American Farmers Are Killing Themselves At An Unprecedented Rate

Suicide is exploding in America – and the increase isn’t confined to celebrities like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. Suicide rates have risen by an astonishing 30% since 1999, with suicidal people citing relationship stress, financial difficulties and other issues as the underlying cause.

But suicide rates have increased for some professions more than others. According to CBS, farmers are facing the highest suicide rate of any profession in the US. The suicide rate for people in the field of farming, fishing and forestry is 84.5 per 100,000 people – more than five times that of the broader population. And with retaliatory tariffs from China and the European Union set to further undermine US crop prices, a bad situation could be about to get worse. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, making the loans on which farmers depend increasingly expensive. 

Agriculture

The study comes with a few caveats: For one, it leaves out Iowa, a major agricultural state. And while farmers make up the bulk of the workers in their subgroup, they do share the designation with a small number of workers from related occupational groups, like fishing and forestry. But the figures largely jive with other recent studies. For example, suicide rates are highest in rural areas – where the bulk of farming is done.

One source said today’s crisis of suicide might be worse than a similar wave that gripped the American heartland in the 1980s. 

“The farm crisis was so bad, there was a terrible outbreak of suicide and depression,” said Jennifer Fahy, communications director with Farm Aid, a group founded in 1985 that advocates for farmers. Today, she said, “I think it’s actually worse.”

“We’re hearing from farmers on our hotline that farmer stress is extremely high,” Fahy said. “Every time there’s more uncertainty around issues around the farm economy is another day of phones ringing off the hook.”

Finances are probably the most pressing reason: Since 2013, farm income has been declining steadily according to the US Department of Agriculture. This year, the average farm is expected to earn 35% less than what it earned in 2013.

“Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago.” That’s how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today.

Farmers are at the mercy of extreme weather like hurricanes that threaten crops to agricultural commodity prices that have fallen below breakeven production levels. And prices will likely only continue to fall as America’s trading partners slap tariffs on American agricultural products.

Of course, farmers aren’t the only American professionals feeling squeezed. In New York City, local press has focused on a wave of cab driver suicides in recent months which have been largely blamed on the rise of ride-sharing apps, which have devalued cab drivers’ medallions. Over the last five months, more than five New York City cabbies had committed suicide, blaming Uber for their financial troubles.

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In “Catastrophic” Scenario, CBO Projects US Debt/GDP Hitting 247%

The CBO released its latest long-term budget outlook today, and found that America’s financial situation continues to deteriorate. While there were not many notable variations from the last forecast, there were some notable differences.

A quick summary of the latest financial situation:

At 78% of gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt held by the public is now at its highest level since shortly after World War II. If current laws generally remained unchanged, the Congressional Budget Office projects, growing budget deficits would boost that debt sharply over the next 30 years; it would approach 100 percent of GDP by the end of the next decade and 152% by 2048 (by comparison, in its March 2017 forecast, public debt was estimated at 113% of GDP in 2017 rising to 150% by 2047). That amount would be the highest in the nation’s history by far. 

Moreover, if lawmakers changed current law to maintain certain policies now in place— for example preventing a significant increase in individual income taxes in 2026 as Trump has been suggesting — the result would be even larger increases in debt.

A breakdown of projected spending and revenue over the next 30 years is shown below.

This is how the breakdown by key spending and revenue components would change from 2018 to 2048.

On the GDP side, the CBO forecasts average annual growth of 1.9% for the 2018-2048 period, an increase from the 1.4% average over the past decade.

The CBO also forecasts inflation of 2.4% and unemployment of 4.6% for the 2018-48 period.

More troubling is the CBO’s projection of interest rates which will rise from their currently low levels and as debt accumulates, putting increasing pressure on government finances and push interest payments to record levels in the coming decades.

Specifically, the rising levels of federal debt would push debt payments from 1.6% of the gross domestic product in 2018 to 3.1% in 2028 and 6.3% in 2048, which would be the highest level ever. At that point, interest payments would equal spending on Social Security.  Those payments would help put overall federal spending to 29% of GDP for the first time since World War II.

