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Norway Warns Sweden Will Collapse, PM Will Defy Geneva Convention To Protect Border

As you might have heard, Sweden has a refugee problem.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time documenting the country’s trials and travails over the course of the last 12 months during which time Sweden has taken on more than 160,000 asylum seekers.

Last month, on the heels of reports from Germany that men of “Arab and North African” origin assaulted women in central Cologne during New Year’s Eve celebrations, Swedish media alleged that police orchestrated a massive coverup designed to keep a string of similar attacks that allegedly occurred at a youth festival in Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August from seeing the light of day.

Meanwhile, a 22-year-old refugee center worker was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant at a shelter for asylum seekers and at the Stockholm train station, “gangs” of Moroccan migrant children reportedly spend their days attacking security personnel and accosting women.

Sweden plans to deport some 80,000 of the refugees this year but according to Norwegian PM Erna Solberg, it may be too little too late to keep the country from collapsing. So concerned is Solberg that she’s now crafted an emergency law that will allow Norway to refuse asylum seekers at the border in the event “it all breaks down” in Sweden.

“It is a force majeure proposals which we will have in the event that it all breaks down, the power just comes, and all end in Norway because we are at the top and most of Europe. Norway is the end point, is not it,” Solberg said, in an interview with Berlingske whose Tinne Knudsen adds that “the legislation will soon be presented to the Parliament and is expected to meet broad support.”


Here’s how the proposal is being presented by the anti-immigration Swedish online magazine Fria Tider: “Norway is now preparing to denounce the Geneva Convention and to secure the border with Sweden by force – without letting people apply for asylum.”

Norway’s Bar Association says the move would violate the country’s international obligations as well as basic human rights. But Solberg isn’t backing down. “When we make such a proposal, we know that it is quite a big break with how things have been, but we must have some measures that are preparing for the worst case scenarios,” she insists.

Yes, “worst case scenarios,” like what Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström described last October when she said “most people feel that we cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year – in the long run, our system will collapse.” 

Expect other countries to make similar threats as the international order breaks down amid the cascade of Mid-East refugees. Once everyone’s borders are closed the question becomes this: will animosity push member states in Merkel’s “harmonious” union to the brink of war with one another?


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Gangster Tactic – Pro Hillary Union Threatened to Pull Funding if Labor Official Spoke at Sanders Rally

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 1.12.43 PM

We’ve all seen Hillary’s shadiness on display time and time again throughout the campaign, but one thing that hasn’t been said enough is that with the Clintons, you don’t just get the Clintons. You end up electing a cadre of some of the most villainous and corrupt corporate criminals, manipulators and unethical political mercenaries America has to offer.

With Hillary in the White House, the American people are also signing up for an all-star roster of associated cronies who have spent much of the last few decades raping and pillaging both Americans at home, and innocents abroad.

– From the post: Madeleine Albright Says “There’s a Special Place in Hell for Women Who Don’t Help Each Other”

As I pointed out in the post above, the Clintons are basically white collar gangsters. You don’t attain the kind of political and now financial power that they have in modern America without your fair share shadiness.

Of course, everybody knows this, which is why she’s considered to be untrustworthy by 60% of the American public. It’s not just her though. It’s the people who have climbed the ladder with her, and who hope to climb it further once she becomes President, that we need to be concerned about. These people can be just as vicious, power hungry and unethical as Hillary.

Yesterday, the Huffington Post highlighted the latest gangster move perpetrated by Hillary supporters:

continue reading

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Even The Average Joe Gets It: “They’re Winding Us All Up For A Minsky Moment”

With global central bank policy in disarray following the Fed’s now admitted “policy error” of tightening just as the US and global economy are heading for recession, while the rest of the world desperate to cut to ever more negative rates, not to mention Japan’s abysmal foray into NIRP, there was hope that this weekend in Shanghai the G-20 would “bail us out” and unveil some miraculous rescue for risk takers at least one more time.

However, as Jack Lew explained earlier today, this won’t happen, leaving traders in a state of limbo and cognitive shock – after all if not even the central banks have your back, then who does?

Still something has to happen, or otherwise the world will careen into a deflationary, NIRP collapse and the Fed’s 25bps “recession buffer” will have absolutely no impact before the US itself plunged into economic contraction.

One proposal comes from BBG trader Richard Breslow, who like most others, is sick and tired of the constant market manipulation, endless central bank jawboning, and who like us, is hoping that one day markets will once again be free and efficient, not for any other reason but because as Breslow notes, even the average Joe gets it: “if you really want to see people spend and invest there has to be some belief this won’t all end in tears.”

