- The Average Home Size In Every US State In 2022
The Average Home Size In Every US State In 2022
Over the last century, the average home size in the U.S. has skyrocketed. In 1949, the typical single-family home was just 909 square feet—by 2021, it had shot up to 2,480 square feet.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, while U.S. homes are getting larger on the whole, they still vary drastically depending on the location. What areas in the U.S. have the largest homes, and which ones have the smallest?
This graphic by American Home Shield uses data from the 2022 American Home Size Index to show the average home size in every U.S. state.
The 2022 American Home Size Index
The index uses data from 474,157 listings of both houses and condos for sale on Zillow as of May 2022. After the data was compiled, it was organized by state and city, and the median home size was then calculated for each area.
According to the findings, there was a strong correlation with the average size of a home and the age of the area’s housing stock. For instance, Utah is the U.S. state with the largest average home size, with an average of 2,800 square feet. And since the state’s average home was built in 1989, it has the third-youngest home stock of any state across the country.
This trend is apparent on a city-level as well. Here’s a look at average home size across America’s top 50 most populated cities (with available data):
As the graphic shows, up-and-coming tech hubs like Raleigh and Colorado Springs have some of the largest homes.
Colorado Springs in particular has seen a significant influx in employment over the last few years, which has attracted high-income tech workers to the area driven up demand for spacious single-family dwellings.
The Price of Real Estate Compared to Average Home Size
The data also showed a relationship between an area’s average price of real estate and the average home size. For instance, Hawaii has the smallest average home size of any state, as well as the most expensive at $743.86 per square foot.
This trend is apparent in the state of New York as well, which had the second smallest average home size. New York’s average home costs were $421.49 per square foot, the third-most expensive of any state.
Lot Size vs. Home Size
Interestingly, while average home sizes in the U.S. have gotten larger over time, the average lot size has shrunk over the years.
In 1978, the average lot size for a U.S. property was 18,760 square feet, but by 2020, this figure had dropped to a record low of 13,896 square feet.
With lot sizes shrinking, will there come a point where home size growth across the country starts to plateau, or even shrink?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 23:30 - Escobar: Electric Wars
Escobar: Electric Wars
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Spare a thought to the Polish farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage – later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300. So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by Anglo-American “intelligence”.
Such tawdriness was compounded by a ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing on Russian missiles from a direction that they could not possibly be coming from. That is: Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian missiles that should not have been in the air (and they were not).
Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying into a rather shabby art.
The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was to generate a “world crisis” against Russia. It’s been exposed – this time. That does not mean the usual suspects won’t try it again. Soon.
The main reason is panic. Collective West intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing their army – ready to hit the ground next month – while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture.
Those February days of sending only 100,000 troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do most of the heavy lifting – are long gone. Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that Russians did quite well.
Every military analyst knows the basic rule: an invasion force should number three times the defending force. The Russian Army at the start of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule. The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they could have spared a few tens of thousands more than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It was a political decision.
But now SMO is over: this is CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability of going beyond a mere “military operation”.
And that brings us to Electric War.
Paving the way to a DMZ
The Electric War is being handled essentially as a tactic – leading to the eventual imposition of Russia’s terms in a possible armistice (which neither Anglo-American intel and vassal NATO want).
Even if there was an armistice – widely touted for a few weeks now – that would not end the war. Because the deeper, tacit Russian terms – end of NATO expansion and “indivisibility of security” – were fully spelled out to both Washington and Brussels last December, and subsequently dismissed.
As nothing – conceptually – has changed since then, coupled with the Western weaponization of Ukraine reaching a frenzy, the Putin-era Stavka could not but expand the initial SMO mandate, which remains denazification and demilitarization. Yet now the mandate will have to encompass Kiev and Lviv.
And that starts with the current de-electrification campaign – which goes way beyond the east of the Dnieper and along the Black Sea coast towards Odessa.
That brings us to the key issue of reach and depth of Electric War, in terms of setting up what would be a DMZ – complete with no man’s land – west of the Dnieper to protect Russian areas from NATO artillery, HIMARS and missile attacks.
How deep? 100 km? Not enough. Rather 300 km – as Kiev has already requested artillery with that kind of range.
What’s crucial is that way back in July this was already being extensively discussed in Moscow at the highest Stavka levels.
In an extensive July interview, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov let the cat – diplomatically – out of the bag:
“This process continues, consistently and persistently. It will continue as long as the West, in its impotent rage, desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible, continues to flood Ukraine with more and more long-range weapons. Take the HIMARS. Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.”
The implications are clear.
As much as Washington and NATO are even more “desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible” (and that’s Plan A: there’s no Plan B), geoeconomically the Americans are intensifying the New Great Game: desperation here applies to trying to control energy corridors and setting their price.
Russia remains unfazed – as it continues to invest in Pipelineistan (towards Asia); solidify the multimodal International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with key partners India and Iran; and is setting the price of energy via OPEC+.
A paradise for oligarchic looters
The Straussians/neo-cons and neoliberal-cons permeating the Anglo-American intel/security apparatus – de facto weaponized viruses – won’t relent. They simply cannot afford losing yet another NATO war – and on top of it against “existential threat” Russia.
As the news from the Ukraine battlefields promise to be even grimmer under General Winter, solace at least may be found in the cultural sphere. The Green transition racket, seasoned in a toxic mixed salad with the eugenist Silicon Valley ethos, continues to be a side dish offered with the main course: the Davos “Great Narrative”, former Great Reset, which reared its ugly head, once again, at the G20 in Bali.
That translates as everything going swell as far as the Destruction of Europe project is concerned. De-industrialize and be happy; rainbow-dance to every woke tune on the market; and freeze and burn wood while blessing “renewables” in the altar of European values.
A quick flashback to contextualize where we are is always helpful.
Ukraine was part of Russia for nearly four centuries. The very idea of its independence was invented in Austria during WWI for the purpose of undermining the Russian Army – and that certainly happened. The present “independence” was set up so local Trotskyite oligarchs could loot the nation as a Russia-aligned government was about to move against those oligarchs.
The 2014 Kiev coup was essentially set up by Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski to draw Russia into a new partisan war – as in Afghanistan – and was followed by orders to the Gulf oil haciendas to crash the oil price. Moscow had to protect Russophones in Crimea and Donbass – and that led to more Western sanctions. All of it was a setup.
For 8 years, Moscow refused to send its armies even to Donbass east of the Dnieper (historically part of Mother Russia). The reason: not to be bogged down in another partisan war. The rest of Ukraine, meanwhile, was being looted by oligarchs supported by the West, and plunged into a financial black hole.
The collective West deliberately chose not to finance the black hole. Most of the IMF injections were simply stolen by the oligarchs, and the loot transferred out of the country. These oligarchic looters were of course “protected” by the usual suspects.
It’s always crucial to remember that between 1991 and 1999 the equivalent of the present entire household wealth of Russia was stolen and transferred overseas, mostly to London. Now the same usual suspects are trying to ruin Russia with sanctions, as “new Hitler” Putin stopped the looting.
The difference is that the plan of using Ukraine as just a pawn in their game is not working.
On the ground, what has been going on so far are mostly skirmishes, and a few real battles. But with Moscow massing fresh troops for a winter offensive, the Ukrainian Army may end up completely routed.
Russia didn’t look so bad – considering the effectiveness of its mincing machine artillery strikes against Ukrainian fortified positions, and recent planned retreats or positional warfare, keeping casualties down while smashing Ukrainian withering firepower.
The collective West believes it holds the Ukraine proxy war card. Russia bets on reality, where economic cards are food, energy, resources, resource security and a stable economy.
Meanwhile, as if the energy-suicide EU did not have to face a pyramid of ordeals, they can surely expect to have knocking on their door at least 15 million desperate Ukrainians escaping from villages and cities with zero electrical power.
The railway station in – temporarily occupied – Kherson is a graphic example: people show up constantly to warm up and charge their smartphones. The city has no electricity, no heat, and no water.