What was perhaps most notable is that as part of its admission that there is no way of accurately predicting the true state of the US economy in 30 years, the CBO noted that in order to illustrate the uncertainty of its projections, the Budget Office examined the extent to which federal debt as a percentage of GDP would differ from the amounts in its extended baseline if the agency varied four key factors in its analysis.

  • The labor force participation rate
  • The growth rate of total factor productivity,
  • Interest rates on federal debt held by the public, and
  • Excess cost growth for Medicare and Medicaid spending.

Where it gets interesting is in the CBO’s admission that if CBO varied one factor at a time, federal debt held by the public after 30 years would range from 42 percentage points of GDP below the agency’s central estimate—152 percent of GDP—to 60 percentage points above it.

And here is the worst case outcome: If all four factors were varied simultaneously such that projected deficits increased, federal debt held by the public in 2048 would be about 96% of GDP above CBO’s central estimate.

Or, in other words, the CBO admits that if everything went wrong, US debt/GDP in 2048 would be a catastrophic 247%, a number that would make even Japan blush.

What would the soaring debt burden do to the US?

Large and growing federal debt over the coming decades would hurt the economy and constrain future budget policy. The amount of debt that is projected under the extended baseline would reduce national saving and income in the long term; increase the government’s interest costs, putting more pressure on the rest of the budget; limit lawmakers’ ability to respond to unforeseen events; and increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis.

And here is the CBO’s sullen admission of how the hyperinflationary endgame would look like:

In that event, investors would become unwilling to finance the government’s borrowing unless they were compensated with very high interest rates.

The CBO’s parting words are hardly a source of comfort:

Those calculations do not cover the full range of possible outcomes, and they do not address other sources of uncertainty in the budget projections, such as the risk of an economic depression or a major war or catastrophe, or the possibility of unexpected changes in rates of birth, immigration, or mortality. Nonetheless, they show that the main implications of this report apply under a wide range of possible values for some key factors that influence federal spending and revenues. In 30 years, if current laws remained generally unchanged, federal debt— which is already high by historical standards—would probably be at least as high as it is today and would most likely be much higher.

Policymakers could take that uncertainty into account in various ways as they make choices for fiscal policy. For example, they might design policies that reduced the budgetary implications of certain unexpected events. Or they might decide to provide a buffer against events with negative budgetary implications by aiming for lower debt than they would in the absence of such uncertainty.

Policymakers could take that uncertainty into account, but they won’t, and instead what is much more likely is that when the next perfect storm hits the US economy, whoever is in charge will do what the US has done every time there was a crisis: issue even more debt, and bring the financial system that much closer to failure. Then again, in 30 years even if the “catastrophic” scenario for the US were to come true, one can only wonder what shape the rest of the world would be in…

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Carpenter Supreme Court Decision Should Lead To Rethinking Ross Ulbricht’s Conviction

The legal team for Ross Ulbricht, currently in jail for life without parole for crimes associated with the launching and operating of the darkweb site Silk Road, sees hope in a Supreme Court decision last week.

The Court decided in the landmark case Carpenter v. United States that law enforcement can no longer assume information voluntarily given to third parties—in that specific case, cell phone records—has no Fourth Amendment protection at all, as per earlier doctrine from the U.S. v. Miller (1976) and Smith v. Maryland (1979) cases.

As Damon Root reported at Reason, Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision had him declaring the Supreme Court has officially “decline[d] to extend Smith and Miller to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection…Whether the Government employs its own surveillance technology…or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through [cell site location information].”

This has huge implications for Ulbricht’s still-pending petition to the Supreme Court to rehear his case, his lawyers assert in a supplementary brief they filed after the Carpenter decision came down.