His full note:

Parole For Prisoners With A Dilemma

If the U.S. wants to really do some good at the G-20, they should try to get their heads around the concept of embracing a stronger U.S. dollar. That would be showing a commitment to global leadership, both economic and moral, which has been long absent. It’s a bet on a stronger global economic tide raising all boats.

Even the largest economy in the world has been unable (unwilling) to export growth sufficient to generate momentum anywhere else. We’re left with a negative feedback loop where global policy makers are competitively circling each other rather than constructively driving toward the goal of sustainable growth.

Meanwhile, the Fed is desperately hoping to raise rates. Their version of saving for a rainy day. They’re doing so when the rest of the world’s central banks are on a diametrically opposed trajectory. This introduces conflicting volatility shocks into the financial system giving off signals the FOMC can’t interpret.

Their response has been to hide behind data dependence. Yet given the volatility they themselves are creating and the hurried press conferences to address every short-term move, it looks suspiciously like total lack of conviction. After years of driving down price swings they’re winding us all up for a Minsky moment.

Imposed long-term stability breeds bad habits that lead to instability. Sound familiar? Get short some more convexity, nothing can go wrong.

If the Fed really does believe the economy is okay then, for now, let the tightening come from a higher dollar. Do some good for the world, because cycling through “raise”, “on- hold” “maybe cut” is counterproductive.

Take the pressure off countries feeling forced into the horribly misguided policy of negative rates. They’re the biological warfare escalation of the currency war everyone purports to be against.

Everyone is hoping consumer spending will save the day. Main Street to the rescue again. But the average Joe isn’t as gullible as he once was and the personal savings rate remains high and is rising. Get out and buy something you don’t need, your kids can pay for their own education. If you really want to see people spend and invest there has to be some belief this won’t all end in tears.


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Citi: “We Have A Problem”

In his latest must read presentation, Citigroup’s Matt King continues to expose and mock the increasing helplessness and cluelessness of central bankers, something this website has done since 2009 knowing full well how it all ends (incidentally not in a deflationary whimper, quite the opposite).

Take Matt King’s September 2015 piece in which he warned that one of the most serious problems facing the world is that we may have hit its debt ceiling beyond which any debt creation is merely pushing on a string leading to slower growth and further deflation. Or his more recent report which explained why despite aggressive easing by the BOJ and ECB, asset prices continue to fall as a result of quantitative tightening by EM reserve managers and China, which are soaking up the same liquidity injected by DM central banks.

Overnight, he put it all together in a simple and elegant way that only Matt King can do in a presentation titled ominously “Don’t look down: You might find too many negatives.”

In it he first proceeds to lay out how things have dramatically changed in recent months compared to prior years: first, the “appalling” asset returns and the “rising dislocations” between asset prices in recent months and especially in 2016, or a broken market which is not just about Crude (with correlation regimes flipping back and forth), or China (as YTD bank returns in Japan and Switzerland are far worse than those in the China-exposed Eurozone), as appetite for risk has effectively disappeared. Worse, as the Japanese NIRP showed, incremental easing in the form of QE actually triggered ongoing weakness, sending both the Nikkei and the USDJPY plunging, suggesting that central bank grip on markets is almost gone.

King then notes that while spreads are at recessionary levels, yields – courtesy of record low interest rates – are still quite affordable and “in principle there is nothing to worry about”, perhaps it is just the market overshooting: he points out several lagging indicators such as employment and loan demand which do not suggest that a recession is imminent and all that needs to happen is to “replace fear with greed.“

That is easier said than done, though, because despite all the “adjustments” data is already rapidly deteriorating, not only in manufacturing where the entire world is in a recession, but also in services as today’s contractionary Markit report showed.

King then begins his conclusive tour de force by noting that “None of the his is supposed to be happening” – inflation and economic growth are supposed to be rising in a world as manipulated by central bankers as this one. Instead, the opposite is taking place.

 

So where does that leave us? Having laid out the issues ailing the market, he note that “maybe it all fizzles out by itself”…

 

Actually, it’s not just one problem. Many problems.

Problem #1: the world finds itself in the aftermath of a series of bubbles inflated by central banks, compounded by the market’s own realization that “we are now running out of greater fools.”

Problem #2: “Whenever we’ve had these spread levels… we’ve always been rescued by central banks.” This time, however, they are either late, or their interventions are failing.

