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Students Heckled Charles Murray at Michigan, But It Wasn’t a Total Disaster

MurrayIt wasn’t a full-blown Middlebury, but Charles Murray’s appearance at the University of Michigan last night did feature a familiar mix of protesting, heckling, and walk-outs. Still, the students demonstrating against Murray did not shut the event down, though many told me beforehand that this was their goal.

I have a theory about that.

Two hours before the event, protesters gathered at the Diag, the central area of campus. Some faculty members had teamed with a local anti-fascist group to lead one of the protests; this group did not plan to shut down the event, and was simply focused on responding to Murray’s ideas, which they consider to be junk science. (Murray co-wrote The Bell Curve, a book that makes controversial claims about race and intelligence.)

Another group, led by graduate students, planned a coordinated walk-out, but only as a last resort if they failed to get the event shut down. A third group, consisting of students and other local activists affiliated with By Any Means Necessary, also desired an explicit shutdown.

Airport-style security was in effect at the building where Murray was speaking: No sharp objects, umbrellas, or water bottles were allowed. Police officers had to check every bag, which meant that students had to wait in line for an hour before entering the auditorium. The room had space for only 200 students.

Ben Decatur, the American Enterprise Institute’s student coordinator at Michigan, kicked off the event by asking the audience to respect free speech principles. But the audience was about 90 percent activists, and they laughed at this idea.

Then Murray took the podium. The heckling began almost immediately. Students shouted at him that he was a white supremacist and a supporter of the KKK. They told him to “get the fuck out of here.” They shut off the lights, revealing that activists had somehow arranged for the words “white supremacist” to be projected on the wall behind Murray. Their phone alarms all went off simultaneously. They blasted the Star Wars imperial march, and then, apropos of I’m-not-sure-what, Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.” At least 10 police officers stood idly by as this happened.

The chanting reached a crescendo, and it seemed likely the event would have to be cancelled. But Rick Fitzgerald, a member of the university’s public affairs department, took the stage and implored the protesters to let Murray speak. No shutdown took place, and the activists opted to walk out at the appointed time.

The problem with the walkout is that the auditorium only had so much room. By taking a seat with the intention of vacating it in protest of Murray, the activists denied students who actually wanted to watch the event the opportunity to do so. And their heckling made it difficult to hear Murray for much if not most of the event.

But the event was not a Berkeley- or Middlebury-magnitude disaster. There was almost no violence or property destruction—with the notable exception of an observer whose phone was snatched and thrown over a balcony—and the shutdown was averted. I would credit this partial success to Fitzgerald’s intervention, and it suggests a potential way to deal with student protests moving forward.

There are no good options for preventing students from shutting down speakers. The nuclear option, of course, is to expel them for doing so. That’s something many on the right favor, but administrators and campus security would not necessarily do a good job distinguishing mere protest (which is rightly protected by the First Amendment) from heckling. Universities routinely deny due process rights to students; I have little reason to believe they would do better if they received a mandate to punish protesters. This is why the University of Wisconsin’s new anti-protest policy, which is based on a flawed Assembly bill, should worry free speech advocates.

The other option is to do what the College of William and Mary did: absolutely nothing.

But the Michigan event suggests a third way. It is incumbent on administrators, academics in good standing with the left, and other students to stand up to the activists and ask them to turn the dial down. Teach them to be better, and maybe, eventually, they will be.

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Bernanke Proposes “Price-Level Targeting” Before Next Crisis, Admits There May Be A Problem

Having taken a four month hiatus from blogging, Citadel advisor and former Fed chair Ben Bernanke penned another article on his Brookings blog in which he discusses a familiar subject: that the Fed has run out of tools, a problematic reality which would be exposed by the next financial crisis, so in advance, Bernanke proposes an even more unorthodox monetary policy: price-level targeting.

