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U. of Arizona Marginalized Students Demand Trigger Warnings, Censorship, Half a Million Dollars

ArizonaThe Marginalized Students of the University of Arizona have published their demands: like a lot of student-activists at other colleges, they want mandatory trigger warnings, sanctions for microaggressors, and obligatory cultural sensitivity training. They also want half a million dollars. For diversity. 

This group—a veritable coalition of the downtrodden—includes representatives from the Adalberto & Ana Guerrero Center, African American Student Affairs, Asian Pacific Student, Affairs, the LGBTQ Resource Center, Native American Student Affairs, the Women’s Resource Center, and other campus organizations. They note that their demands are just that: demands, not requests. 

Demands common to all oppressed participants include mandatory trigger warnings, which should be present in all classrooms in order to preempt “potentially problematic material.” Alternative assignments must be made available to any and all students who are made unsafe by the regularly scheduled curriculum. 

The marginalized also want mandatory cultural sensitivity training for nearly everyone on campus: residence hall staff, members of Greek Life, and even the staff of the student newspaper, The Arizona Daily Wild Cat. 

The Provost for Diversity and Inclusion would receive a budget of $500,000 to sponsor new diversity initiatives. 

The list of demands also includes specific items from each group. The Latino/Latina student group wants to prohibit Border Patrol recruitment on campus; the Black Lives Matter group wants separate and additional sensitivity training; and the Asian-American students want everyone on campus to recognize that “we’re not all the same.” The LGBT student-group had a lengthy list of demands including more staff for their center, mandatory preferred pronoun usage in classes, and a redefinition of violence to include “emotional violence.” 

All groups want their own unique safe space on campus for members of their identity group. 

The College Fix attempted to interview a student about the demands: the student replied, “You’ll never understand a marginalized student’s experience unless you are one, have experienced these things, or surround yourself with other individuals who have.” 

To recap: members of an organized movement that includes a half dozen activist communities are demanding unlimited funding for their narrow left-wing goals, mandatory re-education of those who disagree with them, and censorship of dissenters. I don’t know if these students can properly be described as “marginalized,” but if they are, everyone who values free expression at U. of A should hope they remain that way.

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Why Saudi Arabia Has No Intention To End The Oil Glut

Submitted by Dwayne Purvis via OilPrice.com,

In the geopolitical and oligopolistic global oil market, purely financial supply and demand has often been a secondary force, acting when it is allowed to act. It is the strategic behavior of the producing titans, not their talk or the slow-motion supply-demand balance, which has the real power to move markets. That is the case in the last two years and remains the case in 2016.

The behavior of Saudi Arabia since 2014 has demonstrated the intent to increase both capacity and supply, a pattern not yet mitigated despite a distracting news feed from OPEC and the kingdom.

(Click to enlarge)

Figure 1: Rig counts in US (oil-directed) and Saudi Arabia.

Figure 1 shows the rig counts in Saudi Arabia and the United States from 2009 to last week. (footnote: The U.S. count is oil-directed rigs while it is the total rig count in Saudi Arabia which produces mainly associated gas and exports none.) The data is shown on two different scales in such a way that the curves are equivalent during 2012 and 2013 as this was a relatively stable baseline with Saudi running 80 to 85 rigs, and 1300 to 1400 were drilling for oil in the US. What is most interesting are the actions since then.

As the shale oil revolution had sustained momentum at prices near $100 /bbl, Saudi Arabia began the second most rapid rig count expansion in its history starting in late 2013. During 2014, while the potential for oversupply was clearly known and even as prices turned sharply down in the latter half of the year, Saudi continued ramping up its rig count.

In late November 2014, the semi-annual OPEC meeting turned dissentious, and the group closed without even the pretense of a target production volume. Starting in November and continuing through March, the Saudi rig count grew in its third largest expansion in history, increasing 15 percent in four months.

At the same time, U.S. rig count was falling. Slowly at first in 2014, the rig count responded modestly to reductions in price. After the November 2014 OPEC meeting, though, the U.S. rig count began its freefall, retracing the path of the 2008 downturn. The contrast shows boldly in Figure 1. As the U.S. imploded, Saudi Arabia was ramping up.

For comparison, Saudi Arabia had a couple of times in history, though not always, reduced its rig count as the U.S. rig count dropped. Most notably, Saudi Arabia reduced then stabilized its rig count following its price war of 1986. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s the Saudi rig count tracked the same kind of pattern as the oil-directed rigs in the U.S. During the collapse of 2008-2009, Saudi Arabia again curtailed its rig count.