 

Problem #3: The marginal effect of easing is no longer positive, and “everything QE was supposed to have done, it hasn’t“

 

Problem #4: as a result of coordinated, global intervention, central banks are now forced to fight not just local but global demand shortfalls.

 

Problem #5: As a result of this global coordination, countries that withdraw liquidity such as EM and China, offset the “favorable” impact of central banks which contribute to liquidity.

 

Problem #6: as global central banks now operate as a cabal, this has “serious implications”, namely 1) individual CBs not in control of their own destinies; 2) Everything ECB and BoJ are doing is being offset by outflows from EM, and 3) What do these correlations imply for
herding?

Problem #7: As a result of this required, but failed coordination, the world is left with a global problem that desperately needs a solution. “What should be done”, King asks, and provides the following menu of policy actions, however as he adds, “the things which mught make a difference feel miles away”… and even further after today Jack Lew warned not to expect anything out of this weekend’s G-20 meeting in Shanghai.

 

And the final Problem: the “next phase” will likely be a crisis of confidence in central banks.

King, at his most ominous, concludes with the only possible response should it come to this: “Sell what hasn’t moved against what has.”

To this we would add one minor tangent: once we get to the “next phase“, sell everything whose value only exists as a result of confidence in central banks.


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Is This The Death Of The American Political Establishment?

Authored by Robert Reich,

Step back from the campaign fray for just a moment and consider the enormity of what’s already occurred.

A 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, has come within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, of all places.

And a 69-year-old billionaire who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party has taken a commanding lead in the Republican primaries.

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.   

But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred. They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary “has a trust problem.”

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”  

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.  

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

Median family income is lower now than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages and pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 18 percent. 

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.

At its core are the major corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; the billionaires who invest directly in politics; and the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers.

Arrayed around this core are the deniers and apologists – those who attribute what’s happened to “neutral market forces,” or say the system can’t be changed, or who urge that any reform be small and incremental.

Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “political revolution.”

The establishment is having conniptions. They call Trump whacky and Sanders irresponsible. They charge that Trump’s isolationism and Bernie’s ambitious government programs will stymie economic growth.

The establishment doesn’t get that most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

Most people are more concerned about economic security and a fair chance to make it.

The establishment doesn’t see what’s happening because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. It also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in bringing all this on.

Yet regardless of the political fates of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the rebellion against the establishment will continue.  

Eventually, those with significant economic and political power in America will have to either commit to fundamental reform, or relinquish their power.

 


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Turkish Man Sues Own Wife For “Cursing At Erdogan”: “I Kept On Warning Her”

Back in December, CHP lawmaker Eren Erdem discovered that it’s not a particularly good idea to accuse President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of supplying Sarin gas to terrorists.

Following accusations Erden made in an interview with RT, the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into the deputy for “treason.”

“The paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths is sharing my address [on Twitter] and plans a raid [on my house],” he said, in the wake of the investigation’s announcement. “I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country’s prestige.”

Of course Erdem isn’t the first person to feel the wrath of Turkey’s belligerent autocrat.

In October, for instance, a 15-year-old boy was arrested outside an internet cafe for allegedly “insulting” the President. Less than a month later, two people were detained in the country’s southeastern province of Sanliurfa for posting “insults and curses” directed at Erdogan on social media. The pair were charged with “propagandizing on behalf of terrorist organizations.” Similarly, a 17-year-old was arrested at his home in December for posting something derisive about Erdogan on Facebook.

Of course the most hilarious example came when Erdogan put a medical doctor on trial for posting the following on social media:

Amusingly, the court decided it needed to bring in Tolkein experts to adjudicate the matter because “a judge said he did not know enough about the creature to make an appropriate decision.”

Well now, in what may well be the most absurd Erdogan insult story to date, a Turkish truck driver known only as “Ali D.” is suing his own wife for cursing at Erdogan when the President spoke on television.

“A man in Izmir has filed a petition for libel against his wife for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” Today’s Zaman reports, citing the private Ihlas news agency.

“I kept on warning her,” Ali D. told Yeni Safak. “I said: why are you doing this? Our president is a good person and did good things for Turkey.”

Here’s Ali:

“Record it and lodge a complaint,” Ali’s wife reportedly told her husband.

So that’s just what Ali did. He filed a libel suit and she, understandably, filed for divorce.

“Even if it is my father, who swears against or insults the president, I would not forgive and I would complain,” Ali said, summing up the level of “respect” Turks have for their beloved dictator.