As the brief from Ulbricht lawyer Kannon Shanmugam says, with Carpenter “the Court expressly rejected the government’s ‘primary contention that the third-party doctrine adopted by the Court in the context of telephone calls in Smith v. Maryland…should be applied to new categories of information made available by ‘seismic shifts in digital technology.” (Shanmugam, it should be noted, has a healthy record of successful Supreme Court appeals.)

That same thinking should affect how the Court judges the Fourth Amendment implications of the manner in which the government got information key to their conviction of Ulbricht, Shanmugam writes. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Ulbricht’s conviction, “deemed itself ‘bound’ to apply Smith to modern technology absent this [Supreme] Court’s intervention.”

While Ulbricht’s case involved computer records and not cell phone records specifically, Shanmugam believes that “in light of this Court’s refusal to apply Smith in Carpenter, reconsideration of the Second Circuit’s reasoning is plainly warranted. Accordingly, the Court should grant [Ulbricht’s] petition for certiorari.”

As Shanmugam explained in a still-pending cert petition to the Supreme Court, Ulbricht’s case is “an appropriate companion case to Carpenter because the Internet traffic information at issue here is broader in important ways than the cell site location information at issue in Carpenter. In addition to allowing the government to determine when petitioner was accessing the Internet from the privacy of his own home, the information gathered by the pen/traps here permitted the government to determine the websites to which petitioner connected, the length of the connections, and the port of transmission of the data. As this Court has recognized, the collection of such Internet information could reveal ‘an individual’s private interests or concerns.'”

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“You Are Unbalanced”: Hungarian Foreign Minister Shuts Down Enraged BBC Reporter Over EU Migration

The newly emboldened populist wave sweeping Europe has begun to clash with establishment EU “open border” advocates, as governments opposed to illegal mass migration dig their heels in and resist the influx of mostly North African migrants. 

Europe has been sharply divided over asylum seekers – however words turned to action in early June when Italy’s brand new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, closed Italian ports to Non-Government Organizations (NGO) ferrying migrants into the country. The rest of Italy’s populist coalition government supported the move, fending off condemnation from “hypocritical” French President Emmanuel Macron and other EU leaders. 

Perfectly capturing the current rift between populism and progressivism in Europe, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó got in a spat with BBC presenter Emily Maitlis on Monday while trying to explain why his country opposes an open-border policy.

“The current migration policy of the European Union can be very easily translated as an invitation in the minds of those people, who can easily make a decision to head towards Europe,” – Péter Szijjártó

When quizzed by Maitlis on Hungary’s “Stop Soros” legislation introduced in January the Foreign Minister said “There are organisations who help people to ask for asylum, even if they no legal basis for that… and they have to contend with the consequences.”

Triggered by Szijjártó’s answer, Maitlis tried to argue that anyone landing in Hungary has the right seek asylum and have their case heard, to which the Hungarian hit back: 

“From the south, we are surrounded by peaceful countries, so those people who are violating our borders all came from peaceful countries like Serbia and Croatia and there’s no point of reference in any international regulations why you should be allowed or helped or assisted to violate a border between two peaceful countries.”

“What we don’t want is a massive illegal influx coming from the south to us, we want to keep Hungary a Hungarian country and we don’t think by definition that multiculturalism is good… If you think so, if people in this country think so, we respect that, but please don’t put pressure on us.”

Over the weekend, Polish MP Dominik Tarczyński of the Polish Law & Justice party shocked UK Channel 4’s Cathy Newman when asked if European politicians have a “moral, humanitarian duty” to help asylum seekers: 

Austria, meanwhile just conducted a massive border security exercise on Monday in the town of Spielfeld in preparation for a wave of 80,000 migrants expected to travel through the new “Balkan route” from Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia to Western and Central Europe.

In short, citizens of Germany, France and now Spain will continue to “enjoy” watching their culture become “multicultural,” while those in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Bulgaria and several other European nations take active measures to resist the open border policies. 