Of course, rig count alone doesn't mean nearly as much in the Saudi command-based supply; rig count reveals more about intent and planning than current action. The real test is how the presumed increased capacity is used. Figure 2 shows that behavior, tracing Saudi production alongside oil prices. The market, presumably watching the implosion of rig count, responded by lifting WTI oil prices back into the $60s/bbl, and Saudi Arabia then responded by promptly increasing its supply, sending prices back down again. Even as prices slowly descended close to inflation-adjusted, long-term lows, the Saudi rig count slowly ramped up, and moderated its production only somewhat.

(Click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Oil production by Saudi Arabia and WTI spot market price as a proxy for world oil prices.

Talk of a consensus action to freeze production was rumored in January, and word of a partial agreement including Russia and Saudi Arabia hit the news in mid-February, marking the beginning of a rally in prices. It is ironic that news of a cap on further increases should be a signal for price increase in a widely oversupplied market with slow changes in demand and U.S. production. A cap on production would possibly shorten the extended period of oversupply, but certainly not alleviate it anytime soon.

Perhaps influenced by short-covering by financial speculators and perhaps influenced by dropping exchange rates for the dollar, the rally does not, in any event, mark a change to the outlook for either supply-demand fundamentals or strategic behavior of the titans. The behavior of all parties is likely to follow the thinking explained recently the Kuwaiti oil minister—if Iran doesn’t participate, then they plan to produce at full capacity. Iran has called the idea of a cap on increases “ridiculous,” and, even if they were to agree to a cap, the Saudi oil minister says rightly that there is little trust among OPEC members.

In the meantime, the rig count suggests that Saudi Arabia continues to plan for higher levels of supply. While Saudi Arabia and OPEC have talked intermittently about increasing demand and decreasing supply, about minute increases for use during Ramadan and even about the possibility of caps on production, their actions have not always comported with the distracting, laissez-faire attitude suggested by their commentary. The February rig count was only one rig shy of the kingdom's all-time high set in December, an increase of four rigs over its January count. And its January production was higher than December by a volume roughly equal to the downward effect of all of the forces of supply and demand on U.S. production.


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“It’s A Bloodbath” – Dow Dumps 300 Points, US Equities At One-Week Lows

“Everyone is offside,” exclaimed one trader we talked to, noting the swings in EURUSD and stocks have tagged stops everywhere. Dow futures are now down 300 points from Draghi highs with S&P futures breaking below the crucial 1980 trendline support. As the trader concluded, “it’s a bloodbath.”

Not what everyone was expecting…

 

Ramp is over…

 

Ironically, while a 300 point swing in The Dow is worth noting, the sentiment shift of the last 3 weeks has once again enabled this “nothing can go wrong” attitude and panicced many weak hands today. It seems a rally built on the biggest short-squeeze in history may not be sustainable after all… just like in Nov 2008… 

 

And with gold soaring and bonds and stocks tumbling, it suggests the age of central banker omnipotence is at an end…


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Why US Automaker Stocks Are Underperforming (In 1 Simple Chart)

Since the end of 2013, US automaker stocks have dramatically underperformed the market.

This bewildered many as auto sales surged on the back of easy credit and the entire industry was proclaimed a great success. However, the reason for the underperformance is simple – stock investors discount the future and with a mal-investment-driven excess inventory-to-sales at levels only seen once before in 24 years, they know what is coming next.

 

 

And worse still, used car prices starting to fade rapidly (biggest Feb drop since 2008)…

 

Falling used car prices means pressure on new car prices as well, which would be a shock to America's booming auto market.

Obviously, the scariest part about all of the above is that consumers still have the pedal to the metal (pun fully intended) when it comes to leases, which means there's no end in sight to the off-leases and thus no way to determine, at this juncture, how big the residual writedown wave and deflationary auto industry calamity will ultimately end up being.

So, you know… "buckle up."

*  *  *

Simply put, any pricing power is lost (no matter how long the credit terms are extended) as they are forced to halt production and dump inventories in a vicious deflationary cycle…

 


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Gender Stereotypes Have Budged Little Since the Early ’80s

The good news? We’ve broken barriers in our cultural perceptions of postal workers and men’s legs. But in all sorts of other ways, Americans are still clinging to the same gender stereotypes they have since the 1980s. A new study finds few significant changes since then in people’s perceptions about gender roles and traits. 