Current Russian tactics are the absolute opposite of the military theory of concentrated force developed by Napoleon. That’s why Russia is accumulating serious advantages while “disturbing the dust in a bowl of rose-leaves”.
And of course, “we haven’t even started yet.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 23:00 - San Francisco PD Proposes Letting Robots Kill Suspects
San Francisco PD Proposes Letting Robots Kill Suspects
A policy drafted by the San Francisco Police Department has sent a petition to the city’s Board of Supervisors which would allow police officers to deploy robots with the intent to kill suspects in situations where “risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD,” Engadget reports, citing Mission Local.
Europa Press News via Getty Images Where have we seen this one before?
According to Mission Local, the draft proposal has already received significant pushback from both within and outside of the Board – including supervisor Aaron Peskin, who initially resisted the idea until he inserted language which would completely neuter the death-bots.
“Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person,” he wrote, which the SFPD then removed in a subsequent draft.
The police force currently maintains a dozen fully-functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspections and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD showed in 2016, they make excellent bomb delivery platforms as well. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with blank shotgun shells used to forcibly disrupt an explosive device’s internal workings, though there is nothing stopping police from using live rounds if they needed, as Oakland police recently acknowledged to that city’s civilian oversight board. -Engadget
In short, if this proposal ever sees the light of day:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 22:30 - Musk: Exposing Twitter's Internal Discussion Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story "Necessary To Restore Public Trust"
Musk: Exposing Twitter’s Internal Discussion Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story “Necessary To Restore Public Trust”
Revealing Twitter’s internal discussions surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 US election is “necessary to restore public trust,” according to new owner Elon Musk.
Musk was responding to a tweet by the recently-unbanned @alx, who said: “Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk
should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency.”This is necessary to restore public trust
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022
The Post had its Twitter account locked in October 2020 for reporting on the now-confirmed-to-be-real “laptop from hell,” which contains unprosecuted evidence of foreign influence peddling through then-Vice President Joe Biden – including a meeting between Joe and an executive of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, in 2015.
The laptop contained caches of emails detailing business dealings with Burisma and state-owned CEFC China Energy Co, from which his firms received $4.8 million in wire transfer payments from its founder, Ye Jianming, according to a Senate report. -Daily Caller
Twitter had restricted any user from sharing links of the Post‘s coverage, both publicly or via direct message – while the social media giant also locked out former White House spox Kayleigh McEnany’s personal account, as well as former President Trump’s campaign account, for sharing the link.
In the ensuing years, the authenticity of the laptop has been confirmed by both the Washington Post and the New York Times, while CBS News authenticated the laptop on Monday.
Indeed:
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) November 24, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 21:35 - US Bird Flu Outbreak Officially Becomes Worst On Record
US Bird Flu Outbreak Officially Becomes Worst On Record
The US outbreak of avian influenza or bird flu is now the worst on record, with 50.54 million birds culled, US Department of Agriculture data showed on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in South Dakota resulted in tens of thousands of birds being culled to avoid spreading. This was enough to top the previous record of 50.5 million birds that died in the 2015 avian-flu outbreak.
Readers have been well-informed this year about the devastating bird flu outbreak ravaging commercial poultry farms nationwide. Here’s the latest map of the epidemic spreading across the US.
We cautioned at the start of this month of the “possibility of additional outbreaks” and noted ahead of Thanksgiving that supermarket egg prices were hyperinflating because a large swath of the nation’s egg-laying hens was wiped out.
“The virus has mostly impacted turkey and egg operations, sending prices to all-time highs and contributing to soaring food inflation. While the spread slowed during the warmer months, it continued to fester and now risks further spread as cooling temperatures prompt more birds to migrate,” Bloomberg said.
The outbreak began in February and has so far infected flocks of poultry and non-poultry birds across 46 states.
“Wild birds continue to spread HPAI throughout the country as they migrate, so preventing contact between domestic flocks and wild birds is critical to protecting US poultry,” Rosemary Sifford, the USDA’s chief veterinary officer, said.
Some experts have warned the highly pathogenic bird flu could easily continue spreading into 2023 and devastate even more commercial farms. This may only suggest egg prices are heading higher.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 21:30 - FDA Approves World's Most Expensive Drug At $3.5 Million Per Dose To Treat Hemophilia
FDA Approves World’s Most Expensive Drug At $3.5 Million Per Dose To Treat Hemophilia
Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved CSL Behring’s hemophilia B gene therapy, a one-off infusion treatment with a list price of $3.5 million, making it the world’s most expensive medicine.
The approval of CSL Behring’s Hemgenix “provides a new treatment option for patients with Hemophilia B and represents important progress in the development of innovative therapies for those experiencing a high burden of disease associated with this form of hemophilia,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Hemgenix is used for treating hemophilia B patients who currently use factor IX prophylaxis therapy or suffer from serious spontaneous bleeding episodes or have had a life-threatening hemorrhage. Based on clinical trials, the infusion reduced annual bleeds and “94 percent of patients discontinued factor IX prophylaxis and remained prophylaxis-free,” said the company, opening the possibility for the drug to eliminate the need for lifelong routine treatment in adult patients.
Arising from a single gene defect, hemophilia B is a rare, lifelong bleeding disorder with the current available treatment requiring patients to undergo strict, lifelong prophylactic infusions of factor IX. Although effective, patients are prone to experiencing spontaneous bleeding episodes, whereas Hemgenix allows people to “produce their own factor IX,” according to CSL Behring.
Hemgenix treats patients at the genome level, with an engineered virus carrying the gene expressed in the liver to produce clotting factor IX. Gene therapies are touted to significantly improve medical conditions by resolving underlying causes.
“While the price is a little higher than expected, I do think it has a chance of being successful because 1) existing drugs are also very expensive and 2) hemophilia patients constantly live in fear of bleeds,” said Brad Loncar, chief executive of Loncar Investments, to Bloomberg.
“A gene therapy product will be appealing to some.”
Hemgenix’s one-time treatment can enable people to bypass regular infusions from current treatment providers, Biogen and Pfizer. The list price is not necessarily what patients pay for the drug.
Hemophilia Symptoms, Causes
Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder that is characterized by the body’s inability to clot blood properly due to the absence of enough blood-clotting proteins or clotting factors. Almost always a genetic disorder, it is concerning when the bleeding occurs internally, and leads to life-threatening organ and tissue damages.
Symptoms include excessive bleeding from cuts, blood in urine, and bleeding into the brain. Many people are born with the disorder, and the most common type is hemophilia A, associated with a low level of factor VIII, followed by hemophilia B with a low factor IX. Acquired hemophilia can happen from autoimmune conditions and adverse drug reactions.
According to Mayo Clinic, hemophilia almost always occurs in boys, and is passed from mother to son through one of the mother’s genes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that hemophilia occurs in about 1 of every 5,000 male births.
Hemgenix Trials, Results
The FDA approved Hemgenix following findings from an ongoing, multinational, open-label, single-arm Phase III HOPE-B clinical trial that evaluated the safety and efficacy of the treatment.
Based on one study which had 54 participants, Hemgenix increased factor IX activity levels, and decreased the need for routine replacement prophylaxis, while the participants were found to have a 54 percent reduction in annualized bleeding rate compared to baseline.
The gene therapy allowed patients to produce mean factor IX activity of 39 percent at six months and 36.7 percent at 24 months post-infusion, said CSL Behring. Post-treatment, 51 out of 54 participants discontinued use of prophylaxis, and remained free of previous continuous routine prophylaxis therapy.
The most common adverse effects following Hemgenix gene therapy were liver enzyme elevations, headache, elevated levels of a certain blood enzyme, flu-like symptoms, infusion-related reactions, fatigue, nausea, and feeling unwell.
Patients should be monitored for adverse infusion reactions and liver enzyme elevations (transaminitis) in their blood, said the FDA.
