Different lipstick won't change the nature of the ESG pig

 Environmental, social and governance (ESG)  investing is a concept originally cooked up in 2005 at a UN conference. It's of a piece with the Great Reset initiative devised by the World Economic Forum in 2020, and which has newly crowned British King Charles III among its enthusiasts.

It's all very top-down and collectivist. Our pointy-headed betters have assessed the prospects for humankind and determined that it must be steered en masse into a course that is more "fair," "equitable," "green" and "sustainable."

A couple of months ago, I noted here at LITD how it is being used to circumvent government policy or court decisions that aren't to its proponents' liking:

 . . . now that the Supreme Court has said that the EPA overreached in trying to tell coal companies what kinds of products they could offer in the marketplace, those who want you to believe the global climate is in some kind of dire circumstance are going to use ESG as the next available weapon to assault our liberty:

Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.

“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.

What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”

You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you? 

The bad taste in the mouth where ESG is concerned has been spreading:

A number of sustainable investing champions say it’s time for the “ESG” label to be shelved and replaced by something less likely to draw attacks from both the political right and left.

Robert Eccles, a professor who’s spent the past 12 years researching sustainability at Harvard Business School and now University of Oxford’s Said Business School, says the term “just doesn’t have value anymore. Let’s change the conversation.” 

“I’m happy to not use the term ESG,” he said in an interview, referring to environmental, social and corporate governance issues. “People are so invested now in hating ESG for reasons that don’t really have much to do with ESG.”

It turns out that defining ESG with any kind of specificity is a lot harder than using the Milton Friedman gauge of a business's health: is it showing a return on owners' investment?

Industry veteran Sandra Carlisle, who’s head of sustainability at $58.6 billion Jupiter Asset Management, said ESG remains poorly defined and inadequately regulated, making it confusing for investors and companies to understand. It’s also left investors in the dark, just when they need more clarity, says Leslie Samuelrich, who’s spent a decade in sustainable investing and is president of Green Century Capital Management.

“It’s time for the industry to explain what ESG means and what it doesn’t mean, to maintain its credibility,” she said. Samuelrich, whose Boston-based firm oversees about $1 billion, says ESG is about using relevant material factors to measure how a company handles risks. “It isn’t ‘sustainable,’ ‘green’ or ‘making an impact.”’

Meanwhile, ESG continues to take up an ever bigger chunk of financial markets. McKinsey & Co. estimates that more than 90% of S&P 500 companies now publish ESG reports. And according to Bloomberg Intelligence, ESG will this year exceed $40 trillionworth of assets. The amount allocated to sustainable investment funds reached around $2.5 trillion at end of June, research firm Morningstar Inc. says. Such figures suggest ESG is too entrenched to simply switch off. 

Before we go any further down this rabbit hole, it behooves us to consider the current situations of three countries that went all in for ESG:

Sri Lanka was the poster child for ESG investment and has suffered the brunt of these principles. Their most recent prime minister just resigned in shame, following months of protests and unrest stemming from the country committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. 

 

Ghana also took the “E” prong too much to heart, with its government agreeing to raise $5 billion with international capital with Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. Now experiencing runaway inflation, largely due to these GSS bonds, the country is hoping to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

 

  The Netherlands similarly adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to boost ESG investment and is now experiencing one of the highest inflation rates in the European Union. This was precipitated by the Dutch government approving a multi-year $21 billion plan to sharply cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030 which requires one-third of farmers to kill off their herds and shut down indefinitely.

Much has been made of late about how progressivism has shifted from a focus on class struggle to identity politics militancy, but we should take heed of the fact that its tactics for imposing its aims remain those that James Burnham noted in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.  It was written at a time when totalitarianism was reaching fever pitch in Europe. However, a number of lefties in the West saw that herding humankind into the collectivist pen to bring about their secular vision of a harmonious world could be achieved by the creation of a revolving door through which corporate managers, government bureaucrats and ivory-tower visionaries would pass as they were needed in particular roles.

I might also add that this is yet another example of why post-America can't have nice things. The Trumpists have seized on the general public's realization that collectivist do-gooderism is a crock, and bastardized it into a lexicon of "globalist elites" and "taking care of our people" when their own prescription is nothing more than rank protectionism. Their vision of what ought to be is as vague as the progressives'.  Their strength as an influential force lies in in their ability to imbue serious public-policy and cultural matters with a yee-haw vibe and conjure images of pitchforks and torches.

The actual antidote is what it's always been: a free market informed by Judeo-Christian morality. 