It seems that despite high-profile transgender activism and the brave new world of gender-neutral pronouns, most Americans are still clinging to a binary, essentialist view of gender that ascribes agency and leadership traits to men and nurturing, emotional tendencies to women. The one significant, positive change found in the study was an increased belief that women are competent at assuming financial obligations and handling financial matters. Otherwise, the study—published online March 9 in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ)—actually found more gender stereotyping now about female roles and behaviors than there was 30 years ago.

“Changes in the activities and representation of women and men in society have unquestionably occurred since the early 1980s,” notes the paper. “However, those changes apparently have not been sufficient to alter strongly held and seemingly functional beliefs about the basic social category of gender.”  

For the study, psychology researchers compared survey data collected in 1983 to data they gathered in 2014 using the same set of questions. The earlier data did not contain much demographic-info on participatns, but all were college students. The 2014 subset, by contrast, contained respondents as young as 19-years-old and as old as 73, with a mean age of about 39 years.

Worried the presence of older individuals in the second survey skewed overall beliefs more regressive, the study authors—Elizabeth L. Haines, Kay Deaux, and Nicole Lofaro—compared answers across age groups and found little difference between younger and older respondents. “It appears that the observed increase in female gender role stereotyping between the two time periods was not related to age differences between the two samples, nor did age show any systematic relationship to beliefs about gender characteristics,” the authors concluded. 

Male and female respondents were also equally susceptible to gender stereotyping—although, among 2014 respondents, men were more likely to subscribe to gender stereotypes about men and women were more likely to subscribe to gender stereotypes about women. 

Asked to say how likely a man, woman, or person of unspecified gender was to possess 25 individual behaviors, study respondents in 1983 attached significantly gendered weight to 21 out of 25 behavior categories. In 2014, it was 22 out of 25 categories. Interestingly, the specific behaviors perceived as gender neutral shifted over time.

In 1983, “defers to the judgements of others,” “source of emotional support,” and “plans for the future” were all deemed relatively gender-neutral descriptors. In 2014, the neutral categories were “assumes financial obligations,” “makes major decisions,” and “handles financial matters.” 

An analysis of 25 individual occupations also turned up highly gendered beliefs about who should hold them. In 1983, only “bookkeeper” had no significantly gendered connotations. In 2014, it was only “postal worker.” And respondents also perceived significant gender differences for most physical traits, with only one of 25 descriptors (“well built”) not differentiated in 1983 and only three—”physically fit,” “thin,” and “long legs”—in 2014.  

Thoughts about psychological or emotional trait differences likewise “remained consistent and strong between the two time periods,” the researchers found. Women continued to be rated higher on “communal” traits than men, while men continued to be rated higher for “agentic” traits. Across all trait categories, only “active” was not seen as much of gendered term in 1983. In 2014 respondents, the four traits that didn’t show much gender differentiation were “active,” “stands up under pressure,” “makes decisions easily,” and “never gives up easily.”

“Despite differences in samples and in time periods, there was virtually no difference in the degree to which beliefs about typical men and women were differentiated on agentic and communal traits, male gender roles, male and female occupations, and male and female physical characteristics,” the authors summarize. “The one exception was a significant increase in stereotyping on the female gender role; however, this change appears to have occurred because contemporary judgments on this component were less variable than they were in the past, rather than being due to any marked change in mean likelihood ratings.”

The authors believe that maintenance of gender stereotypes despite the increasingly similar social roles and behaviors of men and women comes down to “confirmation bias, cultural lag, backlash, and essentialist categorical beliefs.” 

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World’s Largest Hedge Fund Appoints Hardware Engineer Jon Rubinstein Co-CEO

That the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater, just announced the appointment of an hardware engineer, even one as enlightened as former NeXT and Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, should tell you all you need to know about what is really going on in the “market.”

Full announcement from Bridgewater:

Jon Rubinstein Joining as a co-CEO of Bridgewater

As you know, we are always in the process of figuring out the best way to handle things. For a number of years, we have been transitioning from an entrepreneurial firm run by its founder to an institution run by many capable people. We refer to this as our “management transition” because Ray is continuing in his responsibilities on the investment side of the business.

For the most part, though not exclusively, this management transition has been gradual and undertaken by the same group of people who have been at Bridgewater since the process began in 2010. These changes include transfers of both management responsibilities and equity ownership from Ray to the next generation of Bridgewater leaders. Our plan is to complete these shifts in four or five years.