Pointing out the obvious, namely that as a result of the bursting of the last Fed-created bubble, the US economy remains mired in “low nominal interest rates, low inflation, and slow economic growth” which “pose challenges to central bankers”, central banks may want to consider temporary price-level targeting, or PLT, as Bernanke is “no longer confident” that the Fed’s “current monetary toolbox would prove sufficient to address a sharp downturn.”

The problem, as the ex-Chairman explains, is that with estimates of long-run equilibrium level of real interest rate “quite low,” Bernanke writes that the next recession may occur when the Fed has “little room to cut short-term rates”; as “problems associated with the zero-lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates could be severe and enduring.”

What Bernanke concedes here, is that the current pace of rate hikes and balance sheet unwind are not nearly rapid enough to provide the monetary policy buffer that will be needed to address the next economic crisis, and as a result the Fed needs to resort to more aggressive “temporary” measures to boost inflation, bypassing the Fed’s implicit 2% inflation target, and heating up the economy substantially.

To short-circuit the effects of the zero-lower bound, and to “temporarily” (that word is critical to Benanke, who uses it no less than 24 times in his article) overheat the economy so the Fed can boost its recession-fighting ammunition, Bernanke “proposes an option for an alternative monetary framework” that he calls “a temporary price-level target—temporary, because it would apply only at times when short-term interest rates are at or very near zero.“

As noted, Bernanke says “temporary” over 20 times, which is ironic because after the Fed injected over $4 trillion in liquidity in the financial system, and 8 years later the Fed is not only still unable to hit its stated 2% inflation target on a consistent basis, but openly admits inflation is a “mystery”, a better word would be “permanent.”

How does price-level targeting differ from conventional inflation-targeting? 

As Bernanke explains, the “the principal difference is the treatment of “bygones.”  An inflation-targeter can “look through” a temporary change in the inflation rate so long as inflation returns to target after a time.  By ignoring past misses of the target, an inflation targeter lets “bygones be bygones.”  A price-level targeter, by contrast, commits to reversing temporary deviations of inflation from target, by following a temporary surge in inflation with a period of inflation below target; and an episode of low inflation with a period of inflation above target.  Both inflation targeters and price-level targeters can be “flexible,” in that they can take output and employment considerations into account in determining the speed at which they return to the inflation or price-level target.”

That is a long-winded way of saying that price-level targeting is an even more brute force approach to pushing inflation higher, one which ignores transitory bursts in inflation, which in a world of record debt has the potential to unleash a financial disaster as its sends the price of global (record) debt tumbling, creating a risk waterfall across financial markets, and reverberate in the economy. In other words, the Fed would flood the system with so much liquidity that economic inflation spikes and only afterwards is reduced back to some baseline level. What happens in between, to Bernanke, is of secondary importance, although with many Wall Street strategists conceding that a burst of inflation is the critical catalyst to unleash a sharp market drop, one could also say that Bernanke is advocating a market crash, wiping away trillions in “welath effect” for the top 1%.

Bernanke ignores such potential downsides, and instead focuses on the positive, saying that price-level targeting has two advantages over raising the inflation target: “The first is that price-level targeting is consistent with low average inflation (say, 2 percent) over time and thus with the price stability mandate. The second advantage is that price-level targeting has the desirable “lower for longer” or “make-up” feature of the theoretically optimal monetary policy.”

That said, the author concedes that PLT has drawbacks:

For one, it would amount to a significant change in the Fed’s policy framework and reaction function, and it is hard to judge how difficult it would be to get the public and markets to understand the new approach. In particular, switching from the inflation concept to the price-level concept might require considerable education and explanation by policymakers. Another drawback is that the “bygones are not bygones” aspect of this approach is a two-edged sword.  Under price-level targeting, the central bank cannot “look through” supply shocks that temporarily drive up inflation, but must commit to tightening to reverse the effects of the shock on the price level.