Somehow, we imagine Ali will prevail in court.


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“Gold Never Changes, It’s The World Around It That Does”

Submitted by Axel Merk via Merk Investments,

Gold never changes; it's the world around it that does. Why is it that we see a renewed interest in gold now? And more importantly, should investors buy this precious metal?

Key attributes in a 'changing world' that may be relevant to the price of gold are fear and interest rates. Let's examine these:

Gold & Fear

When referencing 'fear' driving the markets, most think of a terrorist attack, political uncertainty or some other crisis that impacts investor sentiment, and sure enough, at times, the price of gold moves higher when this type of fear is observed. While that may be correct, I don't like an investment case based on such flare-ups of fear, as I see such events as intrinsically temporary in nature. We tend to get used to crises, even a prolonged terror campaign or the Eurozone debt crisis; whateveras the 'novelty' of any shock recedes, markets tend to move on.

Having said that, I believe fear is under-appreciated – quite literally, although in a different sense. Fear is the plain English word for risk aversion. When fear is low, investors may embrace "risk assets," including stocks and junk bonds. A lack of fear suggests volatility is low; as such, investors with a given level of risk tolerance may understandably re-allocate their portfolios so that the overall perceived riskiness of their portfolio stays the same. While retail investors might do this intuitively, professional investors may also do the same, but use fancy terminology, notably that they may target a specific "value at risk," abbreviated as VaR. Conversely, our analysis shows that when fear comes back to the market – for whatever reason – 'risk assets' tend to under-perform as investors reduce their exposure.

Assuming you agree, this doesn't explain yet why gold is often considered a 'safe haven' asset when the price of gold is clearly volatile. To understand how the price of gold is affected relative to risk assets, we foremost need to understand how risk assets move; after all, remember our premise that gold doesn't change, the world around it does.

A traditional way to value a risky asset is with a discounted cash flow analysis. With equities, for example, one adds up expected future earnings, but discounting the future earnings stream.  When future cash flows are uncertain, analysts apply a higher discount factor to future earnings, thereby deriving a lower value. When investors apply a high discount factor – be that because they are uncertain about the business (think of unproven biotech or young tech firms) or about the market as a whole (a broader sense of fear), we believe this theory dictates a greater focus on short-term cash flows (as future cash flows are more heavily 'discounted'). As a result, we believe it's reasonable for share prices to be lower and more volatile when fear is higher.

If you have followed me so far, you may be thinking: but gold doesn't pay any dividends! Correct, and that's why we reason that the price of gold is not as affected by changes in the 'fear factor' because, again, gold doesn't change.

Note that it is not correct that gold always does well when 'risk is off' in the markets. There are periods when the price of gold moves in the same direction as equity indices; and there are times when it moves in the opposite direction. In fact, since former President Nixon severed the tie between the U.S. dollar and the price of gold in 1971, we have observed a zero correlation to equities. And that is how it should be given that the cash flows of gold (of which there aren't any) are not correlated to the cash flows of corporations.

Ultimately, of course, prices are dictated by supply and demand. And even as gold may not have cash flows associated with it, the supply and demand of gold may be related to the health (expected cash flows) of users and producers. It's in this context that I often mention that we believe gold is less volatile than other commodities because it has less industrial use. Taking copper, for example, it doesn't change either (well, it oxidizes), but supply and demand dynamics are far more elastic (volatile).

And of course, just like any asset, prices can be distorted, even for a considerable period. For example, I allege that the price of gold moves more like a 'risk asset' when gold has been hijacked by momentum investors, thereby potentially turning it into a proverbial hot potato.

With this framework provided, let me get to a point I have been making about the markets for some time: in our analysis, the Federal Reserve, in conjunction with other central banks, worked hard to take fear out of the markets. That is, central banks "compressed risk premia," i.e. making risk assets appear less risky. As a result, risk assets from stocks to junk bonds rose on the backdrop of low volatility (when junk bond prices rise, their yields fall). Conversely, as the Fed is trying to engineer an exit, we believe risk premia will rise again. All else equal, we believe this suggests more volatility (more fear) and lower equity prices.

If you agree with the logic outlined here, an environment in which the Fed is pursuing an exit may be favorable to the price of gold. And it's not because investors are fearful of another terrorist attack, it's because fear has been suppressed, yet the world is a risky place; and if market forces have it their way, fear as a healthy part of the markets will return. It also means that, all else equal, we believe the price of gold should be higher relative to equities.

