A Police Officer Shot and Killed a 17-Year-Old Boy as He Fled. Now, His Mother Is Suing.


Nasanto Crenshaw

Last August, a Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy during a traffic stop. The boy, Nasanto Antonio Crenshaw, was riding in a stolen vehicle and was apparently attempting to flee when he was killed. Yesterday, the boy’s mother filed a civil rights lawsuit against the police officer who shot her son, arguing that the officer’s use of force was so egregious that it violated her son’s Fourth Amendment rights.

“I hurt every day,” Wakita Doriety, Crenshaw’s mother, told WRAL, a local news station, last year. “I cry all day, every day…. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

According to the lawsuit, the incident occurred last August, when Crenshaw was pulled over by local police on suspicion that he was driving a vehicle that had recently been reported stolen. After being stopped, the defendant—a police officer identified only as “John Doe”—exited his patrol vehicle, and Crenshaw began driving away at a “speed of three to five miles per hour,” according to the lawsuit.

After fleeing, the lawsuit reports that Crenshaw pulled the vehicle into a parking lot, where the defendant followed him. The parking lot was a dead end, and the complaint states that Crenshaw had begun attempting a three-point turn, causing the “driver’s side of his vehicle to swipe the front end of Defendant Doe’s patrol vehicle.” At this point, Crenshaw’s vehicle came to a stop, and the defendant exited his patrol car, commanding Crenshaw to “get on the ground, get on the ground do it now.”

However, the complaint states that Crenshaw began turning the vehicle, facing away from the defendant and his patrol car. At this point, several passengers, also teenagers, jumped out of the vehicle and fled the scene. Shortly after, as Crenshaw was attempting to drive away at a “low rate of speed,” the defendant fired three shots at Crenshaw, killing him.

According to the lawsuit, the defendant had no reason to believe that Crenshaw was going to try to drive into him. As the complaint states, “the trajectory of the bullets entering Nasanto’s body is consistent with Defendant Doe standing on the side of Nasanto’s moving vehicle and not in the trajectory path of Nasanto’s moving vehicle and not in the trajectory path of Nasanto’s moving vehicle.”

“The force used by Defendant Doe shocks the conscience and violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Nasanto,” reads the complaint. “Defendant Doe engaged in the conduct described by this Complaint willfully, maliciously, in bad faith, and in reckless disregard of Nasanto’s protected constitutional rights.” The complaint seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.

“As is standard protocol, the officer involved has been on administrative duty since the day of the incident,” Greensboro Police Department (GPD) spokesperson Josie Cambareri told The Daily Beast. “In addition to the criminal investigation from the [State Bureau of Investigation], GPD does an internal investigation to determine whether or not policies were followed.”

Despite the officer’s disturbing conduct, it’s unclear whether the lawsuit will be successful. Qualified immunity protections have managed to protect police from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases where their behavior explicitly violated a complainant’s rights.

However, the complaint does argue that the defendant is not eligible for qualified immunity, noting that another lawsuit in the same circuit established that officers who “had violated the Fourth Amendment to the extent that they started to use deadly force, or continued to use deadly force … once it was no longer reasonable for them to believe that the car was about to run them (or their fellow officers) over” were not entitled to qualified immunity. While this past precedent provides some hope that Doriety will prevail in her lawsuit against the officer who killed her son, winning the case is still likely to be an uphill battle.

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Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

This week on the Short Circuit podcast: Live at Georgetown Law, an all-star panel, including UCLA Law Professor Joanna Schwartz, discusses police accountability and Schwartz’s new book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.

Last week on the Short Circuit podcast: Live at SMU Law, an all-star panel talks gun rights after Bruen, baby powder bankruptcy, and vaping regulations