Bernanke’s punchline at least contains some truth, namely that PLT would be a “painful” process to all those who rely on nominal incomes to purchase goods and services, especially if said process ends up running away from the Fed’s control and results in hyperinflation, to wit:

“Given that such a process could be painful and have adverse effects on employment and output, the Fed’s commitment to this policy might not be fully credible.“

And in case his PLT idea is frowned upon – perhaps politicians don’t want a revolution – Bernanke proposes another, just as “painful” idea, namely using inflation targeting “but to raise the target to, say, 3 or 4 percent.  If credible, this change should lead to a corresponding increase in the average level of nominal interest rates, which in turn would give the Fed more space to cut rates in a downturn. This approach has the advantage of being straightforward, relatively easy to communicate and explain; and it would allow the Fed to stay within its established, inflation-targeting framework.”

Quite easy to explain indeed, and here’s one attempt “we will inject so much liquidity, not only will we blow the biggest asset bubble ever, but it will make your head spin how fast prices soar.” But it’s ok, it will be “temporary.”

Finally, while there is much more in Bernanke’s proposal which was inspired by the “insightful theoretical work of Paul Krugman, Michael Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson”, even Bernanke admits there will be problems, or rather one major one: the peasantry – for some “unknown” reason – is not a fan of runaway inflation:

One obvious problem is that a permanent increase in inflation would be highly unpopular with the public.  The unpopularity of inflation may be due to reasons that economists find unpersuasive, such as the tendency of people to focus on inflation’s effects on the prices of things they buy but not on the things they sell, including their own labor.  But there are also real (if hard to quantify) problems associated with higher inflation, such as the greater difficulty of long-term economic planning or of interpreting price signals in markets.  In any case, it’s not a coincidence that the promotion of price stability is a key part of the mandate of the Fed and most other central banks. A higher inflation target would therefore invite a political backlash, perhaps even a legal challenge.

Ah yes, nothing quite like a former Fed reserve chairman confused by why surging inflation is “highly unpopular with the public”, which is unable to grasp that only through soaring prices of goods and services will wages rise… well, maybe: because as the whole broken Phillips Curve fiaso has shown 8 years into this recovery with 4.2% unemployment and virtually no real wage growth, perhaps the reason why the “public” is not too crazy about 4% inflation is that while prices surge, wages seems to have flatlined.

In short, Bernanke is alleging that inflation is unpopular because we, simple peasants, only focus on rising prices while ignoring wage growth. To which the only possible retort is that the “public” would be more than happy to focus on higher wages… if these were permitted for anyone but the top 1%.

Full Bernanke article here

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Zimbabwe Inflates, Again…

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

In November 2008, Zimbabwe experienced the second highest recorded inflation rate in history, and with that, it entered the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table. That’s when the annual inflation rate reached a peak of 89.7 sextillion (10^21) percent (see table below). 

 

 

At this point, prices were doubling every 24.7 hours. During Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation episode (2007-2008), the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe failed to report any meaningful economic data, including inflation rates. I, assisted by my capable team at The Johns Hopkins University, was the only reliable source accurately measuring inflation during Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation episode.

Just how was I able to do that?  During episodes of hyperinflation, the only reliable and feasible way to measure inflation is via the application of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). To do that, one needs data on the most important price in the economy: the exchange rate between the domestic and a stable international currency. This was not feasible in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe dollar was not traded on an organized exchange that reported exchange rates. Moreover, there were multiple black-market (read: free market) exchange rates for cash, as well as non-cash Zimbabwe dollars (credit and debit cards, checks, and bank transfers). So, the use of black-market exchange rates was not feasible, either.