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We Now Know What The “Trump Tariff Put” Is

Submitted by Nick Colas of Datatrek Research

We got the first sign of a “Trump Tariff Put” on Monday as the White House walked back threats to the Tech sector late in the day after a steep intraday decline in US stocks. That got us wondering: what sort of equity market pullback would it take to have the White House shelve/materially soften its plans to renegotiate numerous trade pacts? Our back of the envelope math: 9% on the S&P from here, or a 3-5% one-day decline on Chinese/European retaliation.

In a recent note we cast a wary but hopeful eye on the notion of a “Trump Tariff Put”; yesterday we saw it in action. The day started with a Wall Street Journal article outlining possible limitations on Chinese investment in US companies with “Industrially significant technology”. A pre-open walk-back tweet from Treasury Secretary Mnuchin did little to calm markets. At the lows of the day the S&P was at 2700, down 2%.

Then trade advisor Peter Navarro came out in the afternoon and said to “discount” notions that there would be investment restrictions. That seemed to do the trick, and the S&P closed at 2717. One gets the feeling that perhaps policymakers are unaware that Technology is 26% of the S&P 500, and by taking its trade issues into that sphere they crossed a red line. At least as far as equity markets go…

Making some lemonade from Monday’s tart action, at least we now know what sort of market action makes trade hawks fly back to the nest for a break. The magic number seems to be 2% on the S&P and right around 500 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. For our readers who trade for a living, it is worth keeping those numbers in mind for future trade news-driven days.

Thinking a little more broadly about the “Trump Tariff Put”, let’s consider how much of a stock market slide it would take to convince the White House to materially soften its efforts on this front. We know from Monday’s headlines this is their Achilles Heel. But how big is that target?

A few background thoughts here:

  • #1. Whether by a happy accident or entirely intentionally, policymakers have staged their economic/trade program quite cleverly since the start of 2017. Year 1, focus on tax cuts to rev the US economy and push equities to all-time highs. Year 2, do the heavy lifting on the trade issues that were a hallmark of President Trump’s campaign for office. Hope that Year 1’s actions serve as a counterweight to Year 2’s harsher measures.
  • #2. That makes the current trade initiative entirely dependent on real-time economic growth and, by necessity, equity market returns. And since the latter keys off not just on current earnings but their perceived sustainability/future growth, the Trump administration’s focus on stock prices does have some self-correcting moderation built into the cadence of its actions.
  • #3. The wild cards in the deck just now: a Federal Reserve bent on raising interest rates, a slow motion train wreck in emerging markets, and global debt levels over 2x higher than a decade ago. How much of these factor into White House trade policy is hard to know. The same holds true, of course, for US equity prices. And how much the current administration will parse the effects of these factors to determine its course of action on trade is the $64 question.

So how much of an equity decline would it take for the administration to soften its tone on trade? Two answers:

  • Down 9% on the S&P from here, as long as the decline was clearly due to trade war concerns. The math behind this guesstimate: the index is up about 18% since President Trump took office. Giving back half those gains would be palatable. More than that would not be, and may even spook markets and consumers into thinking a recession was inevitable. Not the right scenario going into midterm elections.
  • A 3-5% one-day move lower based on European/Chinese retaliation. We know from Monday’s action that 2% is some sort of a pain threshold, but “fixing” it was still in the administration’s power (Navarro’s late date walk-back). If that were not possible because the catalyst was outside US control, that might be enough to push the White House into a softer stance.

Bottom line: as investors gather more experience with this administration, they see that it responds and shifts positions based on news flow. And if we’ve learned one thing about “Policy puts” over the decades, it is that markets get pulled in the direction of the strike price once volatility picks up.

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Mike Bloomberg Weighing 2020 Democratic Presidential Run

New York City’s favorite out-of-touch billionaire former mayor is preparing yet another presidential bid in 2020, which, as CBS New York points out, would make him both the richest and the oldest person to seek the job. While he was first elected mayor on the Republican ticket – and later as an independent – many speculate that, if he follows through with another presidential run, Bloomberg may seek the office as a Democrat.