  • D.C. Circuit: Airplane seats might be small, but there’s no reason to think they’re dangerously small. So no compelling the FAA to regulate seat size. (Low-key implication for emergencies: a few extra seconds getting out of a small seat won’t matter because you’re going to die stuck in the aisle.)
  • Compare Notice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (Jan. 26, 2010) (explaining that “the court strongly urges parties to limit the use of acronyms”), with Int’l Org. of Masters, Mates & Pilots, ILA, AFL-CIO v. Nat’l Labor Relations Bd., No. 21-1249 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 3, 2023) (considering ulp charges brought by IOM on behalf of LDOs and vacating NLRB decision turning on argument about CBA not presented to ALJ).
  • Weekly vocab quiz from Judge Selya of the First Circuit: armamentarium, crucible, decretory. (Bonus Judge Selya Shakespeare precision: “to paint the lily.”)
  • From footnote nine of this Second Circuit opinion, you get the sense that Judge Cabranes doesn’t think it should take 26 pages and a chart to explain why a racketeer who shot and killed someone committed a “crime of violence.”
  • If Americans cared about soccer the way they care about baseball, the Second Circuit wouldn’t be allowing antitrust claims against FIFA to proceed to discovery.
  • Is the Federal Election Campaign Act regular-levels of complicated or is it tax-levels of complicated? Defendant—an associate of associates of Rudolph Giuliani—convicted of conspiring to funnel illegal contributions from a Russian national to American politicians: It’s tax-levels of complicated, of course, so the district court erred in instructing the jury that it could find my violation “knowing and willful” without finding that I had the intent to violate FECA specifically. Second Circuit: Incorrect. Conviction affirmed. (And unlike Robert Bork, the court resisted the impulse to include any scatological puns about “FECA[L] matter.”)
  • A six-thousand-year-old Anatolian statuette has been circulating on the antiquities market since at least 1961 and sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $12.7 million. Republic of Turkey sues Christie’s, the statuette’s owner, and the statuette itself (in rem). Turkey: It’s ours! Second Circuit: No. Under a 1906 Turkish decree, Turkey can claim ownership only if the statuette was found within and exported from Turkey’s borders after 1906. And that question raises a boatload of tricky issues about the parties’ respective burdens of proof, which the district court got wrong. But no matter: Turkey slept on its rights for decades before trying to claim the statuette, so the doctrine of laches applies. Concurrence: which—just to be clear—is why all that other stuff we just said about burden-shifting is 100% dicta.
  • Texas man sues the Lewisville Independent School District and seven school board members, alleging that the district’s at-large election system violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of non-white minorities within the district. District Court: Well, this seems like a run-of-the-mill . . . NOW HOLD ON A DAMN MINUTE! The plaintiff is white?! What possible interest could he have in these issues?! Attorneys’ fees to the government for this utterly frivolous lawsuit! Fifth Circuit: Let’s just say the standing issues in this case are a bit more nuanced than that. No fees for simply bringing the claim.
  • In which Samsung learns the hard way that if you wait for three years of litigation to elapse before deciding you’d like to enforce your clickwrap arbitration agreement, the Third Circuit will not be sympathetic.
  • “When Allen invited Eric to invest [in breeding race horses], he cautioned Eric that though he might lose all his money, he would at least meet people he would never meet otherwise. Eric called the predictions ‘prophetic.'” Third Circuit: And since he didn’t really expect to profit, this was more of a hobby than a business, which has some tax implications.
  • In 1983, North Carolina sheriffs—acting on a tip—interrogate Henry McCollum, a 19-year-old with an IQ of 56, about the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. After hours of interrogation, he confesses and implicates four others, including his 15-year-old half-brother, Leon Brown, who has an IQ of 55. Following a similar interrogation in which he’s threatened with the gas chamber, Leon also confesses. They’re convicted and serve 31 years in prison before DNA evidence conclusively proves that the true perpetrator was a guy who lived near the field where the body was found, who had previously been tried for the rape and murder of a young girl, and who was actively being investigated for another rape and murder of a young girl that occurred shortly after Henry and Leon were arrested—none of which was made known to defense counsel. Suing for their wrongful incarceration, the two receive $100+ mil in damages. Fourth Circuit: Remanded with instructions to string the defendants from a gibbet (just kidding, but you do have to reduce damages award to remove prejudgment interest and offset earlier settlements).
  • The Texas-based corporate creators of the “Read a Million Words Campaign” are extremely touchy about their intellectual property. To wit: They sue a Texas public school district and a charter school corporation under the Lanham Act when both similarly encourage young readers to become “Millionaire” readers by breaking the seven-digit mark. Fifth Circuit: No likelihood of confusion, so no claims. Concurrence: While we’re at it, it’s pretty weird that the district court held that a private charter school corporation enjoys state sovereign immunity but that a public school district does not. That suggests the “arm of the state” test we use for determining those things might need revisiting.
  • Notorious 89-year-old Boston gang boss James “Whitey” Bulger is found beaten to death less than 14 hours after being placed in general population at a new prison. Cause of death was a “lock in a sock” bludgeoning weapon, allegedly used by rival mafia inmates. His estate sues the several prison employees under Bivens and the United States via the FTCA. District court: Dismissed. I’m not expanding Bivens, and safeguarding prisoners is a “discretionary function exception” to the FTCA. Fourth Circuit: It is well established that the Bivens doctrine applies to people named Bivens, not Whitey.Affirmed.
  • Thanks to the Fourth Circuit you can now call the cheese in your fondue “Gruyère” even if it’s made in, say, Wisconsin, and not the Gruyère region of Switzerland and France (even though, explains the court, it “originated in the district of La Gruyère in the Canton of Fribourg, Switzerland in 1115 AD”).
  • Courtesy of the world’s creepiest incarcerated older brother, the Fourth Circuit has an opportunity to do a deep dive into relevance vs. unfair prejudice under Federal Rule of Evidence 403.
  • Congress gives a private organization the power to propose rules for the horseracing industry with a limited role for the FTC to reject them. With facts like those there’s a 10-1 chance it violates the nondelegation doctrine. And after trotting out the lawyers it was off to the races, with the Fifth Circuit declaring the law unconstitutional (as we discussed on the podcast). But, just as a parallel race was setting up for a photo finish, Congress amended the law. Thus the Sixth Circuit rejected the challenge, although it hinted that if it weren’t for the amendment the plaintiffs would be in the money.
  • Cops find a gun on a man during a traffic stop in Gary, Ind. (named for Elbert Gary of judiciary fame). He has two previous “violent felonies” under state law and eight convictions for Hobbs Act robbery. Are those “violent felonies” too, exposing him to an enhanced sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act? Seventh Circuit: We have eight pieces of very bad news for you.
  • Coming soon from CBS and the Eighth Circuit—CSI: Omaha
  • Sixteen-year-old South Dakotan participates in violent assault, then agrees to a plea deal that recommends probation, but he’s sentenced to a year in prison after several violations of his pretrial release conditions (including another assault). But wait! The federal speedy-trial rule for juveniles requires trial within 30 days, and the defendant was in federal custody for 49 days following his original arrest and even moved to dismiss on those grounds before taking the plea. Eighth Circuit: We don’t have to decide if that seemingly crystal clear speedy-trial violation would have helped you, because you waived your right to appeal that as part of the plea deal.
  • Twitter wants to publish data on the aggregate numbers of national security subpoenas it’s received from the government to provide information on Twitter users, but government says reports must be redacted. Ninth Circuit: Strict scrutiny is usually strict in theory but fatal in fact, but this particular censorship is OK because otherwise the terrorists win. That assessment “depends principally” on classified materials, and it’s OK that Twitter’s lawyers aren’t allowed to see the evidence that dooms their case (see supra about the terrorists winning). Concurrence: I agree with the conclusion, but we probably shouldn’t rely on the secret evidence one side can’t see.
  • A private company runs an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Wash. under contract with ICE and pays confined immigrants less than $5 a day for their work. A class of the detained immigrants and Washington State sue for violations of Washington’s minimum wage law, and at trial they win $17.3 million in backpay and a $6 million unjust-enrichment award to the state. Company says the minimum-wage law doesn’t apply to it, so the awards must be overturned. Ninth Circuit: We’d rather the Washington Supreme Court answer the tricky questions of state law.
  • Ninth Circuit: Yo dawg, we heard San Francisco voters like political-advertising disclaimers, so we’re affirming disclaimers in your disclaimers so your ads can tell you who funded the funders who funded your ads.
  • Strive to live your life with the tenacity and self-confidence of the sovereign-citizen litigant in this Tenth Circuit case without, y’know, emulating any of the rest of it.
  • This Tenth Circuit case that yields three different opinions from the three-judge panel may not resolve much about what the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act means, but (in the words of the dissent) it “speaks volumes about Congress’s ability to draft a coherent statute.”
  • Sometimes property disputes hinge on boundary maps or title documents, but sometimes, as in this Tenth Circuit case, judges have to resort to the memoir of “Lew Young’s daughter Dixie,” who wrote a book about her 1920s childhood living near the disputed road.
  • Circuit split alert! For a state-law drug conviction to count as a predicate offense under the Armed Career Criminal Act, the state law cannot criminalize substances that aren’t illegal under federal law. But when do we compare state and federal law—when the state crime was committed, when the federal offense was committed, or when the defendant is sentenced for the federal crime? The Tenth Circuit, after surveying an existing split, chooses door number two.
  • The Speedy Trial Act says that a federal criminal defendant has a right to be tried within 70 days of his initial appearance, so this guy who had to wait almost a thousand days for his trial has a pretty good argument, right? Tenth Circuit: Wrong! (We won’t spoil the court’s reasoning for you, but it rhymes with “schmobal schmandemic.”)
  • Police: Our search of the defendant’s backpack was valid because our only alternative to impounding it would have been to abandon it in public. It’s not like we could just give it to the mysterious stranger who came up mere seconds after the defendant asked for his “girl” and who kept asking us to give it to her. She could have been anyone! Tenth Circuit: Or she could have been his girl. Evidence suppressed!
  • Eleventh Circuit: The Supreme Court says we need to look to history when evaluating the constitutionality of gun laws, such as Florida’s prohibition on the sale of firearms to 18-to-20-year-olds. And it turns out there were a bunch of Reconstruction Era laws that forbid this exact group from possessing handguns.
  • And in en banc news, there is no en banc news … yet.