HEMGENIX is still currently under assessment by other regulatory agencies.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 21:00 - GA Runoff: Why A 51st Senate Seat Matters So Much
GA Runoff: Why A 51st Senate Seat Matters So Much
In Georgia’s January 2021 runoff, control of the Senate was at stake. With Democrats already holding 50 seats plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, that won’t the the case with the Dec. 6 runoff pitting GOP challenger Herschel Walker against incumbent Raphael Warnock.
Still, both parties are pouring millions into this race — because winning a 51st seat in Georgia would greatly ease Democrats’ rule over the Senate.
A recent poll shows Walker (left) trailing Warnock by 4 points (Getty Images via PBS) A tied Senate “slows everything down,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Associated Press. “So it makes a big difference to us.”
That would be true right from the start of the next session of Congress. If Democrats are stuck on a 50-50 tie, Schumer will have to once again negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the GOP’s Mitch McConnell, covering the composition of committees and rules for advancing legislation for a floor vote. Last time around, McConnell used that process to obtain assurances from Democrats that they wouldn’t kill the filibuster.
In the current Senate, committees have an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. If Warnock wins, expect Democrats to have a two-seat majority on each committee. Tied committee votes necessitate extra steps on the Senate floor to advance nominations and legislation.
A two-seat edge in the full Senate would dull the moderating power of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). Today, each one effectively holds a veto power over Democratic proposals, and has used it to frustrate the most ambitious proposals of the progressive left. With both facing reelection races in 2024, they’ll be motivated to continue showcasing moderation for their respective states.
Fifty-one votes is all it takes to approve federal judicial nominations, so a Warnock win would free the Democrats to easily pump more leftist judges into the system.
Perhaps nobody’s as excited about the prospect of 51 Democratic senators than Kamala Harris. The Senate math forces her to stay close to Washington so she can cast her tie-breaking votes. Indeed, she’s a handful of votes away from breaking a nearly two-century-old record set by Vice President John Calhoun.
Liberated from a beltway orbit, Harris would be free to travel the nation and the world, spewing her trademark word salads, empty blather and cringy cackles everywhere she goes.
All Kamala Harris does is get her silk presses and cackle all day. Love that for her 🤣 pic.twitter.com/pWOmCAEZ07
— Skai (@skaijackson) November 14, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Kamala Harris blunders her way through a speech. Trips into a new word salad: “there is such great significance to the passage of time” pic.twitter.com/f3nTOJFxGt
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 21, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 20:30 - Reefer Madness: Demand For Illegal Pot Soars In California Due To High Taxes
Reefer Madness: Demand For Illegal Pot Soars In California Due To High Taxes
It appears that illegal pot growers are giving thanks this holiday for California lawmakers who legalized pot only to fuel demand for illegal cannabis due to massive taxes.
It is the same problem that I wrote about in New York’s program in an earlier Wall Street Journal column.
Politicians continue to pile on taxes as if they have no impact on pricing and demand. It just seems like free money if you ignore every economic metric and principle.
Even with a recent recognition that they have killed their own market, California lawmakers are being criticized for offering too little too late in terms of tax relief.
Sgt. James Roy of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is quoted in Fox News as saying that “The illegal industry is competing with the legal industry and essentially putting them out of business.”
Why? As with bathtub gin after Prohibition, few people would prefer bootlegged products rather than the safer lawful alternatives. The only reason is economics — and the refusal of the California lawmakers to recognize basic rules of supply and demand. Not only is pot cheaper due to the massive taxes imposed on lawful businesses, but it is also being sent to the East Coast where similar price differentials are also fueling the illegal trade.
Despite being a relatively new industry, state and city officials imposed thick layers of regulations, charges, and taxes on the budding businesses. Some estimates put the taxes at 70 percent of current costs.
Even with a recent recognition that lawmakers strangled the industry, a temporary tax cut is not expected to be enough to make lawful businesses competitive. There remain a host of other taxes, required regulatory obligations, and even bars on claiming certain expenses used by other businesses. The result, according to one study, is that “the effective tax rate on marijuana in California ranges from $42 to $92 per ounce, depending on the jurisdiction, compared to an estimated wholesale production cost of $35 per ounce.”
So you have a high demand product that has been strangled out of the legal market by politicians who cannot resist adding their own taxes and demands on these nascent businesses. The result is a bonanza for illegal cannabis growers. The alternative was to show a modicum of restraint and allow this industry and market to stabilize and grow. It would then might produce greater revenue even with lower taxes. That, however, requires the one thing that is seemingly beyond our current political environment: restraint.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 20:00 - "This Is Appalling": Major Tax Filing Services Have Been Sending Financial Information To Facebook
“This Is Appalling”: Major Tax Filing Services Have Been Sending Financial Information To Facebook
Major tax filing services, including H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been covertly sending Facebook sensitive financial information when Americans file their taxes online, according to The Markup.
The data includes names, email addresses, income, filing status, refund amounts and college scholarship information – which is sent to Facebook regardless of whether a person even has a Facebook account – or with other platforms owned by Meta. The company can then be used to fine tune advertising algorithms.
It is sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel.
Of note, Intuit-owned TurboTax does use Meta Pixel, however the company did not send financial information – just usernames and the last time a device signed in. Beyond that, they have kept Pixel entirely off pages beyond sign in.
Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found.
When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally reversible, format. -The Markup
TaxAct, which services around three million “consumer and professional users,” also sends data to Google via the company’s analytics tool, however names are not included in the information.
Once a tax return was filled out on taxact.com, information including an individual’s adjusted gross income, federal refund amount, and number of dependents was sent to Meta via the Meta Pixel. Data in the screenshots is not real user data. Source: taxact.com and The Markup “We take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously,” said TaxAct spokeswoman Nicole Coburn. “TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with all IRS regulations.”
H&R Block embedded a pixel on its site that included information on filers’ health savings account usage, dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses. The company similarly claimed in a very boilerplate statement that they “regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing commitment to privacy, and will review the information.”
While TaxSlayer – which says it completed 10 million federal and state returns last year – provided Facebook information on filers as part of the social media giant’s “advanced matching” system which attempts to link information from people browsing the web to Facebook accounts. The information sent includes phone numbers and the name of the user filling out the form, as well as the names of any dependents added to the return. Specific demographic information was also obscured, but Facebook was still able to link them to existing profiles.
Another tax filing service, Ramsey Solutions, told The Markup that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience,” but that they “did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel.”
“As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.”
Harvard Law School lecturer and tax law specialist Mandi Matlock said the findings showed that taxpayers have been “providing some of the most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited.”
“This is appalling,” she added. “It truly is.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 19:30 - How To Manage Risk In Crypto
How To Manage Risk In Crypto
Authored by Conor Ryder via Kaiko.com,
The FTX collapse was perhaps the single biggest risk management failure in the history of finance. Today, we provide a crash course in basic risk and liquidity metrics which should be required reading for anyone managing crypto investments.
We’ve seen enough incidents over the last few months, let alone years, to conclude there is a complete lack of adequate risk management in crypto. Throughout the Terra collapse, crypto credit crisis, and spectacular implosion of FTX we have collectively witnessed the industry’s largest (and most opaque) firms become insolvent in an instant.
This begs the question: where were the basic financial risk controls that are mandatory in any other industry?
A neglect of proper risk and liquidity management in a market as volatile as crypto has proven to be a death sentence for any business or investor. Today, we will demonstrate why risk metrics such as VaR and expected shortfall, alongside CeFi and DeFi liquidity metrics, are an absolute necessity for any crypto firm in a post-FTX world.
Part 1: Risk Metrics
While commonplace (and required by law) in traditional finance, risk metrics have been neglected in crypto largely because most crypto businesses have been extremely profitable up until lately. When numbers go up, risk management gets swept under the carpet. But the industry’s inherent lack of transparency and regulation has also contributed to a culture of negligence that eschewed basic controls.
Below, we explore three basic risk metrics: Value at Risk, expected shortfall, and implied volatility.