The anonymous sources who leaked the story to CBS New York said Bloomberg’s decision to run is driven in part by remorse that he didn’t stay in the race in 2016. Though he famously proclaimed that he wouldn’t “risk helping Trump” when he announced in March 2016 that he wouldn’t move ahead with an independent run, his feelings about that decision have (understandably) shifted. He now believes he could’ve either won outright – or at least stopped Trump from becoming president (in reality, a Bloomberg independent run would’ve probably taken away more votes from Clinton). Bloomberg has considered a White House run in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Bloomberg

The former mayor (and founder of Bloomberg LP) has been racking up political IOUs thanks to the $80 million he’s reportedly spending to help Democrats during the November midterms. “Republicans in Congress have had almost two years to prove they could govern responsibly. They failed,” Bloomberg said in a statement released last week, according to the Hill. “I’ve never thought that the public is well-served when one party is entirely out of power, and I think the past year and half has been evidence of that,” he added.

Bloomberg also accused Republicans of doing little to “reach across the aisle to craft bipartisan solutions – not only on guns and climate change, but also on jobs, immigration, health care and infrastructure”.

But Bloomberg’s particular brand of “nanny state” liberalism (remember the infamous soda ban that was blocked by New York courts?) is probably as popular today as it was when he was a third-term New York mayor (not very). His pro-gun control stance would also help galvanize Trump’s base, who would likely come out to vote en mass to stop a president who questions the second amendment.

Bloomberg isn’t the only septuagenarian who’s eyeing a run for the Democratic nomination: Former VP Joe Biden is also reportedly considering a bid and one can never count out Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, California Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand are also reportedly weighing bids of their own.

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Red Hen Owner Resigns As Director Of Volunteer-Organization After Backlash

Stephanie Wilkinson, the now infamous social justice warrior that kicked Sarah Sanders out of her Red Hen restaurant, has resigned from a local volunteer group following major backlash.

As the local NBC news outlet reports, Stephanie Wilkinson has resigned from her role as Executive Director with Main Street Lexington, a volunteer-based organization.

Elizabeth Outland Branner, the president of the organization, accepted Wilkinson’s resignation Tuesday morning.

“Considering the events of the past weekend, Stephanie felt it best that for the continued success of Main Street Lexington, she should step aside,” Branner wrote in an email.

Per the organization’s website:

Main Street Lexington exists to enhance the economic prosperity and cultural vitality of our community, re-establishing downtown Lexington as the vibrant economic and cultural nexus of our area while maintaining its unique character.

We are a volunteer-based organization established in 2013. We are affiliate members of the Virginia Main Street Program, which uses a proven “Four Point Approach” created by the National Main Street Center to achieve economic revitalization in the context of historic preservation.

*  *  *

We wonder if “she’d do it all again” now?

 

 

 

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This Is the First FDA-Approved Medicine Derived From Cannabis

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex, an oral cannabidiol solution made by the British company GW Pharmaceuticals, as a treatment for two forms of severe, drug-resistant epilepsy. Although a synthetic version of THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, has been legally available as a treatment for nausea and appetite loss since 1985, this is the first time the federal government has given its blessing to a medication derived directly from cannabis.

The plant itself is still listed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. In light of the FDA’s decision, that designation is clearly no longer appropriate for cannabidiol (CBD), which is not psychoactive but has shown much promise as a medicine.

Patients who received CBD in three randomized, double-blind clinical trials saw much bigger improvements than patients who received placebos. In a study of 225 patients with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, for example, the median number of “drop seizures” (which can cause falls) during a 28-day period fell from 85.5 to 44.9 in the high-dose group (a decrease of 49 percent), from 86.9 to 50 in the low-dose group (43 percent), and from 80.3 to 72.7 in the placebo group (21 percent). In a study of 120 patients with Dravet Syndrome, the median number of convulsive seizures over 28 days fell from 12.4 to 5.9 in the CBD group (a drop of 52 percent) and from 14.9 to 14.1 in the placebo group (5 percent).