Due to the lack of necessary data, it appeared that the measurement of Zimbabwe’s inflation rate would be impossible. But, the organized stock market in Harare did provide prices that allowed me to calculate Zimbabwe dollar exchange rates. This was done in the following way. One stock—that of the insurance and investment company Old Mutual—is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. Each share of Old Mutual commands the same claim on the company’s earnings and assets, irrespective of the market it is traded on. The only difference between Old Mutual shares traded on different exchanges is that the shares traded in London are denominated in British pounds sterling; whereas, those traded in Harare are denominated in Zimbabwe dollars. Therefore, if price arbitrage works and PPP holds, the ratio of the Old Mutual share price in Harare to that in London equals the Zimbabwe dollar/sterling exchange rate. To convert the resulting Zimbabwe dollar/sterling exchange rate to a Zimbabwe dollar/U.S. dollar rate, I multiplied the Zimbabwe dollar/sterling rate by the sterling/U.S. dollar rate, creating what is known as the Old Mutual Implied Rate (OMIR). 

By using the OMIR as an exchange rate between Zimbabwe dollars and USD, I was then able to apply PPP theory to transform this exchange rate into an estimate of the percentage change in the Zimbabwean price level. This yielded an accurate estimate of the implied inflation rate for Zimbabwe during the 2007-2008 period.  

At the peak of Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation episode in November 2008, Zimbabweans refused to use the Zimbabwe dollar. With that, the economy was spontaneously, and unofficially, dollarize. Eventually, the government faced this fait accompli in early 2009, when they dollarized the economy by accepting the dollar as the unit of account for government finances.

Under this dollarized regime, Zimbabwe’s fiscal authorities could no longer demand that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe supply the government with credit (read: print money). This hard budget constraint became too onerous for the free spending government to abide by. In consequence, Zimbabwe’s government has employed Harry Houdini’s magic and circumvented the hard budget constraint imposed by dollarization. It has done so by creating a new fake dollar, which is referred to as the “New Zim Dollar.” Not surprisingly, this new Houdini creation is rapidly becoming worthless. This makes the methodology that I employed to measure inflation during Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation episode relevant again. Since Old Mutual’s price on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange is denominated in “New Zim Dollars” and Old Mutual’s price on the London Stock Exchange is denominated in British pound sterling, we can create a “New Zim Dollar”/sterling implied exchange rate. This exchange rate can be transformed using PPP to accurately measure Zimbabwe’s inflation. At present (10/11/17), Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate has soared to 332.62%. This makes it the second highest inflation rate in the world after Venezuela (see chart below).

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General Kelly Makes Surprise Appearance At Press Briefing With A Message For The “Fake Media”…

Making a surprise appearance at the daily White House press briefing today with Sarah Sanders, Chief of Staff John Kelly dismissed rumors that have flooded the media this week suggesting he’s close to quitting and/or being fired by President Trump.

“I would just offer to you that, although I read it all the time fairly consistently, I’m not quitting today.  I just talked to the president. I don’t think I’m being fired today. And I’m not so frustrated in this job that I’m thinking of leaving.”

 

“I would tell you this is the hardest job I’ve ever had.  This is, in my view, the most important job I’ve ever had.”

Asked what could be done to calm the frustration in the White House, Kelly offered a rather simple solution to the press:  “maybe develop some better sources.”

Of course, this all follows a mini tweet storm from President Trump earlier this week which blasted the “fake news” for making up stories concerning Kelly’s status in his role as Chief of Staff.

On more serious topics, Kelly said that Americans should be “concerned” about the situation in North Korea, which he described as a state that “simply can’t be allowed the capability to reach the homeland.”

“The American people should be concerned about a state that has developed a pretty good ICBM capability and is developing a pretty good nuclear re-entry vehicle.”

 

“I think I speak for the administration that that state simply can not have the ability to reach the homeland.”

 

“Right now, there’s great concern about a lot of Americans that live in Guam.  Right now we think the threat is manageable but over time if it grows beyond where it is today…well, lets hope diplomacy works.”

On whether or not he restricts who gets access to the Oval Office:

And more on Puerto Rico, Cuba and Isis:

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Empire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 3

The first two parts of this series focused on how Trump-specific factors could lead the American empire into another series of foolish and highly destructive wars. Part 1 discussed my concerns regarding Iran deal certification, as well as Trump’s increased coziness with Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who seems to get turned on by the use of violent force. Part 2 discussed how Trump might sell his wars by promoting an environment of slobbering, superficial patriotism, and also speculated how corporate media might rally behind Trump if the target of his aggression happens to be Iran.