Gold & Interest Rates

But all else isn't equal, as interest rates might be moving higher. At least that was the story we were told for years as the Fed was preparing the markets for an 'exit'. Given that markets tend to be forward looking, investors seemed to be fleeing the precious metal. After all, the real competition to a shiny brick that doesn't pay any interest may be cash that does pay interest. Cash, though, is an artificial construct, and investors have every right to be skeptical. Notably, investors may care more about the real interest they receive on cash, i.e. the interest after inflation is taken into account. While we are told what inflation rates are through official statistics, investors may choose their own perception of inflation in making investment decisions.

Instead of high rates, the world appears to be in a rush to go negative. Bloomberg recently wrote that one third of 47 countries in their global survey have negative 2-year government bond yields. Sure, in the U.S. rates are positive, but will the Fed be able to pursue its exit? Can we get real interest rates that are significantly positive? Or are we heading the other direction, i.e. is an economic slowdown coming that might take rates down further? In a recent editorial in the Washington Post, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers "puts the odds of a recession at about 1/3 over the next year and at over 1/2 over the next 2 years." He then suggests that a "400 basis point cut in Fed funds … is normally necessary to respond to an incipient recession."

While I don't encourage anyone to base their investment decisions on Larry Summers' musings (at least not unless he takes Fed Chair Yellen's job), I don't see real interest rates moving higher anytime soon. Larry Summers' scenario may be positive for gold, although – if we had rate cuts, it might, of course, compress risk premia once again, taking fear out of the markets…

The way we assess the Yellen Fed is a bit like an ocean tanker, i.e. it moves very slowly. The reasons for that we discussed in a recent Merk Insight, but have mainly to do with the fact that Yellen is a labor economist and, as such, typically looks at data that will lag developments in the real economy. To us, this suggests risk premia may continue to widen (causing risk assets to remain under pressure), and that any rally in the markets may be a bull trap, i.e. deceptive. In our assessment, investors are likely to use rallies to diversify their portfolios as they continue to be over-exposed to equities and other risk assets. The question is whether gold will be part of their diversification efforts. We think investors may want to consider adding a gold component to their portfolio.


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Hillary Clinton Gives Long, Incomplete Answer on Police Reform

Asked about the backlash among police officers to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 performance, Hillary Clinton declined to engage the performance directly, instead talking about police reform in a way that identified a wide range of problems but also missed crucial solutions.

“I think there are an enormous number of police officers in our country that perform honorably every single day,” Clinton said at last night’s CNN town hall debate in South Carolina. “They put themselves in harm’s way, they connect with the communities they are sworn to protect, and we should show them all the respect that they have earned and deserved.”

Such deference to police officers—as if they were not public employees paid to perform a service but some kind of public servants for whom the only necessary payment is respect, and not, say, a paycheck, a pension, and protection from the consequences of their actions—make it harder to engage honestly about the police reforms needed.

Clinton moved on to acknowledge there “problems in our criminal justice system in a lot of places that we can’t ignore.”

She mentioned two prominent police shootings from South Carolina in 2015—that of Walter Scott and Zachary Hammond. While she mentioned Hammond was “unarmed and killed in a police action,” she didn’t mention why police targeted him in the first place—over a small amount of marijuana.

“We have lost too many young people,” Clinton said. “So what’s the answer?”

Clinton talked about training police officers to de-escalate, but it would be more effective, especially on the federal level, to consider how to de-escalate laws so that they don’t put law enforcement officials and the people on whom the laws are imposed into situations where violence is more likely.

“I don’t think the answer is for us to find ourselves in opposing camps, where we’re just going to be looking at each other with mistrust,” Clinton said, referring to the controversy over the Beyoncé performance.

Yet laws like the ones propping up the drug war create the most dangerous camps—police officers who are ordered to impose the will of lawmakers (and ultimately, in a democratic society, of voters) versus people engaged in non-violent, consensual behavior that the public disapproves of.

“We have to figure out how we’re going to lift up the good practices, reform policing, provide more support, so that force is a last resort, not a first choice,” Clinton said, “and that means helping to train police.” It also needs to mean not asking police officers to go out and enforce the kind of petty laws that not only increase the likelihood of police violence but also trap many people in cycles of poverty.

Clinton then brought up the case of Dontre Hamilton, who was shot by a police officer in Milwaukee who was trying to remove Hamilton from a park bench after a number of officers who were previously called about Hamilton declined to do so.