But it is encouraging to see developments such as this backing away from ESG. 

Eventually, proven verities win out over bizarre schemes. It's often a twisted and rocky road to that point, and the story is never over, but it's reassuring to see that common sense isn't dead. 

 

The present moment as a gauge of the strength of my faith

Let's see, now.

The S&P 500 halted trading minutes after opening due to a 8.14 percent drop. It's recovered somewhat, but not to a healthy degree.

My local hospital is reporting its first confirmed COVID-19 case.

Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb announced that all bars and restaurants in the state must close. They can still deliver orders. The state joins its neighbors, Illinois and Ohio, and several other states that had implemented this measure in the past few days.  The economic hit to thousands of servers, cooks,  bartenders, hosts and managers will be immediate, as such folk don't typically have a financial cushion.

Yesterday afternoon, the White House coronavirus task force gave a press briefing. It's been a while since I saw such an exhausted-looking group of people. Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Seema Verma et al were clearly in dire need of a decent stretch of sleep. As has been characteristic at these gatherings, the Very Stable Genius had to do his relax-we're-doing-great schtick before the bedraggled grownups gave us the straight skinny.

The Democrat debate last night pretty much cemented the nomination of Joe Biden as the party's presidential candidate.

A word about that: regular LITD readers know that I fall into that zone along the ideological spectrum that Trumpists, as well as some of us when it's expedient to employ shorthand, refer to as Never Trump. I don't like the term for two principle reasons. One, there are gradations within the zone. Matt Boot and Jennifer Rubin are at one end, and David French and Jonah Goldberg, among others (and, if I may include myself in such august company, me) are at the other. Two, the horse is out of the barn, so the term makes it sound like conservatives who find Trump objectionable are untethered from the basic reality that he's president. Now, those closer to the Boot-Rubin end of the zone are the likeliest to declare they're going to vote for the Democrat presidential nominee, even if it's Sanders.

Since I think we can dispense with Sanders after last night, that means Biden, whom these folks have held up as some kind of beacon of "decency," a foil for the VSG, is the one for whom they'll be pulling the lever.

I still can't see myself joining them. For one thing, the decency designation doesn't fit:

You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

As Senate Judiciary Committee chair in the 1980s, he let Ted Kennedy's vicious smear campaign against the towering legal scholar Robert Bork cause Bork's nomination to go down in flames.

There's also the "put y'all back in chains" remark during the 2012 campaign.


And his pandering has been on full display in the current election cycle. He's cast his lot with the most radical of the climate alarmists. Now he's vowing to select a woman as his running mate and nominate a woman of color to the Supreme Court. Given that, as I say above, he is going to be the Democrat nominee, his insistence on these demographic criteria for these positions sets a precedent. There will be litmus tests for the foreseeable future, and a fealty to the original intent of the Constitution's framers will recede ever further as a requirement for consideration into the mists of antiquity.

Then there's the much-remarked-upon and obvious mental frailty which causes him to botch terminology and proclaim his happiness to be in states that are far removed from where he actually is.

My point in enumerating all these not-really-so-disparate matters on the nation's plate today is to say that their sum total is driving home for me that we, each and all, are really on our own. We're in the throes of an unprecedented public health crisis with huge economic ramifications, and the current ostensible leader in the effort to address it, as well as the figure who wishes to prove to us that he would lead far more effectively, are clearly inadequate to the task. And the actual experts and crisis managers on the case are having their stamina tested to the very limit.

There is absolutely nowhere to turn but to the sovereign Creator who is not surprised by any of it.

Is my certainty that he is in charge rock-solid every minute during these hair-raising days? I won't lie to you like that.

But I take very seriously the words of James, who spent a great deal of time in the personal company of the Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ, when he admonishes us thusly:

 . . . when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.

As I see it, we have no choice but to rely on the Holy Spirit, not only to get us through our present juncture, but more generally to permeate our hearts and make us yearn to reclaim the unique birthright God gave us as Americans.

I know I have no choice. I've been circumstantially backed into a corner. This is the kind of scenario that forces me to decide if I think this thing called human existence has a purpose.

There's a vote I can cast.

I don't know if he has COVID-19 or not, but the Very Stable Genius is one sick individual

His need to be glorified knows no bounds.

I didn't see his presser yesterday at which he declared a national emergency. For that matter, I only caught a passing glance at his Oval Office address Wednesday. I try to avoid his television appearances if at all possible. But I'd heard that the presser was an appreciable improvement over Wednesday's event. (I'm also seeing quite a few assessments that Mike Pence indulged in a cringe-worthy display of sycophancy.)