How Bridgewater is Run and How the Transition is Being Managed

We have a partnership management model comprised of a Management Committee led by co-CEOs (currently Eileen Murray and Greg Jensen) and a Stakeholders Committee overseen by co-executive chairmen (currently Ray and Craig Mundie). Craig joined us about two years ago after being Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, where he was for 22 years.

The Management Committee is comprised of our three co-CIOs (Ray, Bob Prince, and Greg) as well as Eileen, David McCormick, and Osman Nalbantoglu. Eileen, who oversees a significant portion of our operations, had a distinguished career on Wall Street prior to joining Bridgewater in 2009. David, who joined Bridgewater at about the same time as Eileen after serving as Under Secretary of Treasury with Hank Paulson during the financial crisis, leads our client organization and engagement with key clients and policymakers around the world. Osman, who joined Bridgewater in 2008 as a partner from McKinsey, oversees our account management and trading departments. This team is the group responsible for managing Bridgewater.

The Stakeholders Committee is essentially Bridgewater’s board of directors in that it represents Bridgewater stakeholders and is responsible for ensuring that management is operating excellently. In addition to Ray and Craig Mundie, it includes, Bob Prince (who has been at Bridgewater for 30 years), Greg Jensen (who has been at Bridgewater for 20 years) Giselle Wagner (who has worked with Bridgewater for almost 30 years), Randal Sandler (over 20 years), and Dan Bernstein (almost 30 years). Consistent with how Bridgewater has operated for many years, this partnership relies on merit-based decision making to govern the firm. The primary responsibility for management lies with the CEOs (and the Management Committee) and the primary responsibility for assessing the CEOs and management resides with the Chairmen (and the Stakeholders Committee). All senior management issues and disputes are resolved by these people.

That is our governance structure which has evolved since we started the management transition six years ago. And, of course, which people are in what roles also continues to change as we learn about the management team and about our changing requirements.

One of the things that we have learned over the last six years is that it is probably too much for the CIOs to also serve as CEOs. The company had grown up with Ray leading both investment management (as CIO) and company management (as CEO)-and Greg had a similar set of responsibilities. However, as Bridgewater has evolved from a boutique to an institution, the company has become too large for anyone to oversee with such split attentions. While currently Greg is a co-CEO (with Eileen) and a co-CIO (with Ray and Bob), we have concluded that in order to have pervasive excellent management, we need CEOs who can give their full attention to the company’s management, and we want Greg to shift his full attentions to investment responsibilities. Also, because technology is so important to us, we wanted one of our co-CEOs to be very strong in that area.

Jon Rubinstein Background

Recently we finalized an agreement with Jon Rubinstein to join Bridgewater as co-CEO later this year. Jon has helped launch some of the most influential computing products of our time. He worked closely  with Steve Jobs for almost 16 years, first running hardware engineering at NeXT and then at Apple, where he was SVP of hardware engineering and later SVP of a new division for the iPod, a device he was instrumental in creating. He then became the driving force behind Palm’s smartphone devices, serving as Executive Chairman of the Board of Palm, Inc. from June 2007 and Chief Executive Officer and President from June 2009 until its acquisition by the Hewlett-Packard Company in 2010. More recently, Jon was SVP and General Manager, Palm Global Business Unit, and then SVP, Product Innovation, for the Personal Systems Group at HP. He currently sits on the board of directors at Amazon.com, Inc. and Qualcomm Incorporated and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Technology is pervasively important at Bridgewater, especially since one of our major strategic initiatives in the coming years is to continue building out the systemized decision-making that has been so successful in our investment area and to extend it to our management as well. Jon’s track-record of building world class products will be a tremendous boost to the efforts we already have underway. We are thrilled to have him join us and bring his unique management and technology talents to our team. Jon is expected to join us in May. Until then and perhaps for some time thereafter, Greg, Eileen, Ray and the other members of the Management Committee will continue to oversee the management of Bridgewater, though the exact timing and responsibilities have yet to be worked out.


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German bank that almost failed now being paid to borrow money

The 12.5 hours spent crossing the Pacific on Qantas flight 27 feels like going through a wormhole.

The flight departs Sydney, Australia at 12:50pm and arrives to Santiago, Chile the same day at 11:20am. In other words, the plane lands 90 minutes before it departs.

When I landed yesterday, the captain came on the P.A. and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have good news; if you enjoyed Wednesday March 9th, it’s still Wednesday March 9th!”

It really does feel like going back in time.