Value at Risk
VaR is a risk indicator to quantify the extent and probability of potential losses in a portfolio. It is particularly useful in risk management as it can essentially assign a cash value to a confidence level. These confidence levels usually range from 90% – 99%. For example, if the 95% daily VaR of my portfolio is $30k, it means that:
– My portfolio has a 95% chance of losing less than $30k over the next one day period.
– On average I will lose more than $30k one day out of 20 (5 days out of 100 = 5%).
VaR can be viewed as an acceptable loss, given a confidence level, which makes it a particularly useful metric for compliance purposes as well as capital requirement planning. Since the VaR for different confidence levels exhaustively describes the investment profitability, it can be used for investment management, allowing us to define limit-order levels to crystallize profits or cut losses.
Kaiko’s VaR estimator can be applied to any cryptocurrency portfolio to accurately track VaR over time. Below, we have charted the Daily VaR of an equally weighted $200k portfolio of BTC and ETH.
Suppose I’m setting my risk budget for my portfolio, and I want a 95% probability of not losing more than $30k (-15%) each day. I would set my VaR confidence level to 95%, charted below, and monitor when my portfolio exceeds that $30k level. When the portfolio VaR exceeds that level I would look to de-risk my portfolio so that my Value-at-Risk is under that $30k threshold. We can see that in November as the FTX fallout began, VaR tripled in a matter of days to surpass the $30k max loss which would tell me to de-risk.
For a more conservative risk budget, perhaps for an exchange or lender, VaR at a 99% confidence level would be more appropriate. 99% VaR will impose stricter risk measures as the max loss is higher, due to the degree of certainty that it requires. We can see in the chart below that in times of higher volatility or returns, such as this time last year when the bull market came crashing to a halt, the max loss using 99% VaR was nearly double that using 95% VaR. This results in more stringent liquidity management being put in place, which will give businesses a better chance to remain solvent in volatile markets.
Expected Shortfall
Expected shortfall (ES) is another useful metric, and particularly relevant for a volatile asset class like crypto where investors want to try and quantify their losses in the worst of cases. While VaR estimates a max loss 95% of the time, expected shortfall quantifies the average loss in the 5% of times. ES answers the question: If VaR is exceeded, how bad will our losses be?
Distribution of returns in a crypto portfolio have historically had what are known as fat left tails, or black swan events, that alter the makeup of the return distributions. As we can see below, crypto markets exhibit more of the characteristics of chart 2. Both charts have the same VaR but result in different expected shortfalls: chart 2 losses are more extreme in the worst case scenario.
Charting the expected shortfall, or the average loss in the worst 5% of scenarios, for the same $200k portfolio above, we observe a decline in the average loss this year as crypto volatility generally eased. However, we can see expected shortfall spike during the recent FTX collapse, doubling in a matter of days. ES compliments VaR and gives risk managers a sense of how bad things may get in the worst of scenarios. This allows business to determine a risk budget, ensuring solvency during market crashes.
Implied Volatility
Risk managers can also turn to the options market to get a better idea of how much risk is being priced into markets. Volatility is one of the criteria that makes up an option price, and by calculating how much volatility the market is pricing into an option, it is possible to come to a conclusion as to how much volatility to expect until the option expiration date. Using the December 2nd expiry date as an example, the market is pricing in implied volatility of 81% for ETH options until the end of the month, decreasing from 98% since mid-November. Implied volatility can be one of the most useful metrics risk managers monitor when looking to adjust the risk of the portfolio.
Part 2: Liquidity Metrics
Market Depth on Centralized Exchanges
Two of the black swan events this year, the collapse of Celsius and FTX, were directly related to liquidity issues surrounding stETH and FTT, respectively. Holders of either tokens could have seen that there was little to no liquidity available on spot markets and if everyone rushes to the exit at the same time, the price of the token crashes.
We saw this happen with stETH, which hit a discount of +6% as liquidity dried up on exchanges as Celsius rushed to liquidate their holdings amid record redemption requests for ETH.
FTT didn’t have many buyers apart from FTX themselves, and the bid side liquidity was not enough to support immense selling pressure of the token throughout the FTX scandal, despite Alameda’s best efforts to defend the price. Bid side liquidity within 2% of the mid price for FTT was only $6m pre-collapse. A fund engaging in adequate liquidity management would have flagged this and likely reduced exposure to FTT on the off-chance a rush to the exit happened.
Looking at some other tokens which could be relevant from a liquidity management perspective, DOT, the token of the Polkadot ecosystem, had very similar bid depth to FTT pre-crash. Post-crash, DOT only has about $4m of bid side support within 2% of the mid-price across 12 exchanges it trades on, meaning a wave of sell orders could quickly crash prices.
KCS is the native token of the Hong-Kong based exchange Kucoin. Kucoin is ranked 32 out of 42 exchanges in the latest Kaiko Exchange Ranking, largely thanks to a 42/100 score for Governance. According to recent proof of reserves releases from exchanges, the Block claims Kucoin holds nearly 20% of its reserves in its own token, KCS. Looking at 2% bid depth for KCS we can see there is only about $60k of bid side support for the token. A rush for the exit could see the KCS price crash and Kucoin taking a significant hit to their reserves.
Understanding liquidity is thus a vital component in a robust risk management framework. The valuation of a fund’s balance sheet is only as strong as its ability to efficiently liquidate their holdings.
DeFi Liquidity Data
As centralized and decentralized markets become increasingly integrated, CEX market depth is no longer enough to fully understand a cryptocurrency’s liquidity
As mentioned earlier, staked Ether (stETH) played a large role in the liquidity issues faced by Celsius and Three Arrows Capital this summer. This caused market wide contagion at the time as investors scrambled to cash out of stETH and move into the more liquid ETH. In this case, the majority of liquidity for stETH wasn’t on centralized exchanges; rather, it was in DEX liquidity pools.
Diligent monitoring of the Curve stETH/ETH pool would have flagged a drop in the total value locked in real time as stETH made up over 80% of the pool at the height of the rush for liquidity. That allocation has improved slightly since, but remains quite imbalanced as stETH now makes up 67% of the pool.
Going forward, crypto firms will need to understand liquidity on both centralized and decentralized markets to be able to simulate large liquidations and price impact.
Part 3: Exchange Due Diligence
The importance of exchange due diligence has never been more relevant than it is today. FTX was one of the most trusted names in all of crypto, but after Coindesk did a bit of digging the whole charade unraveled and FTX ended up insolvent. Not only did customers lose money, but many sophisticated hedge funds and trading desks had their funds stored on FTX and now have to explain that decision to investors.
It is vital that going forward, as part of a robust risk management process, that businesses do their due diligence on exchanges, monitoring everything from liquidity to governance. Kaiko is aiming to assist investors in this vetting process for exchanges with our Exchange Ranking, which is structured around six criteria with a proprietary scoring methodology internally developed and maintained by Kaiko’s Indices team. Over the next few months, we will incorporate proof of reserves and other transparency metrics into this ranking.
Conclusion
When liquidity is plentiful, risk management is less of a concern as most companies’ balance sheets look healthy and liquid. However, when a bear market hits, the tide goes out and we see who was swimming naked. Those with significant positions in illiquid tokens, such as FTT or stETH, have paid the price for not monitoring the liquidity of those positions and not accurately assessing the outsized risk of their positions should prices go down.
Risk management and crypto are two words that up until lately have rarely been mentioned in the same sentence. To quote the new CEO of FTX, John Ray III, he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”
If businesses investing in crypto are to survive going forward, risk management must play a central role in the investment process. Liquidity metrics, combined with traditional risk metrics such as VaR or Expected Shortfall will allow investors to survive bear markets like these and reap the rewards of survival come the next bull market.
* * *
Learn more about Kaiko’s Value at Risk, Implied Volatility, and liquidity data.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 19:00 - California Mulls Ban On All Gas And Diesel Truck Fleets
California Mulls Ban On All Gas And Diesel Truck Fleets
California’s Air Resources Board has laid out a plan to ban all diesel-powered trucks that would cause inflationary ripples throughout the entire economy.