We don’t like to toot our own horn (Ed.: A lie; we shamelessly do), but last Friday Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed legislation—inspired by an IJ model bill—that will recognize many out-of-state licenses, a reform that will let experienced workers operate freely in Virginia without having to complete duplicative training or tests. With the governor’s signature, Virginia is now the 20th state that has enacted some form of universal license recognition. Click here to learn more.

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60% Of Restaurants Struggling To Find Enough Employees

60% Of Restaurants Struggling To Find Enough Employees

Three years after Covid led to a national shutdown of restaurants, the $900 billion US foodservice industry is struggling to find enough workers – despite boosting pay and benefits. In fact, over 60% of establishments say they’re understaffed, according to a new poll cited by Bloomberg.

Chains such as Domino’s Pizza and Jack in the Box say the labor shortage is hurting business.

Like much of the US labor market at the moment, the picture that official data paint of the restaurant industry can look contradictory. On one hand, foodservice employment levels are approaching where they were in early 2020 and the number of restaurants is still below pre-pandemic counts, implying there are plenty of workers to go round. Yet for every two job openings in foodservice, there’s only one unemployed person to potentially fill the gap, and job openings spiked to 1.7 million in December. -Bloomberg

“Despite the really strong gains in the labor market, leisure and hospitality continues to be the sector where you haven’t seen the full recovery,” said Anna Zhou, an economist at Bank of America Institute. “They continue to struggle to fill every opening.”

Of note, US restaurant and bar sales are projected to increase to the tune of 6% this year to nearly $1 trillion.

 

Domino’s Pizza can’t find enough delivery drivers, causing pizzas to take longer to get to customers than they did in 2019. At Jack in the Box, around 70% of locations are operating on fewer store hours despite a wage increase last year.

People don’t really want those jobs anymore,” said Lightcast senior economist Rucha Vankudre. “Given how much choice there is in the market right now, people are kind of moving away.”

Who’s still missing from the labor force? Mostly Millennials and Gen Xers, who make up a ‘significant chunk’ of the more than 2 million people who are still unemployed, according to BofA research from February. They explain that many left for childcare or eldercare reasons, or quit because of a disability or a disease, or relocated to areas with lower costs of living, Zhou told Bloomberg. These structural changes have left restaurants desperate for servers, cooks and cashiers.
 

Things were bad in the industry even before the pandemic, however. Restaurant jobs typically mean hard work and low pay, which the ‘get rich quick’ entitlement generation seems allergic to.

Now, the industry has been forced into an unprecedented growth spurt and must claw back the millions of jobs that were lost in 2020: food and beverage outlets are projected to have the largest employment jump of any industry for the decade through 2031, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

Burger King and Qdoba franchisee Matt Herridge’s staff have been quitting, too stressed and tired to work in his 11 restaurants across West Virginia and Ohio. One Burger King general manager, who’d worked there for more than a decade, left during the pandemic for a 9-to-5 office job at an auto servicing company, desperate for predictable hours and no night shifts. -Bloomberg

“The way she described it to me — in tears even — ‘My son wanted to know how often he will get to see me.’ There’s a lot of stories like hers,” said Herridge. “Just folks who went out and found other types of work that felt a little bit more stable to them.”

The average hourly wage for a fast-food cook in May of 2021 was $12.25, vs. $21.22 for the average construction worker, or $17.28 for a data entry position. The fast food industry has tried without success to boost perks to no avail.

Many restaurants, including McDonald’s Corp. and Domino’s, gave workers bonuses during the pandemic. Some smaller chains and franchisees that did the same are now struggling to wean them off.

Herridge started offering a $2-per-hour attendance bonus in late 2021, where employees get extra pay just for showing up. He’s since notched it down to $1 per hour extra, but said that competition from other industries would make it difficult to scrap entirely. -Bloomberg

I have to raise prices when I raise wages. That’s just how it works,” said Herridge, who can’t find enough staff to get his Burger Kings back to 24-hour operations. “That’s going to be the primary driver of inflation still over the next year or so.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 17:20

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Luongo: The War For The Dollar Is Already Over, Part II: The Fly Or The Windshield?

Luongo: The War For The Dollar Is Already Over, Part II: The Fly Or The Windshield?

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

Live images flashing by
Like windshields towards a fly
Frozen in that fatal climb
But the wheels of time, just pass you by

-RUSH, “Between the Wheels”

In part I of this series I told you the war over the US dollar was over because the bane of domestic monetary policy, Eurodollar futures, lost the battle with SOFR, the new standard for pricing dollars.

The ignominious end of the Eurodollar system is a study in the evolution of markets, as a new system replaces an old one. Old systems don’t die overnight. We don’t flip a switch and wake up in a new reality, unless we are protagonists in a Philip K. Dick novel.