Today’s piece will be slightly different. The prior posts focused on Trump-specific angles with regard to how America’s forthcoming military mistake might play out, but I want to make one thing clear. While Trump carries his own specific risks when it comes to militarism overseas, this is all much bigger than Trump.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, I’ve become convinced that the U.S. empire will never reform on its own. There’s simply too much money and power at stake, and we already know oligarchs are above the law under our two-tier justice system. The biggest financial criminals of a generation were not only spared prison for their actions, but were handsomely rewarded. Wall Street ran the Obama administration before, and it runs the Trump administration now. It’s become clear to me that these lawless elite crooks and their enablers will continue with their insane and oppressive policies until the whole things collapses. Whether Trump, Pence or Hillary Clinton run the charade doesn’t change where this train is headed.

I say this because I don’t want people to think I believe everything would work out fine if Trump wasn’t in charge. Our society is extraordinarily corrupt, delusional and systemically abusive. The public no longer has confidence in any of our institutions and for very good reasons. Our institutions exist merely to serve as gatekeepers to protect predatory crooks from the consequences of their actions.

continue reading

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Chicago Alderman Who Told Businessman to ‘Come Back To Me On Your Knees’ Sued for Abuse of Power

Chicago Alderman Proco Joe Moreno wanted to help a business that had contributed to his campaign coffers. So he told Brian Strauss, a firefighter and property owner, to rent his building to the business or suffer the consequences. When Strauss refused to comply, Moreno made good on his threats, downzoning Strauss’s building and scuttling multiple attempts to sell the property.

Strauss is now suing, arguing that Moreno’s abuses of his aldermanic powers violate Strauss’ rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

According to Strauss’s suit, Moreno’s threats and eventual downzoning “were completely out of character with both the zoning and actual uses of the neighborhood,” “were proposed in bad faith,” and “were done for personal rather than a public interest”.

Strauss’s trouble began in late 2015, when he tried to evict the Double Door Music Hall from a Wicker Park property his family had owned since the ’60s. (The eviction was prompted by several lease violations.) Moreno, who had received more than $7,500 in campaign donations from Double Door’s management, requested that Strauss let the business stay on.

Strauss declined and began looking for another tenant. Then Moreno’s gloves came off.

“I’m tired of hearing about the sympathy of you and your family,” the alderman reportedly told Strauss and his attorney at one meeting. “Double Door is going to be in that building, there will never be another tenant in there, there will never be another sign on that building.”

Over the coming months, Moreno—in meetings brokered and attended by staffers for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—tried to get Strauss to sell his building to Double Door for $7 million, despite its market value of nearly $10 million.

When that failed, the alderman started introducing downzoning proposals for Strauss’s property that would have made it off limits for most business uses. In June 2017, Moreno even tried to reclassify the building as a residential unit, which would prohibit practically all commercial uses.

That failed, but in September the city council did pass a downzoning ordinance, which prevents Strauss from converting his property to a general restaurant, a bar, or even, ironically, its previous use as concert venue.

In a very public, and very disturbing, encounter with Strauss, Moreno made clear his zoning changes were all about extracting concessions.

“You can come back to me on your knees, which is going to happen,” he raged. “It’s gonna be an empty building with no income for you or your family.”

Other officials went along with this under the longstanding practice of “aldermanic privilege,” which basically means that other aldermen don’t interfere with their colleagues’ zoning and regulatory practices in their own wards.

Moreno’s actions have taken their toll on Strauss’s attempts to sell the building. Three sales have now fallen through, with developers citing the downzoning proposals as reasons for walking away.

Strauss is now asking for $9.6 million in damages from those lost sales, saying that Moreno’s “extreme and outrageous” conduct amounts to a taking of his property without due process of law.

As Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted when this story surfaced in May, Moreno is not a big fan of property rights. He previously tried to prevent a Chick-Fil-A from opening in his ward because of the owners’ views on gay marriage, and also attempted to block the construction of a Wal-Mart because it wasn’t “a perfect fit for the area.”

Said Boehm:

The rule of law requires that government officials have their authority held in check, specifically to prevent abuses like the ones that Chicago’s civic system seems to encourage. Moreno is free to believe that Chick-fil-A’s executives are wrong about gay marriage, and he’s free to dislike shopping at Wal-Mart. He should not be able to use his position of authority to block those businesses from operating in his ward, and he certainly shouldn’t be able to threaten property owners with targeted zoning changes if they don’t kneel before him, as if he were some sort of feudal lord.

Strauss agrees, telling the government watchdog Project Six, “This isn’t about the numbers, it’s about aldermanic abuse of powers. You are just messing with people.”

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Trump’s Afghanistan War Policy (In 1 Simple Chart)

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

President Trump’s coalition airpower in Afghanistan continued its annihilation of ‘extremist groups’. Latest figures from Air Force Central Command’s ‘Airpower Summary’ for September showed a 7-year high in airstrikes.

According to the report,

“September marked a record high month for weapons employed in Afghanistan since 2012, with 751 munitions being delivered against Taliban and ISIS –Khorasan targets; a 50 percent jump from August”.

The more active air-war reflects the President’s strategy to target extremist groups that threaten the security of Afghanistan.

Defense One adds, U.S. leaders say there’s more to come. Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, promised “a tidal wave of air power is on the horizon.”

We suspect, President Trump, Warmonger-in-Chief, has just reignited a trend that the military industrial complex is very satisfied about.

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Hurricane Rally Stalls: GM Forced To Idle Detroit Plant Amid “Slow Demand”

General Motors’ stock has experienced an unprecedented rally over the past six weeks as wall street has increasingly bought into the thesis that a one-time, short-lived, pull forward of demand from folks needing to purchase replacement cars following Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida suddenly means that the company is worth about 30% more than it was the day before Hurricane Harvey struck.

GM

If that thesis holds water, of course, then someone will need to explain to us why GM, amid a ‘surge in demand’, is suddenly having to idle their Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant and layoff 1,500 workers just ahead of the holiday season.  These two things would seem to be mutually exclusive but perhaps we’re missing something?  Per the Wall Street Journal:

General Motors Co. plans to close a Detroit factory through the end of the year and deepen production cuts to slow-selling cars the plant manufactures, idling some workers and letting go others around the holiday season in response to weak sales.

 

GM will temporarily close its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant for about six weeks starting in mid-November, said people familiar with the plan. The move will lay off roughly 1,500 workers who help build four low-demand models at the plant.

 

The nation’s largest auto maker also plans to scale back the factory’s assembly line to produce roughly 20% fewer vehicles once the plant resumes operations, costing about 200 workers their jobs, the people said.

 

The expected move comes after GM already laid off several hundred employees at the Detroit-Hamtramck factory earlier this year by eliminating the evening work shift.

GM

The problem, as we’ve noted all along, is that while a one-time pull forward in demand could marginally help GM with its inventory crisis it will by no means solve it.  As GM seems to be finally admitting, only a protracted, deep production cut well below current sales run rates, particularly in small cars, will be sufficient to solve GM’s inventory glut which includes nearly 1 million unsold cars sitting on dealer lots.

The upshot is dealer lots are packed with compact and midsize sedans that were staples of the U.S. auto market a few years back. GM, saddled with more factories that make only passenger cars than competitors, has moved aggressively to realign production amid the shift in consumer tastes.

 

The 32-year-old Detroit-Hamtramck factory has been hit especially hard. Workers there build four nameplates, including the small Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid and the Cadillac CT6, a large sedan introduced last year as the luxury brand’s flagship car. Sales of each have generally fallen sharply in recent months, leading to inventory piling up at dealerships.