The plan would mandate that all new trucks operating around busy railways and ports be zero emission vehicles by 2024 – while all diesel trucks would be phased out by 2035, and eventually, banishing every truck and bus fleet from California roads by 2045, where feasible, according to SFGATE.
The proposed Advance Clean Fleets regulation first targets the busiest trucking areas in the state — around warehouses, sea ports and railways. The board says the pollution in these areas affects communities disproportionately.
“Many California neighborhoods, especially Black and Brown, low-income and vulnerable communities, live, work, play and attend schools adjacent to the ports, railyards, distribution centers, and freight corridors and experience the heaviest truck traffic,” wrote the board, which asserts that this type of pollution creates health risks for those communities.
Representatives from the trucking and construction industries were livid at a recent hearing on the issue – where over 150 public commenters voiced their opinions ranging from the state’s woefully inadequate grid, to a general lack of charging capacity to handle a massive shift to zero-emission vehicles so quickly (whose electricity would in part be generated by coal).
“The infrastructure cannot be established in the timeframe given,” said American Trucking Association representative Mike Tunnell. “Fleets will have to deploy trucks that cannot do the same job as their current trucks.”
Another speaker, construction company CEO Jamie Angus, pointed to logistical issues involved with charging electric vehicles.
“This will do damage to us. We don’t really understand how to charge these vehicles,” he said, adding “Those pieces of equipment go home with those men every day, so they’ll need to be charged from home? How do you compensate that person for that?“
On the other side of the fence, environmentalists – including the Sierra Club, argued in favor of an expedited timeline to rid California roads of internal combustion engines as quickly as possible.
Maybe they can also figure out how to solve the massive logistical and economic issues that would surely ensue, as well as what to do with all that lithium when the batteries eventually go bad?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 18:30 - Qatar & The World Cup: Alcohol Ban Bad, Fueling War In Syria Good?
Qatar & The World Cup: Alcohol Ban Bad, Fueling War In Syria Good?
Authored by Gavin O’Reilly via The Ron Paul Institute For Peace & Prosperity,
In the lead up to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the hosting of the tournament by the conservative Muslim state has been the source of much controversy in Western media.
On Thursday, less than 48 hours before the opening match between the host country and Ecuador, it was announced that alcohol would be prohibited from being sold in any of Qatar’s football stadiums. Controversy also arose on Monday afternoon when a plan for England captain Harry Kane to wear the rainbow-themed “OneLove” armband in his country’s match against Iran, was cancelled at the last minute due to an intervention from FIFA.
What has received virtually zero-coverage or criticism in the run up to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup however, has been Doha’s instrumental role in fueling the 11-year long proxy war on Syria, a conflict that has led to thousands of deaths, an exacerbated refugee crisis, and the rise of ISIS.
Al Janoub Stadium, one of the World Cup venues, via The Athletic In 2009, plans for the construction of a pipeline that would begin in the Qatari-managed North Dome gas field in the Persian Gulf, and which would then pass through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey on its way to Europe, were halted by the refusal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to take part, his close relationship with Russia being a deciding factor.
With the Arab Republic being a long-time opponent of the US-NATO hegemony, in which the Gulf States behind the pipeline play a key role, this refusal would act as a final straw for the regime-change lobby. A plan was quickly put in place to remove Assad from power.
To this end, the United States and a host of other countries would authorize a plan to provide arms, funding and training to Salafist militants in the hope that a sectarian conflict would topple Syria’s secular government, thus allowing a Western-friendly regime to be put in place.
Timber Sycamore, the official codename for this regime change operation, would officially erupt in March 2011, when protests in Damascus and Aleppo calling for government reform would rapidly escalate into violence that soon swept the entire country.
By 2013, the “Syrian Revolution” had seen vast swathes of the Arab Republic come under terrorist control, with Salafist groups from neighboring Iraq, itself having been destabilized following the 2003 US-led invasion, crossing over to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April of that year.
In order to counter this onslaught and avoid the same fate that had befell Libya following a similar regime change operation, a common defence agreement between Syria and key-ally Iran was enacted and the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah would launch a military intervention in June 2013, with Tehran being acutely aware that had Damascus fell, Iran would have been next in line for the regime-change lobby.
Though this Iranian intervention would play a key role in repelling the Western-backed terrorists, what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the conflict in Damascus’ favour would come in September 2015, when a Russian air campaign was launched in defense of the Arab Republic, allowing it to retake territories that had come under the control of the militants, such as the key city of Aleppo, liberated in December 2016.
Sensing that their regime change operation wasn’t going to plan, Washington’s Neocons would soon resort to desperate measures. In April 2017, a likely false flag chemical attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun was blamed on the Syrian government in the hope of triggering a US-led military intervention, something that almost came to fruition several days later when the then-Trump administration launched cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase.
Just stopping short of the full-scale intervention that had been hoped for, the same strategy would be carried out almost a year to the day later in the Syrian city of Douma, this time resulting in the United States, Britain and France launching airstrikes against government targets, again just stopping short of a military intervention that would have triggered a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.
We told you & told you again.
“Al-Qaeda is on our side in #Syria.” – email from policy advisor to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton (Feb 2012). pic.twitter.com/EcYlpdeAgm
— H. Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) April 14, 2017
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Despite Qatar being a key player in the geopolitical impact of the Syrian war via its arming and funding of the terrorists who carried it out, a situation that almost led to a third world war, Doha has come in for little to no criticism from the Western media for its involvement amidst the 2022 World Cup coverage, Qatar’s banning of alcohol, and rainbow armbands, being a seemingly more pressing issue.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 18:00 - As Negotiations Fracture, EU Postpones Talks On Russian Oil Price Cap To Monday
As Negotiations Fracture, EU Postpones Talks On Russian Oil Price Cap To Monday
Although today was the deadline for EU diplomats to determine the specifics of the Russian oil price cap, we pointed out earlier just how “great” discussions were going with Poland rejecting a proposed cap of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece refusing to consider anything below $70.
EU oil price cap discussions going great: Poland rejected proposed price of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece doesn’t want to go below $70.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022
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Meanwhile, amid the growing discord, in typical European fashion – where nobody has even looked at the math ahead of time – the entire concept of a price cap was clearly meaningless as explained in “The Ridiculous Reality Of The Russian Oil Price Cap Debate In One Picture.”
Which is why it wasn’t at all surprising that on Friday, European Union diplomats suspended talks on capping Russian oil prices, as Poland and the Baltic states objected to a proposal they consider too generous to Moscow.
Confirming none planned over weekend. Nonetheless a variety of EU sources still think a deal will come in the coming days.
— laurence norman (@laurnorman) November 25, 2022
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As Bloomberg reports, diplomats had expected a deal to be done on Friday night but positions remained entrenched and the talks were postponed to Monday.
*EU DIPLOMATS POSTPONE OIL PRICE-CAP TALKS TILL AFTER WEEKEND
they need 48 hours to learn math
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022
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As previewed earlier this week, the bloc has been locked in a fight over how strict the Group of Seven-led price cap should be. Poland and the Baltic nations are outraged at a proposal to cap Russian oil prices at $65 per barrel limit, as the level is above the rates Moscow sells crude now, making the entire price cap discussion completely meaningless and purely an exercise in virtue signaling.
Poland is demanding additional sanctions, a review mechanism, and a price below the market level, according to a senior diplomat.
And as always happens when Europe has to reach a unanimous decision, with Poland and the Baltic states digging their heels in, the spat has laid bare the fundamental tension at the heart of the price cap idea. Countries are being forced to choose between two priorities that are almost impossible to resolve: trying to choke off revenue to Russia and avoiding potentially painful spikes in the oil price that could damage the global economy.
“If you put the price cap too high, it doesn’t really bite,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “Oil is the biggest source of revenue for Russian budget, so it’s very important get this right so it really has an impact on Russia’s ability to finance this war.”
