehearsing the case for and paths to a freer and fairer world in ways that will appeal to readers with whom we are already in broad agreement. Longtime subscribers may even remember a 1985 cover story titled “Gun Control: White Man’s Law” that made many of the same points we’re making 37 years later.
But there’s also the much harder task of changing minds. The way to do this—perhaps the only way to do this—is to use a shared underlying view as the thin end of a wedge. In this case, the thin end of a very important wedge has been honed by concerns about harm, and the way to change minds is to probe for inconsistencies in the views of those who do not yet share your conclusions. Rights talk doesn’t always have the same power to leverage existing beliefs into new insight and interpretations.
This issue of Reason is full of arguments that ask readers—in this case, mostly left-leaning readers—to think about the consistency in the formulation and application of their beliefs, not just about gun and drug control, but also about income inequality (“Against Champagne Socialists,” page 28) and the proper role of the courts (“What Progressives Get Wrong About Judicial Review,” page 42).
Ralph Waldo Emerson may have insisted that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, a notion that has given aid and comfort to hypocrites for more than a century. But a desire for internal consistency can also drive meaningful change.
Not every argument offered as a way to bridge those gaps in consistency can or should rest on the same deep principles. Instead, the goal (an ambitious one, to be sure) is to figure out how to talk to each other and come to shared conclusions about how to move forward.
The post Defending Armed Self-Defense appeared first on Reason.com.
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China’s Latest COVID Outbreak Spreads To 2 New Cities Including Home Of World’s Largest Port
China is now dealing with three serious outbreaks as the eastern port city of Ningbo reported 16 cases over the weekend, while the city of Yuzhou, a smaller city with 1.3M residents, has seen some of its neighborhoods placed on lockdown.
Fortunately for China’s economy, the Ningbo Zhoushan Port, the largest port in the world, said in a statement published on Weibo late Sunday that its operations are basically stable despite the strict COVID controls to try and contain the outbreak. Of the 16 cases, authorities said nine were imported and seven were local.
According to a statement posted by Yuzhou’s city government to its Weibo account, a lockdown has been imposed upon the downtown district, even though the city reported just 3 cases on Monday. Public transit, taxis and school have all been suspended in the district.
Fortunately for the Chinese economy, the numbers in Ningbo are much smaller than the number of new cases still being reported in Xi’an, which is in the middle of a mass lockdown, leaving many in the city of 13M without easy access to essentials like food and medicine.
As the virus continues to spread, the Ningbo Containerized Freight Index has just reached an all-time record high of $4,264/FEU at a time when shipping costs around the world have surged.
The port city has already undergone 3 partial lockdowns in the past 6 months, according to China’s state-controlled press. Meanwhile, some 200 pilots have been put into quarantine over the past week after two pilots tested positive for the virus.
It’s fair to assume the world is curious about the conditions inside Xi’an, as critics of China pointed out on Twitter that there are no “citizen journalists” in Xi’an reporting on the latest lockdown. That’s unlike the situation in Wuhan, which was covered by several citizen journalists. However, most of these people were disappeared or otherwise disciplined by Chinese authorities, setting a pretty clear example for anybody else who might want to try it.
Still, even China’s state-controlled press has acknowledged that people in the city had been struggling to buy food. It’s unclear whether this situation has eased.
Beijing must contain the situation in Ningbo: freezing the port would have broad-based ramifications for the entire Chinese economy, and the global economy more broadly.
As we noted the other day, traders have already started freaking out about the prospect of supply chain-crippling shutdowns in China, even as companies with large factories in Xi’an have insisted the lockdowns aren’t having a big impact on production. But as a reminder, the last time China’s megaports of Yantian or Ningbo were closed, supply chains collapsed, shipping rates went astronomical after a modest lag.
China finished off 2021 last week by reporting the most new cases since the end of the lockdown in Wuhan, and overall, the number of new cases has been nearing 200/day since the start of the New Year.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/04/2022 – 05:45
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eP9HOG Tyler Durden
All New Cars Sold In EU To Be Fitted With Data Recording ‘Black Box’
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Starting this summer, all new cars sold in the EU will by law contain a ‘black box’ accessible by authorities that records driving data.
From July 6, 2022, all car manufacturers will be forced to fit new models with a system that keeps track of technical data.
The data recorded will include “the vehicle’s speed, braking, steering wheel angle, its incline on the road, and whether the vehicle’s various safety systems were in operation, starting with seatbelts.”
“The new system will coincide with the introduction of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) systems, which will warn drivers when they breach the speed limit,” reports Reclaim the Net.
“However, the ISA systems should not prevent the driver from actually breaking the speed limit.”