More than a decade ago I looked at the responses to President Obama cutting Iran out of the SWIFT system as the beginning of the end of the petrodollar system. The goal was to take Iran out of the global oil markets by shutting Iran out from the dominant dollar payment system.

Out of necessity Iran opened up trade with its major export partners, most notably India, in something other than dollars. India and Iran started up a ‘goods for oil’ trade, or as Bloomberg called it at the time, “Junk for Oil.”

The stick of sanctions created a new market for pricing Iranian oil and a way around the monopoly of US dollar oil trading. India, struggling with massive current account deficits because of their high energy import bill, welcomed the trade as a way to lessen the pressure on the rupee.

Iran needed goods. They worked out some barter trade and the first shallow cuts into the petrodollar system were made.

Turkey eventually joined the fray, seeing the opportunity to act as a middle man by accepting gold into its banks from Iran’s customers and settling up with Iran in dollars or whatever.

Turkey was the first country to make gold a 100% reserve asset in defiance of Basel I capital rules to facilitate this trade. Turkey’s gold ‘reserves’ skyrocketed because of this.

More than 10 years later we’re now looking at the lynchpin of the petrodollar, Saudi Arabia, seriously considering taking other currencies for their oil. The petrodollar was never going to die overnight, it was always going to die as the cost of doing business in dollars rose to make using other currencies a better path to buying/selling oil.

Every time the US went to the sanctions well to coerce conformity, the more “star systems slipped through its fingers,” to quote Princess Leia. While we joke today about never ‘going full retard,’ this is just another way of saying that you should never threaten to nuke someone either.

Trump went sanctions nuclear on Iran in 2018. He failed.

“Biden” and Davos went nuclear on Russia in 2022, going further than even Trump. And they failed even harder. All they did was raise the cost of using dollars in the minds of the dollar’s best customers.

When the cost/benefit framework flips, behavior changes accordingly.

In the world of money, since we don’t have anything close to resembling real capital markets, rather politicized ones, policy is the thing that alters that cost/benefit structure the most. This means while analyzing the market reaction to day-to-day data the listening to the tea-leaf reading by commentators becomes an exercise in chasing your tail through a wilderness of rhetorical mirrors if you don’t include policy changes.

So, with that in mind we have to analyze structural changes to markets from a policy perspective to see what the future really looks like. It’s not that the markets don’t have a say in the matter, it’s that if you analyze the policy through the lens of capital flowing to where it is treated best, then the future outcome is pretty predictable if there isn’t a competing policy put in place to redirect that capital flow later.

In this sense, financial analysis in politicized markets is better described by court politics than spreadsheet output cells.

People want oil. They will buy it regardless of what Davos or “Biden” or anyone else says about this. Until you replace oil itself, no amount of policy changes will fundamentally change the market for oil unless you destroy the supply chain supporting the oil industry.

And analyzing oil supply and demand fundamentals in this case is a fool’s errand when malign actors are materially affecting the supply and demand for oil and are incentivized to ‘game the statistics.’ It’s not that these numbers are worthless, it’s more that they should be discounted heavily until policy changes are assessed.

Diminishing Returns of Socialism

In the end all markets respond predictably to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. If you don’t believe that, then you are a Malthusian and publicly admitting you are a moron with the inability to accept outcomes you cannot personally perceive.

I put the “Peak Oil” folks in this category. And you know who you are.

I put Climate Change believers in this category as well. Yes, by the transitive property of rhetorical mathematics, I just called them all morons.

The Davos solution to their problems of overpromising the deliverables of socialism financed through the dollar is to default on those promises through global monetary inflation using war with Russia and China as the cover and Climate Change as the reason why it’s necessary.

This is to save themselves and secure totalitarian control for their posterity into the next cycle of history.

But history will prove them wrong. Because, in the end, you can’t fight a flowing river any more than you can alter the mass of human behavior with respect to their preferences. If they want to drive a car, eat a steak, live in a house, own a gun or have a child, they will.

You can delay it or make it more expensive but that expense is a double-edged sword, because as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (OPM)

Think of the Eurodollar system as the ultimate expression of OPM, which is a homophone for ‘hopium.’

If you really want to change their behavior, you have to give them more carrot than stick. This appraoch worked for decades to guide us towards their more perfect technocratic dystopian unions as long as money got progressively cheaper during the dollar reserve standard.

This system broke in 2008 and by 2011 forced the world, through a compliant Federal Reserve, into birthing the Coordinated Central Bank Standard, where all the major central banks would take turns inflating a deflating credit system.

But back to Diminishing Marginal Utility. The law simply states that the acquisition of the next unit of a thing, any thing (water, money, food, credit dollars, etc.), is worth less to a person than the previous unit. We act to alleviate our perceived need to hedge against future uncertainty. So, in hurricane season, we Floridians stock up on bottled water, propane, toilet paper, preserved food, etc.

Price is supposed to tell us when to stop stocking up and really assess what’s important to us.

I’ll leave my rant about ‘anti-gouging’ laws on the cutting room floor.

It is this verity about human action in the face of both scarcity and abundance that creates the Newtonian ‘opposite reaction’ to rising/falling costs.

It is what always squashes the fears of Malthusian thinking against the windshield of history.

So, while you can bully people into acting against their preferred outcomes for a while by raising the costs of disobedience to be greater than the marginal return of defiance, eventually a reversal of that cost/benefit framework takes place.

For the Fed and the domestic banking interests, the best way to get to their preferred end, a domestically-driven cost structure to the US dollar, it meant offering the market gradually a better alternative to the old system or Eurodollars.

SOFR is a collateralized rate, delivered to the market by the market for dollars. It’s a fundamentally superior interest rate product than LIBOR, which is a number picked out of thin air by 18 banks of dubious character and even more dubious motivations.

Eurodollar futures are set based on LIBOR and because of LIBOR being written previously into every old debt and debt derivative instrument out there, LIBOR was the tail wagging the monetary policy dog.

The five-year roll out of SOFR was done to introduce the better system and phase it in allowing the market to come to the ‘right’ conclusion that it is superior. If SOFR wasn’t a superior product to LIBOR no matter how much the Fed tried to force it onto the market, the market would have rejected it.

Eurodollar futures would have remained a vibrant and liquid market up to the last day and call the Fed’s bluff.