On the other end of the spectrum from Poland are shipping nations like Greece, which favor a higher level that will help keep trade flowing, and boosting state revenues derived from quietly helping Russia break the oil embargo by turning a blind eye to an entire industry of ship-to-ship transfers that has taken Greece by storm.
The talks have been fraught because at $65, the cap is above the prices that Russia is already accepting for its crude from ravenous buyers such as China and India – a level which is heavily discounted to global benchmarks.
Such a “cap” would allow Moscow to argue that it’s business as usual; at the same time, the Kremlin had said it would refuse to sell oil to anyone signing up to the cap – but on Thursday appeared to hint it could soften its stance.
Still, Europe can only kick the can so long: the Dec. 5 deadline is looming, at which point EU sanctions on Russian oil are set to kick, and the disruption to the market will likely be greater if the price cap isn’t in place as all Russian oil exports would be suspended, unless of course Europe stops being a vassal state of the US State Department and decides to do away with the Russian sanctions entirely (for an objective assessment of who holds the upper hand in Europe, read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with “Putin has another gas shock for us: the deindustrialisation of Europe “.
The EU sanctions would bar access to insurance and services for any ship transporting Russian oil. The cap allows access to those services, but only if the crude is purchased below a certain price. The US proposed the price cap earlier this year as an alternative to EU sanctions that were so strict they risked shutting down swaths of production.
The US argued that a spike in prices caused by EU sanctions could eventually help Putin — as well as being ruinous for the global economy.
Oil prices have fallen in recent days, partly on signs a deal could keep Russian oil flowing, easing the pressure on the global market. Then again this is Europe, and anything that is seen as a consensus outcome will never happen…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 17:30 - Newly Elected Conservative School Board Fires Superintendent, Bans Critical Race Theory
Newly Elected Conservative School Board Fires Superintendent, Bans Critical Race Theory
Authored by Jackson Elliott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.
Newly-elected Berkeley County, South Carolina school board members get sworn into office on Nov. 15, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Christy Dixon) His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.
In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.
Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November, as reported previously. The group’s leaders say more aggressive school management decisions may soon be in order.
In Berkeley, the candidates’ aggressive approach was a response to student discipline policies and slow learning post-COVID-19, said Christi Dixon, the Moms for Liberty chapter chair for Berkeley.
“Parents were seeing that their children weren’t achieving at the levels that they had been previously. And there were a lot of changes,” Dixon said.
Newly-elected Berkeley County school board members run their first meeting on Nov. 15, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Christy Dixon) Fire and Firings
When Jackson left the board meeting at which he was fired, it appeared that not everyone supported the board’s decision.
Some parents watching walked out with him in protest, video from local network Live 5 WCSC News shows. Others cheered.
Former school board chair David Barrow called the firings a “travesty” and a “political witch hunt,” according to NBC.
So far, the board has yet to explain its rationale for firing Jackson and Richardson.
Board members Yvonne Bradley and Crystal Wigfall walked out of the room in protest after Jackson departed.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the board might be newly-elected but that it knows exactly what it’s doing.
“These are people that have watched the former board. They interacted and watched the former superintendent. They have watched and interacted with the staff attorney,” she said. “The newly elected school board members have been keeping a list and checking it twice.”
According to Dixon, Jackson changed school discipline policies in ways that caused problems and usurped parental authority.
Schools under his authority told parents that school staff should be able to discipline students for behavior outside the school, she said.
“The example that they gave was that if a child and another student in their neighborhood got into some type of disagreement and it was going to spill over into the school environment, then they should be able to insert themselves into that situation,” Dixon said.
Jackson also supported “restorative practices,” she said.
According to the University of Florida, a “restorative” school justice system replaces suspensions and detentions with “restorative meeting circles” where offenders and victims practice “Restitution Planning.”
The previous school board wanted to spend $1 million to hire five district-level administrators, said Dixon.
“We don’t have teachers’ aides. Could that money not be better served to get down into the schools and into the classrooms to help the teacher than to hire more top-heavy district-level administrators?” she asked.
Finally, the school district’s library included the book “Looking for Alaska,” which has sexually graphic language, Dixon said.
Dixon added that she didn’t know exactly why the board moved so fast to fire Jackson and Richardson but that she trusted they had good reason.
Parents concerned about Critical Race Theory took home these buttons from a school board activist training Jan. 19, 2022 in Sarasota, Florida. (Alexis Spiegelman) “I’m not a board member, and they have protected information that they can’t share,” she said. “I just have to trust that they made the best decision with the information that only they had.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 17:00 - Hopes Rise For Cannabis Banking Relief During Lame Duck Session
Hopes Rise For Cannabis Banking Relief During Lame Duck Session
Federal legislators seeking to free state-legal cannabis businesses to use the country’s banking system have high hopes of finally pushing legislation across the finish line during the upcoming lame duck session.
After November’s latest batch of state referendums, recreational marijuana is now legal in 21 states — but remains illegal under federal law. As a result, current federal rules force even legal marijuana businesses to use cash instead of normal banking services.
That makes them prime targets for criminals, exposing owners, employees and customers to violent crimes and necessitating expensive security measures.
Ben Koltun, director of research at Beacon Policy Advisors, told MarketWatch that the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act has about a 70% chance of passing by year end: “There’s a lot of positive momentum. It’s just can they come to agreement over some of the details that are outstanding?”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has struck his own optimistic tone last week:
“I’m still holding productive talks with Democratic and Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate on moving additional bipartisan cannabis legislation in the lame duck. We are going to try very, very hard to get it done.”
The SAFE Act would bar federal regulators from punishing banks for serving legitimate cannabis related businesses.
It also stipulates that proceeds from a transaction involving activities of a legitimate cannabis-related business are not considered proceeds from unlawful activity — thus removing legit cannabis revenue from the scope of anti-money-laundering laws.
The SAFE Act has 180 cosponsors, including 26 Republicans. Despite the measure of bipartisan support, the looming Republican takeover of the House of Representatives is sparking urgency among the SAFE Act’s backers.
A commercial cannabis cultivation facility (via Organigram Inc.) The House of Representatives has passed some form of the SAFE Act seven times, only for it to repeatedly die in the Senate. This key to finally enacting it is twofold, says Politico:
They must find a pairing of financial services and criminal justice reform-centered cannabis legislation that progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans can all accept. And then they must receive signoff from the leaders of the Senate Banking Committee, House Financial Services Committee, and the four corners of party leadership in both chambers.
Demands for accompanying criminal justice measures have included grants for state expungement programs, various forms of help for communities damaged by marijuana prohibition.
“The parameters of a deal are pretty easy to imagine, but I am getting the sense that Republicans feel like Democrats are asking for too much in terms of concessions,” Tobin Marcus, senior U.S. policy and politics strategist at Evercore ISI, told MarketWatch.
Liberals have been making the perfect (in their eyes) the enemy of the good. Even the Drug Policy Alliance, which has backed cannabis reform, has opposed the SAFE Act, on the head-scratching premise that it “prioritizes marijuana profits over people.”
As Jacob Sullom wrote at Reason:
The bizarre implication was that marijuana merchants, who face an ongoing danger aggravated by the failure to approve banking reform, do not qualify as “people.” Michael Arthur, the 44-year-old Portland budtender killed in the 2020 robbery that Willamette Week mentioned, was a person. So was Jordan Brown, the 29-year-old employee who was killed last March during an armed robbery at World of Weed, a dispensary in Tacoma, Washington.
If liberals keep their demands within the bounds of reason and the SAFE Act passes, it would still leave state-legal cannabis businesses with plenty of financial headaches courtesy of the federal government. For example, they can’t even claim business deductions on federal income tax returns, to say nothing of the fact that their every transaction is a federal drug felony.
Of course, the federal government has no constitutional basis for criminalizing marijuana or any other intoxicant…but here’s hoping this particular chunk of the destructive prohibition regime get peeled back before New Year’s Day.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 16:30 - The Doctor Who Can Rebuild Trust: Joseph Ladapo
The Doctor Who Can Rebuild Trust: Joseph Ladapo
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,
If you are like me, you are exhausted of the lies. Every day seems to bring new revelations about how our lives came to be upended. The connections are becoming clearer between the pandemic response and the growing economic crisis, the ballooning debt, the growth of the surveillance state, the corruption and scams, chilling absence of integrity in public life, and, with the failure of FTX, the way in which an outright financial scam was integral to the calamity.