“We’ve got to come to grips with the fact that we’ve got to do some retraining here,” Clinton said, “We’ve got to do some work to make sure that our police are understanding how best to deal with situations, where somebody’s not armed, somebody’s sitting on a park bench, and he ends up dead, so there is work to be done.”

Perish the thought that Clinton might’ve mentioned the independent review commission set up in Wisconsin to deal with police shootings just like Hamilton’s, because Scott Walker was the governor when that law was passed. The commission, which ended up being stacked with former Milwaukee law enforcement officials, ended up ruling in favor of the officer, although the police department fired him for policy infractions related to the incident. Walker said he wasn’t sure if the commission decided correctly, but did not want to get involved.

While Clinton framed the issue of police reform as one that still requires a lot of questions be asked to begin to arrive at solutions, that work is actually already being done. Activists associated with Black Lives Matter launched Campaign Zero last year, a set of policy initiatives aimed at reducing police violence. Clinton does not have to re-invent the wheel—she can work off the proposals of Campaign Zero.

Among their policy solutions is reforming police contracts to remove barriers to accountability put up via collective bargaining and other labor agreements.

“Let’s hold police behavior accountable, so that there’s an incentive for people to change how they are doing police practices,” Clinton said.

Police unions are such a big part of the problem of incentives in policing that Black Lives Matter launched an initiative specifically to collect and analyze union contracts. It should be becoming increasingly clear that police unions are a major part of the problem of police violence. Clinton and other Democrats (and Republicans) should be held accountable for ignoring that, and other components, of the problem in favor of rhetorically pleasing bromides that won’t lead on their own to meaningful reform.

“What we want to do is stop this from happening again,” Clinton said. “We want to save lives.”

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Global Warming Hiatus Is Real

DebateOverLots of climate researchers and climate change activists have been discombobulated by the fact that global average temperature increases have been considerably slower during the first years of this century than most climate models projected. There have been scores of studies that have tried to explain away this inconvenient fact. One of the more heralded studies was published by researchers associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in June, 2015. That study eliminated the hiatus by controversially adjusting ocean temperature data derived from robot buoys to match earlier data temperature data taken by ocean-going ships.

Now a group of climate researchers in Nature Climate Change have published an article, “Making sense of the early-2000s warming,” that argues the hiatus is real and not well understood. Interestingly, it includes as co-authors some of the more prominent climate researchers who have challenged the notion of the “pause.” For example, last June, Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann crowed:

Just out in Science is a new article by Tom Karl of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and colleagues driving another stake through the heart of the supposed “hiatus” or “pause,” i.e. what I like to call the “Faux Pause.”

I expect this article will be attacked by climate change deniers who are unhappy to see the demise of a narrative they helped frame, a narrative that arguably took hold due in part to the “seepage” of contrarian framing into mainstream climate science discourse.

Mann is now a co-author on the new study that pulls that stake out:

It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.

Has Mann become climate change “denier” now? Hardly.

About the new study, Nature News reports:

The latest salvo in an ongoing row over global-warming trends claims that warming has indeed slowed down this century.

An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.

Now a prominent group of researchers is countering that claim, arguing in Nature Climate Change that even after correcting these biases the slowdown was real.

“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”

Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory.

A graph comparing climate model projections, a.k.a., Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CIMP5) with satellite data from Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama in Huntsville is most illuminating. See below.

CIMP5NatureClimateChange

Overlapping trend in the temperature of the lower troposphere (TLT), spatially averaged over the near-global (82.5°N, 70°S) coverage of two satellite-based datasets; model results are from 41 simulations of historical climate change performed with 28 CMIP-5 models, with RCP8.5 extensions from 2005. Peaks in the running 15-year trends centred around 2000 reflect recovery from the Pinatubo eruption in 1991.

Another co-author, Ed Hawkins, who is at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, notes:

Overall, there is compelling evidence that there has been a temporary slowdown in observed global surface warming, especially when examined relative to our expectations, which can be explained by a combination of factors. Research into the nature and causes of this event has triggered improved understanding of observational biases, radiative forcing and internal variability. This has led to more widespread recognition that modulation by internal variability is large enough to produce a significantly reduced rate of surface temperature increase for a decade or even more — particularly if internal variability is augmented by the externally driven cooling caused by a succession of volcanic eruptions.

The legacy of this new understanding will certainly outlive the recent warming slowdown.

Indeed. But if the rate of temperature increase continues to remain low, at what point do the models and projections of catastrophe warming get called into question by mainstream researchers?

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