But SOFR was a superior product, gradually weaning the markets off LIBOR. Now there is still a whole lotta LIBOR-indexed debt out there and a lot of people are holding out hope this is all just a bad dream, but it’s not.

There has been an uptick in loans switching to the Federal Reserve’s recommended Secured Overnight Financing Rate (Sofr) from Libor so far this year, but “a huge volume” still needs to transition, he said.

Of the loans, many of which are held by CLOs, that still need to remediate, about 55% risk falling back to the prime rate, which is 7.75%, compared to around 4.5% for Sofr, if they do not find a transition path before the deadline, according to KKR.

That difference could hurt borrowers with lots of debt and lower credit ratings, like CCC or B-, as their chances of downgrades rise, and it also puts lenders, such as CLOs that are measured by how many CCCs and defaults are in their vehicles, in a difficult spot, said Reback.

“That is a significant risk for the loan market,” she said.

Caught between the Scylla (a 25 bps spread over LIBOR) and Charybdis of prime, 3.50% over that, the outcome is inevitable. Anyone holding out is likely hoping for a last-minute policy change to help them out. If I had to guess those holdouts are at Blackrock trying to blackmail the Fed like they blackmailed the Bank of England last summer over UK pension obligations.

I don’t know that the situation is analogous but it certainly smells that way.

The BRICS and the Golden Path

I had Vince Lanci on the podcast recently to discuss this very thing, how to replace an old system with a new one gradually.

He’d been thinking about remonetizing gold, spurred on by a Twitter Spaces we did where we discussed gold redeemable Treasuries, or as Vince put it, “throw gold out onto the yield curve.”

Listen to the podcast as we go over this idea in detail.

Like the fall of the petro- and euro- dollar, the re-monetization of gold cannot happen overnight. Instead something like that has to happen over time. Again, using more carrot than stick is the better, more sustainable path.

The markets are screaming for a solution to the current mess — wanting less debt, even less leveraged debt, fewer wars, more decentralization — but everyone also doesn’t want to be reduced to Bartertown and all that that implies.

So, the best way to achieve that is to signal to the market that this exactly what you want. It starts with policy. In the case of the Fed it starts with being wholly unapologetic of the political consequences of aggressively tight monetary policy.

FOMC Chair Jay “Baller” Powell gave us that this week testifying before the Senate Banking Committee.

Powell reiterated his ‘higher rates for longer’ mantra. But, unlike in the past, the markets are now actually listening to him. There are still holdouts, trying to undermine the Fed, but I’ll leave the ECB and BoJ out of the discussion for now. The bond markets are grudgingly accepting this but the yield curve on US Treasury debt is still stubbornly inverted.

But more significantly, Powell told Sen. Cynthia Lummis the Fed flat-out does not consider the fiscal situation on Capitol Hill in making monetary policy. (H/T Jim Bianco).

Read that passage carefully and you’ll see this FOMC Chair isn’t above telling Congress their business. You may not believe Powell but we know there are ways of getting out of this fiscal and monetary mess if we commit to doing it, rather than pouring gasoline on the socialist fire that the “Biden” Administration just did with their budget proposal.

Moreover, what’s unspoken by Powell and others in the position to support him is what’s lurking on the other side of the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a growing international framework for trade wholly outside the control or threats of the western political establishment and their slap-happy sanction monkeys we call heads of state.

Powell can see the de-dollarization writing on the wall and he knows now is the time to slow down that trend and find a way to make the dollar more trustworthy. But, again, he can only deal with one side of that equation — the monetary policy side. The Fiscal and regulatory side are still firmly controlled by, frankly, shitbag commies; old, terrified colonial interests in Europe and the northeast US who see their time passing and refuse to accept it with grace.

People who would rather burn the world to the ground than let it fall into the hands of those they consider ‘the help.’

But ‘the help’ are no longer helpless in the face of a big bully US dollar. They have a plan and they are executing it.

That plan clearly involves the return of gold as the asset to balance the trade books to rebuild global trust and if the US and Europe don’t stop acting like entitled, spoiled children on the world stage, they will drop the gradualism and one day we will wake up in a different reality.

This was Powell’s real message to Congress this week. It is the clear geopolitical imperative staring us all in the face. But if we don’t start down it now voluntarily, the superior monetary system will eventually outcompete and capital will flow to where it is treated best.

This is the future policy choice we have to make our peace with. Because if we don’t I’m reminded of an old, bad joke I first heard as a teenager.

“What’s the last thing that goes through a fly’s head before it hits the windshield of your car?”

“It’s ass.”

“We can move from boom to bust
From dreams to a bowl of dust.
We can fall from rockets red glare
Down to — “Brother can you spare…”
Another war — another wasteland —
and another lost generation…”
— RUSH, “Between the Wheels”

Join my Patreon if you don’t like windshields

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 17:00

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US Special Ops Wants To Use Deepfakes To Conduct ‘Propaganda And Deception’ Campaigns

US Special Ops Wants To Use Deepfakes To Conduct ‘Propaganda And Deception’ Campaigns

US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) wants to use deepfake videos to conduct propaganda and deception campaigns online, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.

While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.

SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them. -The Intercept

The plans also include hacking internet-connected devices to spy on foreign populations and assess their susceptibility to propaganda. The document describes it as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” and that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.”

When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” said Brookings Institution head of AI and Emerging Technology Initiative, Chris Meserole. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.

“If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight,” he added.

In addition to deepfakes and hacking, SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology laid out a wish list of next-generation toys to equip the modern commando and enable them to more effectively hunt and kill targets using lasers, holographs, robots and other high-tech hardware.

Last October they updated this wish list with a new section; “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” aka propaganda and deception, which encompass “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.”

SOCOM also wants “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”

Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.

Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds. -The Intercept

This, after the US has spent years warning against the potential national security threat posed by deepfakes, which could have a ‘destabilizing effect’ on civilian populations.

Do as we say, not as we do?

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 16:40

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Is This the Year California’s Development-Killing Environmental Review Law Sees Serious Reform?


A golden statue of U.C. Berkley's mascot

In February, a California appeals court ruled that the University of California, Berkeley would have to halt its plans to build a much-needed student housing project on the site of Berkeley’s famed People’s Park until it studied the excess noise the future student occupants would cause.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of neighborhood activists under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires government bodies to study and mitigate the environmental impacts of projects they undertake or have a discretionary role in approving.