While we await new revelations, depositions, coverups, pleas for amnesty, and bad economic news, whom can we trust? Is anyone telling the truth?
Today was Anthony Fauci’s last White House press conference, and he spoke as if life is all normal and everything is fine. It’s as if the whole disaster never happened. He never locked anyone down, he says. He has happy for any investigations, he says, because he has nothing to hide. And then he ended with a final push for everyone to get booster #5 or whatever number we are on.
It’s like we live in two universes: our own lives in which we read true things in some places, and official life, in which shills and publicists keep repeating the same nonsense over and over without flinching or providing anything like an honest account of these last three years.
Perhaps for this reason – and also because by any historical standard this is a tremendous autobiography – reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s Transcend Fear is a welcome relief from the nonsense of our times. It is brutally honest. It is emotionally affecting. It is careful and precise but also deeply radical in its observations. If what’s called the “public health world” has lost touch with both the public and health, this book provides a path to restoring it. In short, it is a beautiful and inspiring experience.
Dr. Ladapo is the Surgeon General of the State of Florida, picked by Governor Ron DeSantis to forge and explain the state’s health decisions and priorities to the public in the midst of a grave crisis. He has faced down the national press time and time again with Zen-like wisdom. He seems emotionally unflappable while also sticking to the science as he understands it. He is the only public health official in the country who has been upfront about the limits of the vaccines and warned healthy young people that they don’t need them.
What we learn from this book is that he has been a warrior against pseudoscience from the very beginning of this pandemic and the government response. After the lockdowns, most scientists and health professionals fell silent, fearing reputational and financial loss. Dr. Ladapo was different, On March 24, 2020, still within the window of “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” he wrote in USA Today:
We are fretting and we are fuming. As a country, we have been caught miserably flat-footed after receiving warnings about what lay ahead when cases of Covid-19 began exploding in Wuhan, China. Messages from local and state leaders about how to respond to the pandemic change almost daily—a sure sign they have no idea what they are doing. Shutdowns are happening here in California and in New York, and will probably spread to the rest of the nation….
Here’s the problem: Because of the (understandable) fear and hysteria of the moment, few US leaders are seriously talking about the endgame. The epidemiologic models I’ve seen indicate that the shutdowns and school closures will temporarily slow the virus’ spread, but when they’re lifted, we will essentially emerge right back where we started. And, by the way, no matter what, our hospitals will still be overwhelmed. There has already been too much community spread to prevent this inevitability.
We don’t have a totalitarian government like China, and we value our civil liberties too much to take the measures (i.e., total lockdown) that would be needed to rapidly decrease the infection rate to zero. This means that, even with shutdowns, the virus will still spread. Unfortunately, this also means that rates of “community immunity,” often referred to as “herd immunity,” will slow. As a result, we will always be vulnerable to the virus spreading rapidly again as soon as shutdown measures are lifted, unless they are immediately reimplemented—over and over and over again.
Was he the first post-lockdown voice from public health profoundly to object in a public forum of this magnitude? Perhaps so. Consider the bravery and presence of mind it required to write those sentences. The entire country was on a wartime footing with unprecedented horribles taking place. The media was screaming “Run for your lives” but most of us weren’t even allowed out of our homes to do that.
These were utterly crazy times. The whole world was going bonkers. And yet this man kept his cool.
This book explains where his cool comes from. You see, he is the son of an immigrant from Nigeria, born 1979. A math and science whiz, he attended Wake Forest and then entered Harvard Medical School. While he was involved in his studies, he noted the existence of the Kennedy School of Government and enrolled there too. On graduation day, he was granted a MD plus a PhD in public policy. So essentially: the highest credentials in two fields that this country offers. He became professor of medicine at New York University and then the University of California, Los Angeles.
The trouble was that none of his training had prepared him to deal with medical issues closer to home, namely his wife’s unrelenting migraines that often landed her in the hospital and his own underlying psychological fears of social interaction. The details are very painful and told in this book with disarming detail. Long story short: his search for answers led him toward alternative medical paths that eventually fixed both issues, and burned a lesson in his mind. Health is individual, and the right path is not the same for everyone and not always found in expertise as codified in the textbooks and institutions.
It was soon after these difficult times that the pandemic broke and, along with it, the claims that the experts had all the answers in lockdowns and eventual universal mandates for vaccination.
Dr. Ladapo had meanwhile developed the self-confidence to speak about such matters truthfully and fearlessly. And he never stopped. He wrote for every venue he could, month after month, urging an end to the lockdowns, a focus on therapeutics, attention to the science we had, and genuine concern for the health of actual individuals, who are not lab rats but people with human rights and freedom.
Even though Dr. Joseph Ladapo is obviously a hero (and one for the ages, so far as I’m concerned), the prose here is remarkably lucid, humble, and precise. That’s why I say that the humane concern in this book is an inspiration. Moreover, reading it is a form of therapy because he connects with a common sense that we all had in 2019 before the world descended into utter madness.
What’s more, this book shows a path forward not only for public health but for all of us as individuals. He urges personal reflection as the first step in recovery, overcoming whatever hidden fears we had that caused too many among us to go along with the preposterous parade of dangerous nonsense that controlled our lives for so long.
In my own view, this book is a classic of our times. Its value added is not only the author’s credentials, though he has them galore, or even how it speaks so directly to issues that have profoundly affected all our lives. Its real value is as a model of autobiography that offers lessons for all of us without exception.
We at Brownstone are deeply honored that Dr. Ladapo will be our dinner speaker at our annual conference and gala in Miami, December 3, 2022. There is still time to attend. You can register here.
I write as Dr. Fauci just finished his last press conference without offering so much as a hint of apology for what has happened. Meanwhile, I’m sure Dr. Ladapo is tending to his work in Florida where he has been charged with dealing with public health policy with honesty, truth, and wisdom. I know who gets my vote for hero of the pandemic.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 16:00 - Clothes Pile Up At Bangladesh Warehouses As Western Imports Collapse
Clothes Pile Up At Bangladesh Warehouses As Western Imports Collapse
Exactly half a year ago, on May 23, we warned that as the “bullwhip effect” was set to end with a bang, and as inventories were set to go from zero to massively overstocked, prices were “about to fall off a cliff.” Well, with purchase orders having fallen off a cliff, and with containership rates crashing at the fastest pace on record as demand for Chinese imports has evaporated in the US…
… this is precisely what we are now seeing, and as the FT reports, with US inventories in freefall amid a collapse in domestic demand, clothing is instead piling up at warehouses in Bangladesh as consumers tighten belts in the US, Europe and other big markets.
Citing manufacturers, the Financial Times notes that orders in the world’s largest garment exporter after China had been slowing since July because of the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, and their impact on inflation, interest rates and mortgages across the world.
“Everything has gone up, so the clothing budget has squeezed,” Faruque Hassan, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, told the Financial Times. “That’s why some of the brands, some of the importers have slowed down their orders.” Hassan said that some retailers had asked Bangladeshi suppliers to stop making garments or to delay shipments for up to three months.
“That is having a huge impact because all our factories . . . have bought fabric to produce the garments and now they are having a serious crisis.”
Making clothes for international brands is one of Bangladesh’s biggest industries. In other words, we are seeing not just the reverse bullwhip effect kick in, but smaller, secondary bull-whippets being unleashed as the butterfly of the coming global recession flaps its wings.
And it’s about to have profound political consequences too: the downturn in global clothing demand comes as Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s Bangladeshi government, which faces an election next year, contends with higher prices for imported gas, leading to power cuts that have hit some garment producers. The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party has staged large rallies in recent weeks in a bid to capitalize on discontent with a weakening economy ahead of the poll.