 

Dealers are sitting on a roughly 10-month supply of the Buick LaCrosse, for instance, another car built at the plant, according to WardsAuto.com. A two-month supply is considered healthy.

 

The cars are struggling to attract buyers despite GM recently redesigning most of them. Fresh sheet metal typically translates into stronger sales. Critics lauded the CT6 as on a par with German luxury cars, but sales are nonetheless falling short of GM’s goals.

So are GM shareholders finally catching on this morning or is this just another great opportunity to BTFD?

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The CDC, Like the FBI, Dramatically Undercounts Deaths at Hands of Police

Police tapeThe media do a better job at keeping track of who the government kills than the government does. Go figure.

By “who the government kills,” I specifically mean who the police kill. A new study released this week shows that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which tracks stats on causes of death in the National Vital Statistics System, seriously undercounts how many people in the United States are killed during encounters with police.

The report was put together by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, who compared the CDC’s numbers for 2015 to The Guardian‘s database of people killed in police encounters in the United States.

Not only did the CDC undercount the deaths, but it did so dramatically, catching only half of them. The researchers counted 1,166 fatalities that year. The Guardian‘s database caught 1,086 of them. The CDC registered only 643.

Justin Feldman, lead author of the study, explained to Reuters that the CDC relies on diagnosis codes in state death certificates that indicate “legal intervention” was involved in the death. But many medical examiners and coroners fail to mention police involvement on these documents.

This seems to happen most frequently with deaths that don’t involve guns (such as a person dying after getting Tasered) and with deaths in less wealthy counties. As just one example, none of the 30 people killed by police in Oklahoma in 2015 were included in the CDC count.

The CDC isn’t the only agency doing a bad job of tracking these deaths. In fact, the Guardian project—and another by The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer—were devised because the FBI’s efforts are so insufficient.

The FBI does have a program to track police killings, but participation is voluntary and many law enforcement agencies do not participate. In some cases, entire states don’t participate. So the FBI, tasked with tracking national statistics on violence and crime, does not have good numbers. They’ve got amazing stats on how many police are themselves killed or assaulted every year. But they don’t have reliable figures on how many people the police themselves kill.

The FBI announced in 2015 that it will work on improving these statistics to make them more reliable, but the bureau lacks the authority to mandate full participation by law enforcement agencies. Civil rights groups would like the FBI to try to tie federal grants to participation in the program.

If we don’t have the most basic information on how many people the police kill, that makes it all the harder to evaluate the circumstances behind these deaths, the trends they might represent, and whether there are changes that could reduce the risks of someone dying.

“As with any public health outcome or exposure, the only way to understand the magnitude of the problem, and whether it is getting better or worse, requires that data be uniformly, validly, and reliably obtained throughout the U.S.,” notes Nancy Krieger, one of the report’s authors, in a press release.

Check out the report out here at PLOS Medicine.

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Earthquake Detected Near North Korea Nuclear Test Site, USGS Can’t Confirm If “Natural Or Man-Made”

The USGS reports that a magnitude 2.9 earthquake was reported in North korea, 23km NE of Sungjibaegam, close to where the country conducts nuclear tests.

The temblor was reported at 01:41:08 / 1:41 am (local time epicenter). The epicenter was at a depth of 5 km (3 miles).

While initial reports suggest that the quake was not caused by a nuclear test, the USGS has said it is unable to conifirm, yet, whether the quake was natural or man made.

  • USGS CAN’T CONFIRM WHETHER N. KOREA QUAKE NATURAL OR MAN-MADE

Until there is confirmation that this was a natural aftershock, the market is not taking any chances, and the USDJPY has sold off notably on the report. As discussed previously, officials have been expecting the North to do something provocative surrounding either its national holiday on October 10 or the start of the Chinese Party Plenum next week. .

Developing.

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