The decision sparked outrage across both California and the nation. A law meant to stop highway projects paving over wetlands was being hijacked by NIMBY (not in my backyard) activists to deny college students housing.

“California cannot afford to be held hostage by NIMBYs who weaponize CEQA to block student and affordable housing,” thundered Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in a statement. “This selfish mindset is driving up housing prices, and making our state less affordable. The law needs to change.”

Legislators echoed these sentiments, introducing immediate fixes while vowing more comprehensive action to come. Blogs and editorials pointed to the appeals court decision as just more evidence that California, and America generally, had lost its ability to build the things it needs.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

A nearly identical set of facts played out last February when a California appeals court ruled in response to another CEQA lawsuit brought by neighborhood activists that U.C. Berkeley had failed to properly study the impact of its growing student body on the surrounding city.

The decision required the university to slash its enrollment by several thousand students until those studies could be done. Given the timing of the ruling, it would mean that some would-be freshmen who had already been accepted to the school would have to find somewhere else to pursue their education.

Newsom issued a statement criticizing that ruling. His administration filed an amicus brief in support of the university’s (ultimately unsuccessful) appeal to the California Supreme Court. Legislators passed new laws to reverse the decision and exempt future student housing projects from CEQA. Essays in The New York Times and The Atlantic treated it as the epitome of America’s staid Boomerocracy.

Despite all the outrage and even the successful passage of reforms intended to exempt student housing projects from CEQA, the state has wound up in a near-identical position one year later where neighborhood activists are using the law to stop a U.C. Berkeley student housing project.

The problems with CEQA aren’t new. They’ve been talked about for years. The law’s ability to stop or delay a wide variety of projects—including new housing, new hospitals, new bike lanes, new burger joints, new solar plants, and new marijuana dispensaries, to name a few—has produced a diverse set of critics eager for reform.

“It’s the law that swallowed California. This state is addicted to CEQA,” says state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco). “Anyone with the resources to hire a lawyer can delay a project for years and years.”

The same features of CEQA that make it so controversial also make it so hard to reform. Almost every interest group in the state sees some merit in using CEQA to stop projects they don’t like or to wring concessions out of project sponsors.

“If you want to start to open up the law itself, you instantly get into these very complex coalitional negotiations with an ever-shrinking piece of what you set out to do in the first place,” says Matt Lewis, communications director for the housing advocacy group California YIMBY.

Reforms that can pass the Legislature are, therefore, exceedingly marginal. Even when reformers leverage serious outrage at CEQA abuse to sweep whole categories of projects out of the law’s purview, the caveats and conditions they include often defang their reforms. Whatever marginal improvements do make it out of the political sausage grinder are also easily erased by courts who see it as their duty to broadly interpret CEQA.

The CEQA deja vu over U.C. Berkeley is a great example.

Last year, Wiener capitalized on the negative reaction to the U.C. Berkeley enrollment decision to pass S.B. 886. It exempts student housing projects on or near public university campuses from having to go through CEQA, provided “they adopt stringent energy and environmental design standards, aren’t replacing existing housing, aren’t in flood zones and historic districts, and contain fewer than 2,000 units or 4,000 beds. The university would also have to hold a public hearing on the project.”

Weiner tells Reason that the law didn’t go into effect until this year, meaning it arrived much too late to save U.C. Berkeley’s People’s Park project, which has been in the pipeline for years.

It’s doubtful S.B. 886 would have spared the project from CEQA litigation even if had been in effect.

The law’s CEQA exclusion doesn’t apply to projects that would demolish a historic structure listed on a national, state, or local historic register. The appeals court decision halting the People’s Park project notes that the park was designated a historic landmark in the 1980s and building housing on it would require demolishing on-site structures.

That seemingly would have forced it back into the CEQA gauntlet, S.B. 886 notwithstanding.

“The Legislature came back and did a very surgical fix and it didn’t actually work,” says Jennifer Hernandez, a land use attorney with the firm Holland & Knight. “The idea that CEQA wasn’t going to be a problem for housing” was obviously wrong.

Forthcoming research from Holland & Knight that Hernandez shared with Reason shows that between 2019 and 2021, 198 CEQA lawsuits were filed against housing projects, as well as local government plans and agency regulations allowing for more housing.

Of those, 9 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed against campus student housing projects. During those three years, lawsuits also targeted plans that would have allowed for one million homes. In 2020 alone, CEQA lawsuits targeting individual projects held up a total of 50,000 units (or half the state’s housing production).

By revealing the limits of recent surgical CEQA reform, the appeals court decision in the U.C. Berkeley case raises the possibility that this is the year that more comprehensive structural reform might happen.

“The court is almost daring the state Legislature to use Berkeley as an example of why it has to reform CEQA,” says Lewis. “This is the second ruling that has kind of found anti-housing activists to categorize human beings as pollution.”

A few more modest CEQA reform bills have already been introduced.

A.B. 1700, introduced by Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R–Folsom), would declare that noise impacts from housing projects aren’t an environmental effect that has to be studied or mitigated for the purposes of CEQA.

While CEQA is often used to stop housing projects, the appeals court decision in the People’s Park case was conspicuous because it required study and mitigation of already illegal noise impacts from a housing project based on the type of people who would occupy it.

That opens up a range of unsavory avenues for future CEQA litigation.

“Family housing, which may mean a colicky infant crying for the first three months of her life, is that a CEQA impact? How about crime rates for different kinds of housing?” says Hernandez.

A.B. 1700 is intended to stop those kinds of cases from popping up.

There’s also A.B. 1633, introduced by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D–San Francisco), which would stop cities from effectively, but not officially, denying projects by keeping them in perpetual CEQA review.

State housing law requires cities to approve certain projects and gives developers the ability to sue to compel approval if their project is denied. Some cities skirt this law by keeping projects in endless environmental review, such that they’re never officially approved or denied.

Ting’s bill would treat some higher-density projects as denied if they spend a certain amount of time in environmental review without being approved. This law would be particularly helpful for getting “builder’s remedy” projects popping up across the state approved.

More structural CEQA reform appears to be in the offing too.