In response, this month Bangladesh turned to the IMF for help, and secured a $2.3 billion credit facility and another $1.3 billion from its Resilience and Sustainability Facility, meant to help poorer countries address climate change and other long-term challenges.
That good news is that for now, Bangladesh has not faced a full-blown liquidity crisis unlike its neighbours Sri Lanka and Pakistan. But its foreign exchange reserves have fallen this year against the backdrop of a strengthening dollar and pressures on prices and consumer demand.
And it’s about to get worse: clothing and textile production is by far the biggest industry in Bangladesh, which profited from surging sales when Covid-19 lockdowns eased and consumers indulged in “revenge buying”. The result was a burst in income and the south Asian country exported garments worth $42.6bn and textiles worth $2.6bn in the 12 months to the end of June, accounting for about 85% of total exports, according to the BGMEA exporters association.
Bangladesh exported garments worth $42.6bn in the past year Making clothes for Walmart, Primark, H&M, Target and other global chains is a cornerstone industry that has helped lift many of its more than 160 million people, primarily women, out of poverty.
According to Ranjan Mahtani, chief executive of Epic Group, which has a factory in Bangladesh and a large business in the US, clothing sales “really spiked post-Covid because there were so many stimulus cheques”, but were now falling again, leading to “huge” inventories at retailers; and unlike the US where so far collapsing inventories haven’t led to mass layoffs, in Bangladesh the lack of US stimmies means millions are about to be fired, leading to social instability.
In the first months of the pandemic, Bangladesh’s garment makers were hit hard when many retailers cancelled orders. Some responded by pivoting to making masks and personal protective equipment as demand for those products climbed rapidly.
“In a country that looks chaotic from the outside, everybody was really focused,” says Vidiya Amrit Khan, director of the family controlled Desh Garments, which supplies brands including Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger in the US, and Crew Clothing in the UK. “This was because we had to survive.”
Hassan, the BGMEA president, said that in the latest slowdown, retailers were not cancelling orders outright. Instead they were asking for discounts or factoring warehouse charges into what they paid manufacturers whose clothing they could not sell immediately. He added that the industry had asked the Bangladesh Bank, the country’s central bank, to press lenders to defer suppliers’ loan payments so that factories could give priority to paying wages and utility bills.
Additionally, the FT notes that power cuts have caused further problems at manufacturers. “Energy is a problem and because of that, a very large section of the industry is going through terrible months,” said Syed Naved Husain, chief executive of Beximco, one of Bangladesh’s largest companies, whose customers include Target and Zara owner Inditex. Husain said that he thought the industry should “buy energy at the cost it’s available”, even if it meant the cost of a garment shot up.
The bottom line is that in a fiercely competitive industry with thin margins, clothing producers in Bangladesh are especially vulnerable to changes in global consumer tastes and demand. As clothing chains respond to pressure from shoppers and shareholders to improve their sustainability practices, garment-makers have invested in machinery and equipment aimed at reducing the use of water, power and other resources.
“What’s happening now is that fashion is under attack,” said Husain, whose company has installed solar panels, new denim washing machines and other equipment.
Tipu Munshi, Bangladesh’s commerce minister, confirmed the slowdown in clothing exports, but noted that people would “still have to wear garments”, even during leaner economic times.
“Maybe you buy two out of four [garments], but you still have to buy it,” he said. “And no one can beat our price.”
While we admire Munshi’s optimism, he has no idea just how low the price will have to fall to find buyers one the US recession collapses import demand across the world. And while Bangladesh and its clothing industry will be the first domino to fall as the reverse bullwhip effect hammers global supply chains, it’s only the first of countless other dominos that are about to topple over.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 15:30 - Treasury Curve Inversion Has Even More To Come Than Feared
Treasury Curve Inversion Has Even More To Come Than Feared
By Ven Ram, Bloomberg Markets reporter and analyst
One of the most-watched segments of the US yield curve is now caught in the throes of the biggest inversion since the 1980s.
Ten-year Treasuries now offer a yield that is about 77 basis points lower than the two-year maturity. Still-to-come tightening from the Federal Reserve is holding front-end yields higher, while concerns about an economy losing momentum are spurring investors toward longer-dated notes.
While it may be tempting to draw far-reaching conclusions about the depth of the inversion, the evidence is that it reflects that interim state of play where the economic narrative hasn’t yet gone completely pear-shaped. That is especially the case with the labor market, which is still extremely tight from all available evidence. Simultaneously, inflation in this economic cycle is a beast whose contours are yet hard to fully fathom, and it would be premature to equate a peak in price pressures with a headline print that is somewhere where the Fed would want it to be.
While the markets have been quick to run ahead with the idea of an end to Fed tightening, the story just ain’t as simplistic. My two cents is that the Fed will pause on rates once it reaches circa 5%-5.25% and then watch how the economy evolves. If the inflation cookie crumbles, then the early birds may have something to show for their risk-taking ability, but if it doesn’t, the chance that we get into a second stage of further tightening from thereon can’t be ruled out. After all, history shows us that the Fed hasn’t been able to conclude its hiking cycle any time before inflation-adjusted policy rates reached a full 200 basis points. For the record, that rate is now -90 basis points.
The import of all this is that the yield curve is likely to invert even more in the days to come as markets wait for that conclusive inflection point on the economy and inflation.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 15:05 - For Thanksgiving, Biden Stuffs America's 401(k)s With ESG
For Thanksgiving, Biden Stuffs America’s 401(k)s With ESG
On Tuesday, the Department of Labor finalized a rule that provides regulatory cover for retirement plan sponsors who want to emphasize environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in plan management.
Since 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) has rightly required that plan sponsors act “solely in the interest” of employees and beneficiaries when selecting and monitoring investments and casting shareholder votes.
The Trump administration reinforced that principle by prohibiting retirement plans from considering investment attributes that aren’t material to risk or performance. Trump’s DOL explicitly prohibited funds with ESG principles from being used as the default investment for plan participants.
With Biden’s Thanksgiving week move, that’s all out the window, setting up tens of millions of Americans to have their retirement potential clipped as woke corporations corral their money into ESG-tainted investments.
The administration knows it’s doing something that a broad swath of society would find objectionable: In choosing Tuesday of Thanksgiving week to post the rule, the White House was clearly aiming to minimize reporting and public awareness.
In Orwellian fashion, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh issued a statement declaring that “removing the prior administration’s restrictions on plan fiduciaries will help America’s workers and their families as they save for a secure retirement.”
However, by its very nature, ESG reduces diversification by eliminating broad swaths of the investment universe. That means leaving money on the table. An ESG-managed 401k plan, for example, would have likely prevented employees from benefiting from the 79% year-to-date gain in Exxon Mobil.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the Biden ESG rule is also a handout to asset managers — with the expense borne by employees who are just trying to save for a comfortable future. As Kenneth P. Pucker and Andrew King wrote in the Harvard Business Review in August:
“ESG funds typically charge fees 40 percent higher than traditional funds, making them a timely answer to asset management margin compression.”
But there’s more at stake than dollars and cents. This is just one more scheme by which society is being force-marched into the depths of the broad progressive agenda.
While the pursuit of green energy is often used as an example of ESG principles, don’t forget they also include pushing the diversity, equity and inclusion programs and mandatory “anti-racism” training sessions that stoke divisions rather than promote harmony.
To appreciate how brazenly leftist the Biden administration’s retirement plan move is, consider that the DOL’s official introduction to the new rule justifies it by saying it’s consistent with…
“The policy of the Administration to listen to the science; improve public health and protect our environment; bolster resilience to the impacts of climate change; and prioritize both environmental justice and the creation of the well-paying union jobs necessary to deliver on these goals.”
It’s one thing for a 401k to provide an ESG option for individual employees who want to invest their money that way — hopefully after being cautioned that doing could put a dent in their nest egg. It’s another thing altogether to let plan sponsors unilaterally impose ESG across the full spectrum of asset classes — but here we go.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/25/2022 – 14:40
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