“The difficult-to-control seizures that patients with Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome experience have a profound impact on these patients’ quality of life,” said Billy Dunn, director of the Division of Neurology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “In addition to another important treatment option for Lennox-Gastaut patients, this first-ever approval of a drug specifically for Dravet patients will provide a significant and needed improvement in the therapeutic approach to caring for people with this condition.”

Twenty-five of the 29 states that allow medical use of marijuana specifically recognize epilepsy as a qualifying condition. Another 17 states officially allow the treatment of epilepsy with low-THC, high-CBD cannabis oil, although they do not necessarily provide a legal way to obtain it.

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Beyond Serena Williams: Why Athletes—and the Rest of Us—Are Getting Better as We Get Older: Podcast

Did you ever notice that elite athletes seem to be getting…older? You’re not imagining things. In 2016, Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl for the Indianapolis Colts at the ripe old age of 39. A year later, Tom Brady did the same thing at the same age for the New England Patriots (boo). This year, tennis great Roger Federer became the oldest man to be ranked number one (he’s 36). His female counterpart, Serena Williams, has won more Grand Slam tennis titles than anyone and was ranked number one in 2017 when she was 35. She also faced off against her 36-year-old sister Venus in that year’s Australian Open final.

The new book Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age, explores and analyzes why today’s professional athletes aren’t just sticking around longer but are often getting better as they get older. And it’s not simply pros, says Jeff Bercovici, the San Francisco bureau chief of Inc. and a former staffer at Forbes. The rest of us are upping our games as we move into middle age and beyond, he writes, increasing our “healthspan,” or years at or near the top of our physical condition even as we live longer. Rich in detail and humor (Bercovici memorably documents his ordeals at some of the nation’s top conditioning clinics), Play On is ultimately a book about self-improvement and taking control not just of your life but your body and mind, too.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Bercovici talks to me about everything from blood-doping, by which athletes seek to increase their endurance, to Silicon Valley’s current penchant for “blood boys” (don’t ask).

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Andreessen Horowitz Launches $300M “Long-Term” Cryptocurrency Fund

At a time when regulators in the US and elsewhere are finally cracking down on ICOs – though the industry as a whole has largely failed to shed its patina of shadiness – there’s still at least one Silicon Valley VC firm that thinks launching a “long-term” ICO-focused VC fund is a smart idea.

Andreessen

Marc Andreessen

As the Financial Times reports, Andreessen Horowitz is launching a $300 million hedge-fund style “venture capital” fund to invest in ICOs with a “typical venture-capital timeframe” of 10 years, or longer. The company has already named a former DOJ prosecutor as its first female partner – which is probably a smart move for a fund where sniffing out criminality and fraud should be a top-level skill.

The Silicon Valley investment firm announced it had raised $300m to back new cryptocurrency-related ideas, including investing directly in the currencies themselves, which have become the focus of massive financial speculation.

Andreessen also named Katie Haun, a former prosecutor at the Department of Justice, to help manage the fund, making her the firm’s first female general partner. Ms Haun led some of the most prominent enforcement actions in the area, including the DoJ’s investigation of Mt Gox, a bitcoin exchange that collapsed after a massive theft.

The timing of AH’s decision is interesting, given that Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures argued in a blog post published last week that “the venture capital fund model is not optimized for investing in the blockchain/crypto sector.” In fact, it’s difficult to imagine any investing model where an ICO-focused strategy makes sense. Price movements among ICO tokens typically correspondent to two qualities: hype, and manipulation.

Crypto

But amazingly, the ICO market still looks attractive to some professional investors. As one Andreessen partner put it: “You squint one way and it’s a whole new asset class – you squint another way it looks a lot like the venture capital world,” said Chris Dixon, an Andreessen partner.

And if you really look carefully, it looks like a scam. Andreessen said it has already made “a number” of investments in blockchain companies from its main fund, and the firm hopes the new dedicated fund will allow for more “flexibility” in their investments. This is a curious bit of hedging, which suggests that the firm is aware of the immense risk it is taking, and begs the question: why continue?

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