Newsom’s 2022 statement on the U.C. Berkeley decision criticized the result of the court’s decision without calling for wider reform. His 2023 statement demanded more serious change to the law. The governor is not known as a policy wonk, however, and his statement seemed to put the onus on the Legislature to come up with the details for any CEQA fix.

Wiener, a longtime critic of what CEQA has become, says that his office has been working on a more comprehensive reform bill since a draft appeals court decision in the People’s Park case was released in December 2022. He says he plans on introducing that bill in the coming weeks.

“I’m interested in fixing [CEQA] so that it’s focused on the really problematic projects from an environmental perspective while not delaying or killing projects that we really need while not undermining climate action,” he says, while cautioning that “we’re not going to solve every problem.”

Hernandez says that efforts to exempt urban apartments and bus lines from CEQA while still preserving the law as a climate action tool will mean the law still blocks a lot of housing, often in ways that undermine other state laws related to housing production and fair housing.

As an example, she cites the treatment of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a CEQA impact that needs to be studied and mitigated. Currently, developments that don’t reduce per capita vehicle miles traveled by more than 15 percent below county averages are deemed to have significant travel transportation impacts that need to be mitigated.

Because wealthy suburban and exurban areas already have higher-than-average VMT, builders of new housing in those areas have to pay mitigation fees of as much as $700,000 per unit. Those fees make building new housing in those areas economically infeasible. 

But reforming CEQA to make suburban greenfield development easier is something that would be opposed by lots of environmentalists, NIMBYs, and even the state’s supply-side housing reformers who see more dense urban housing as good for both affordability and climate change but are critical of more suburban sprawl. 

So, even within the universe of people eager to see more home construction, there is tension over CEQA. It’s just another example of what a difficult task reform will be.

Lewis says that he doesn’t think that there won’t be a single “aha” moment on CEQA, where policy makers decide to fix everything wrong with the law in one fell swoop.

Instead, he predicts reform will look more like time-lapse videos of snails eating a watermelon. After a million little nibbles, the fruit is gone. Likewise, it’ll take continual work reforming CEQA on the margins until the law is put back into a more appropriate box. 

The post Is This the Year California's Development-Killing Environmental Review Law Sees Serious Reform? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Have We Reached “Peak Idiocracy” Yet?

Have We Reached “Peak Idiocracy” Yet?

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

We should all be absolutely horrified by what has happened to our society.  Everywhere you look, people seem to be going completely and utterly nuts.  Once upon a time, the crazy people were a very small segment of the population that could be easily ignored.  But now the lunatics are literally running the asylum.  If you doubt this, just look at our statehouses around the nation and the current crop of politicians that we have in Washington.  Sadly, the truth is that the people that are representing us are a very accurate reflection of what we have become as a nation.  We truly have become a raging “idiocracy”, and the rest of the world is literally laughing at us.

Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln once guided our nation from the White House, but now we have an incoherent babbler leading us who literally doesn’t know where he is half the time…

And what do you think the first vice-president of the United States, John Adams, would have thought of Kamala Harris?

We should all be greatly alarmed that this woman is just one heartbeat away from the presidency…

Of course I don’t mean to suggest that the general population is on some sort of a higher level than our politicians.

At this point, our society has degenerated so much that we literally entertain ourselves by watching grown men slap the living daylights out of one another

One expert that has reviewed footage from the Power Slap League says that participating in this “sport” is “one of the stupidest things you can do”

Some slap-fighting beatdowns have gone viral, including a video from eastern Europe showing a man who continues to compete even as half of his face swells to seemingly twice its size. Such exposure has led to questions about the safety of slap fighting, particularly the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. A former chairman of the commission, which regulates combat sports in Nevada, says approving the league was a mistake.

Chris Nowinski, cofounder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, agrees, calling slap fighting “one of the stupidest things you can do.”

I would agree with that assessment.

But it isn’t just our entertainment that has become highly uncivilized.

Literally, all you have to do is to walk down the street to see how uncivilized our major cities have now become…

And each generation seems to be getting increasingly worse.

In the old days, you would never see a pack of wild kids terrorize a restaurant like this

A ‘wolfpack’ of teenage vandals ripped a Chinese restaurant in New York apart on Saturday night, leaving around $20,000 in damage, with staff saying they are increasingly unsafe as crime continues to plague the city.

Shocking footage shows over a dozen masked youths on a rampage through Fish Village restaurant in Queens shortly after 8.15pm as diners were eating their dinner.

The mob, who took an elevator up to the third floor to get to the eatery, caused utter destruction as they flipped tables and chairs in the frenzied attack which was said to have lasted less than a minute.

Words alone simply cannot convey the full horror of this incident.

If you have not seen it yet, I would very much encourage you to watch the video footage

This happened in New York City.

It was once one of the greatest cities on the entire planet, but now it is a nightmare.

100 years ago, the Big Apple was such a civilized place.

But now it has become a war zone.

I wish that I could tell you that there is hope for the future, but the truth is that the “leaders of tomorrow” are incredibly dazed and confused.

For example, just check out this young chap that believes that “farming needs to stop” because it is one of the primary drivers of “climate change”…

Where in the world does he think his food comes from?

If there is no farming, there is no food.

Our young people are so messed up, and that has very serious implications for our future.

It isn’t an accident that our society has degenerated so rapidly.

Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have gotten us to this point, and time is running out to get this mess cleaned up.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 16:20

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“Worst Since Lehman”: Banks Break The World Again

“Worst Since Lehman”: Banks Break The World Again

Last week we detailed BofA’s Michael Hartnett’s warning that “The Fed will tighten until something breaks”.

Well, something just broke…

SVB’s collapse – the second biggest US bank failure in history – dominated any reaction to this morning’s mixed bag from the BLS (hotter than expected earnings growth, rising unemployment (especially for Latinos), better than expected payrolls gains).