This feeling was only reinforced when I whipped out my phone and saw that German bank Berlin Hyp had just issued 500 million euros worth of debt… at negative interest.

I wondered if I really did go through a time warp, because this is exactly the same madness we saw ten years ago during the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis.

To explain the deal, Berlin Hyp issued bonds that yield negative 0.162% and pay no coupon.

This means that if you buy €1,000 worth of bonds, you will receive €998.38 when they mature in three years.

Granted this is a fairly small loss, but it is still a loss. And a guaranteed one.

This is supposed to be an investment… an investment, by-the-way, with a bank that almost went under in the last financial crisis.

It took a €500 billion bail-out by the German government to save its banking system.

Eight years later, people are buying this “investment” that guarantees that they will lose money.

The bank is now effectively being paid to borrow money.

We saw the consequences of this back in 2008.

During the housing bubble, banking lending standards got completely out of control to the point that they were paying people to borrow money.

At the height of the housing bubble, you could not only get a no-money down loan, but many banks would actually finance 105% of the home’s purchase price.

They were effectively making sure that not only did you not have to invest a penny of your own money, but that you had a little bit of extra cash in your pocket after you bought the house.

Paying people to borrow money is just crazy, whether it’s homebuyers, bankrupt governments, or banks.

Global insurance giant Swiss Re calculated that roughly 20% of all government bonds worldwide now have negative yields. And over 35% of Eurozone government bonds have negative yields.

(They would know—along with pension funds and banks, insurance companies are some of the largest buyers of bonds.)

With this deal, Berlin Hyp becomes the first non-state owned company to issue euro-denominated debt at a negative yield.

They won’t be the last.

We’re repeating the same crazy thing that nearly brought down the system back in 2008—paying people to borrow money.

The primary difference is that, this time around, the bubble is much bigger.

Back then, the subprime bubble was “only” $1.3 trillion.

Today, conservative estimates show that there’s over $7 trillion in negative rate bonds.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Is The Establishment Rigging Ohio’s “Intentionally Confusing Ballot” Against Trump?

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

The GOP has a history of manipulating the primary, but this time they are going all out to destroy Trump. Is it any wonder that Ohio’s ballot – which will be cast next week – is so confusing that Trump may lose votes just as a result of the ballot’s design?

 

It is the home state of Governor John Kasich – a lackluster candidate who, nonetheless, was expected to win Ohio, and keep the delegates for the establishment side. But according to the polls, Trump is beating Kasich in Ohio AND Rubio in Florida – and they are big delegate, winner take all states. However, Kasich is close enough in his homestate, that a bit of meddling could change things. If Trump wins both, the GOP insiders have even less of a chance to trip up The Donald.

 

But if the Ohio GOP ballot leaves as many people scratching their heads as the newscaster in the video below, anything could happen in Ohio. Polls will not translate into votes if the machines are designed to deceive.

You Won’t Believe What They Did to the Ohio Ballot to Stop Trump

Authored by Piper McGowan and originally published at The Daily Sheeple.

We all know the elite are on the warpath against Donald Trump, with everyone from pundits, to major world leaders, to the Pope speaking out against him. Newt Gingrich recently said it’s because Trump isn’t part of the secret societies and hasn’t taken the initiation rites.

Regardless, Trump has received a groundswell of support from the average conservative American, winning state primaries left and right. Ohio’s primary is coming up on March 15, and it’s a big one because it’s a “winner takes all” state.

Well now it’s being alleged that Ohio’s GOP has intentionally set up a confusing ballot in a bid to try to make sure Donald Trump does not win.

The Dem ballot has one place for voters to mark their choice for president. Period.

The Republican ballot in Ohio this year apparently has two, leaving a lot more questions than answers about whether or not voters will understand how it works.

Take a look, (via the Conservative Treehouse):

ohio-vote

Is the ballot intentionally confusing by design?

 

Given the previous discussions on State Party shenanigans, and the intent of state republican party leadership to hold complete influence over their delegate’s decision-making, many believe the answer is “probably”.

Look at that ballot. It definitely raises a lot of questions… that aren’t answered on the ballot.

Do the majority of voters know the difference between “Delegates-at-Large” and “District Delegates”? Does a person need to choose their candidate twice, or are they only supposed to chose once? Which is right? What if they pick a different candidate in each box, do they cancel each other out? What if they pick someone in the first box and not the second, or vice versa?

Why the confusing GOP ballot, Ohio?


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