The system, which will be accessible to law enforcement but not insurance companies, will also be able to catalogue the exact type of vehicle and send the information to manufacturers after an accident.
Authorities claim the data will be “anonymized,” meaning the information can’t be used to identify the owner of the vehicle, although only the incredibly naive would plausibly believe that.
For decades, government have been pushing for all cars to be fitted with black boxes that track location data.
The ultimate dystopian scenario involves giving police the power to utilize similar technology to completely disable the functioning of a vehicle if the driver is deemed to have committed an infraction.
This doesn’t need to be a criminal offense, if the pursuit of social credit score schemes continues to become more invasive, it would eventually be used as a form of punishment for everything from unpaid utility bills to offensive comments posted on social media.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/04/2022 – 05:00
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3HvtiQc Tyler Durden
2 Nordea Strategists Suspended For Questioning Vaccines & Criticizing “Lockdownistas”
It’s the biggest embarrassment perpetrated by a European sell-side analyst since the Paul Donovan “Chinese Pig” fiasco.
A pair of senior Nordea analysts have been suspended due to a retracted research report that raised questions about vaccines, lockdowns and other aspects of the COVID response that the bank’s management has said should be left up to the “authorities” to decide. At one point, the two strategists criticized European officials who were calling for extended lockdowns “lockdownistas.
Here’s more from Bloomberg:
Nordea Bank Abp has suspended two senior analysts from publishing after retracting a controversial research note in which they referred to governments battling Covid-19 as “lockdownistas” and questioned the efficacy of the vaccines.
“We have initiated an internal review, and the two analysts will not write or publish during the review,” the Helsinki-based bank said on Friday.
The Nordic region’s biggest bank on Wednesday removed the note by Chief Analyst Martin Enlund and Global Chief Strategist Andreas Steno Larsen from its website, after it caused a stir on Twitter and a member of the Finnish parliament, Mikko Karna, questioned its contents. Among the statements made in the note was that “the vaccine is apparently so good that you need to force people into taking it.”
Even if they’re used to illustrate a point, or simply as a sarcastic quip, when it comes to vaccines, jokes about “bodily autonomy”, “lockdownistas”, prison colonies, and showing “papers” – or anything implying that anti-vaxxers are being unjustly singled out for persecution – are simply not allowed.
Nordea has apparently learned its lesson, as the two well-respected analysts have been dumped overboard. Martin Persson, head of Large Corporates & Institutions at Nordea, apologized for the note, saying the Helsinki-based bank will continue to “publish credible analysis and research with integrity.”
And when it comes to COVID, it would continue to delegate to the authorities on all matters of COVID policy.
“As a bank, our expertise is banking – supporting and advising our customers on their financial situation,” Persson said in a statement. “We leave medical advice to the experts and therefore, as a company, we follow the authorities’ guidance on vaccines against COVID.”
When the note was first published, it caught the attention of several Finnish notables, including one Finnish PM.
Siis mitä h*lvettiä @Nordea @Nordea_FI? Oletteko palkanneet jonkun ylilaudalta tai jostain FB:n rokotekriitikkoryhmästä kirjoittamaan viralliset uutiskirjeenne? Onko tämä todella Nordean virallinen linja? Olen aivan järkyttynyt. pic.twitter.com/Rp9IQir20A
— Mikko Kärnä (@KarnaMikko) November 24, 2021
Enlund, 45, joined Nordea in 2014 as chief analyst, but previously worked at Svenska Handelsbanken for nine years doing economic analysis. Steno Larsen has spent more than 10 years at Nordea in various foreign exchange market roles, working his way up the ranks before becoming chief global strategist on macro, FX and rates in February 2020.
Both have frequently criticized official responses to the pandemic both in their research, and on Twitter. And while the Finnish government is surely an important client for Nordea, shouldn’t the bank’s analysts at least occasionally focus on trying to educate clients, rather than appeasing the government?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/04/2022 – 04:15
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3pRRLcp Tyler Durden
When a Redmond, Washington, police officer shot Andrea Churna six times, killing her, she was unarmed, lying on the floor of the hallway outside her apartment and complying with police orders. That was Sept. 20, 2020. The King County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the shooting, says the officer who fired the shots and other officers on the scene have refused to cooperate with the investigation. Those officers have not talked to sheriff’s deputies but instead provided unsigned, undated statements written by their union attorney. And the local prosecutor has yet to file any charges. Churna was having mental issues and called police thinking someone was trying to kill her. When they arrived, she was armed and admitted firing a shot. But The Seattle Times reports she had placed the weapon down and had been lying on the ground for more than three minutes before she was shot.
The post Brickbat: Defund These Police? appeared first on Reason.com.
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