Things started off badly as SVB crashed 65% in the pre-market before being halted. SVB bonds were puking hard and when the FDIC headline hit, the bonds collapsed further…

Source: Bloomberg

A number of small/medium sized banks were clubbed like a baby seal…

Source: Bloomberg

And the KBW regional bank index crashed (down 9 of the last 10 days and 20% in that period). The 18% drop this week was the index’s worst drop since Lehman (Sept 2008)

Source: Bloomberg

And as you’ll see below, that started to have some notable impacts on the most arcane of global systemic risk red flag signals

  • TED Spread at YTD highs (systemic risk rising)

  • Global USD Liquidity tightest in 2023 (foreigners paying up for USDollars)

  • Global Bank Credit Risk rising

The worst week for stocks in 2023… On the week, all the US majors were down hard with Small Caps crashing 9%, S&P, Dow, and Nasdaq over 4% lower…

The Dow has been underwater on the year for over a week and is now down 4% in 2023. Today’s ugliness smashed the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 down to unchanged on the year

Source: Bloomberg

All the US Majors are now back below their 200DMAs…

Unsurprisingly, financials were the week’s biggest sector laggards but all were red on the week…

VIX exploded higher on the day, back above 28 and recoupling with equity weakness…

Source: Bloomberg

On the week, Treasuries saw a wild ride but yields ended dramatically lower across the curve with the shorter-end outperforming (down almost 30bps on the week)

Source: Bloomberg

The 2Y yield is down over 50bps in the last two days, the biggest 2-day drop since Lehman (Sept 2008)

Source: Bloomberg

The 2Y Yield is back below the Fed Funds rate once again, and will likely be considerably further below it after the next Fed meeting…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y yield puked back to 3.70% – one month lows – after testing 4.00% for two weeks…

Source: Bloomberg

Notably, Specs are practically still at their most short ever in bonds – so this week’s plunge in yields was hurting a lot of people…

Source: Bloomberg

No extreme moves in the TED spread yet (although its back YTD highs as systemic risk increases)…

Source: Bloomberg

Global bank credit risk is on the rise too…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended higher against its fist peers on the week – after major ups (hawkish Powell) and downs (SVB sparking dovishness)…

Source: Bloomberg

Global dollar liquidity tightened dramatically this week as the world reached for USDs at much more aggressive costs…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin puked back down to $20,000 – 2 month lows – and found support…

Source: Bloomberg

Solana and Litecoin were hit really hard this week with BTC and ETH down about 10% and Ripple holding close to unch…

Source: Bloomberg

Against all the carnage, bullion joined bonds in the safe-haven camp, with gold spiking back above $1870 – one month highs…

While oil was up today, WTI ended lower on the week back to a $76 handle…

The ‘panic’ across markets had a dramatic effect on Fed rate trajectory expectations with the Fed’s terminal rate expectations plunging over 55bps since the post-Powell spike earlier in the week, and 40bps of rate-cuts are now priced-in by year-end

Source: Bloomberg

Additionally, expectations for The Fed’s action in March are hawkishly higher on the week (but down today) with around a 40-50% chance of 50bps hike priced in…

Source: Bloomberg

To put that shift in context, the term structure has dropped and twisted significantly since Wednesday…

Source: Bloomberg

Just to really rub in what the fuck just happened… the market was pricing in over 3 25bps rate-hikes to Jan 2024 on Wednesday… and now its pricing in around half of one rate-hike…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we give the last word to Eric Johnston at Cantor Fitzgerald:

Three days ago the view in the market was that economy was teflon vs the rate hikes and that there were not going to be any financial accidents because we have made it this far without much damage,” he wrote.

“What has now changed is that people now realize that we are not teflon and there can be impact and very negative impact at that from these hikes. It is not about which bank is next, or who has similar exposure, or will depositors be made whole. It is about there likely being more time bombs out there that we have no idea about right now. That is what has changed, people no longer believe we are teflon…finally.”

Maybe keep your eyes out for other bank CEOs dumping millions in their own stock…

Makes you wonder eh?

Returning full circle to the start of today’s market summary, we are reminded of Michael Hartnett’s closing remarks: “The market stops panicking when central banks start panicking.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 16:01

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Colin Kaepernick Accuses His Own White Adoptive Parents Of “Perpetuating Racism”

Colin Kaepernick Accuses His Own White Adoptive Parents Of “Perpetuating Racism”

Authored by Eric Lendrum via American Greatness,

Former NFL player Colin Kaepernick has released a new memoir, in which he insults the White couple that adopted him and raised him, accusing them of “problematic” behavior and “perpetuating racism.”

As reported by the Daily Caller, Kaepernick’s memoir, “Change the Game,” is written as a graphic novel. He further expanded upon what he said in the book in an interview with CBS News on Thursday.

“I know my parents loved me,” said Kaepernick.

“But there were still very problematic things that I went through. I think it was important to show that, no, this can happen in your own home, and how we move forward collectively while addressing the racism that is being perpetuated.”

In one example that Kaepernick cites, he told his parents that he wanted to get his hair done in a cornrow style, so that he could imitate the look of NBA player Allen Iverson. But his mother first asked what cornrows even meant, before commenting that the look was “not professional” and that it made him look “like a little thug.”

“Those became spaces where it’s like, ‘Okay, how do I navigate the situation right now?’” Kaepernick continued in the interview.

“But it also has informed why I have my hair long today.”

Kaepernick used to play for the San Francisco 49ers, but in 2016 he garnered widespread backlash after he knelt during the playing of the National Anthem during one game, a protest gesture that he continued in subsequent games in a  direct effort to disrespect the American flag and the United States as a whole. He subsequently was not re-signed with the 49ers and never joined another team, claiming that he was blacklisted from the NFL for political reasons, while others have asserted that he was already on his way out of the sport due to being a mediocre football player.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/10/2023 – 15:45

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D.C. Circuit Reversees District Court for the Third Time in a Single Case

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided Maldonado v. District of Columbia for the third time. As on the prior two occasions, the D.C. Circuit concluded that the district court improperly dismissed the case.

Here’s Judge Tatel’s quick summary:

More than a decade ago, Medicaid recipients filed this suit alleging that in violation of
the Due Process Clause, the District of Columbia is failing to provide them notice and an opportunity to be heard when denying them prescription coverage. The case is now before us for the third time. In the first two appeals, we reversed the district court’s dismissals for lack of standing and for failure to state a claim, respectively. On remand, the district court once more dismissed the case, this time for mootness. For the reasons set forth below, we again reverse and remand with instructions to proceed expeditiously with discovery and allow plaintiffs to make their case.

Perhaps the third time will be the charm and the plaintiffs will finally have the opportunity to have their claims heard.

The post D.C. Circuit Reversees District Court for the Third Time in a Single Case appeared first on Reason.com.

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