That's good, I thought. This nation desperately needs an assurance that leadership is the executive branch's top priority at this moment.

But the observation I've made over the VSG years - that there's a cycle in which he follows a laudable move with two or three boneheaded stunts that pretty much negate the good impact of the first move in the cycle - kept nagging at me.

Now I know why. Behold:

That's his autograph on a chart showing the uptick in the stock market's performance Friday afternoon. He sent it to supporters. No mention of the national emergency.

Plus, there's this to remember about that uptick:

In boasting about the stock market, the President was cherry-picking a single day's rally amid a period of major selloffs and a 20% decline that was the fastest in history. 

Friday was the best day for stocks since 2008, but the S&P 500 ended the week with sharp losses and fell into a bear market on Thursday. 

The day's rally also came the day after the worst day for stocks since the 1987 crash. 

Three of our four most recent presidents have been flaming narcissists. (George Bush is the only one who hasn't been.) But the other two at least had some acquaintance with decorum. This guy has clearly never been told by anyone that he's overstepped any kind of bounds.

He has a lot of nerve ever depicting anyone else as being in over his head.

A snapshot of a day that will be talked about for some time to come

Some readers know that some of the bonus content I've offered to the LITD Patreon community consists of compilations of archived posts in various categories, going back to this site's earliest days (2012). It's provided illuminating glimpses into fairly recent history, allowing me (and you in the community) the opportunity to revisit key moments from which chains of development were launched. (It's also given me the chance to observe how my blogging style has evolved. I've backed away from certain rhetorical devices as the entire dynamic between sociopolitical forces has shifted - and a major new force (Trumpism) has emerged.)

My perspective on some of those early posts may have changed, but I haven't come across any that I regret writing. I was giving my most honest assessment of particular points in time, and those points in time have proven to have lasting significance. Those posts have a kind of time-capsule significance.

It's in that spirit that it seems to me a lasting documentation of the lay of the land in the second week of March 2020 is in order. So much is happening today that it can make one's head swim.

I haven't had much to say about the coronavirus, mainly because people with far more expertise in the public health realm are still speaking as if the jury is out. Statistics show that other viruses, including the common flu -which is a broad-brush way to speak about a range of microbes - kill far more people proportionally than this virus has so far. Those recommending a balance between prudential precaution and continuance of normal daily life seem to be the adults in the room at the moment.

As I say, I'm no public health authority, but it seems plain that Donald Trump's attempts to convey the message that everything is under control are looking increasingly flimsy:

Fissures between the White House and national health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have begun to expand as the coronavirus pandemic spreads to more American states, creating dissonance between President Donald Trump and the professionals tasked with containing the virus further.

The two sides have grown increasingly distrustful of one another, people inside both the CDC and the White House say, as officials on each side question decisions that either appear designed to downplay the growing crisis or to generate further concern.

The cracks are falling along predictable lines. While health officials have sought to present a realistic and cautious picture of the national situation, Trump and his political allies are hoping to relay an altogether different message: that the virus is contained, Americans face little risk, and life should proceed as normal.

And it's true that while concerns about global supply-chain disruption due to this virus are a significant factor in the stock market free fall we're seeing, it's also being driven by a fissure between OPEC and another oil producer that is normally its ally, namely, Russia. Saudi Arabia is dealing with the problem of over-production by initiating a price war. 

Elevating domestic politics to the level of these possible calamities may seem inappropriate generally speaking, but we are well into an election year, and the stakes involved in the circumstances that are appearing demand our consideration.

Trump's cocktail of bombast and denial is, of course, unhelpful. The nature of what the alternative to his antics is going to be has changed in the last couple of weeks, though.

There are two left standing on the Democrat side. Aside from the matter of that party asking itself, given the primacy of identity politics to its raison d'être,   how it came to the juncture at which the choice would be between two straight white men in their late 70s, there are problems of how either would be perceived by the overall voting public once we've arrived at the general-election phase of the current cycle.

Bernie Sanders's marked decline in electability stems from the Democrats' realization that his explicit proclamation of what all the original lineup of candidates, to one degree or another, had stood for, was beyond palatable to most Americans. There are, of course, those of the opinion, that his overt radicalism is exactly what Democrats will need to defeat Trump, but Super Tuesday's outcome would seem to indicate that this is a niche outlook.

And there seems to be a hint of desperation in the recent spate of endorsements for Biden. Does anyone really think that Kamala Harris's little video oozed sincerity, particularly given their raw moments of interaction on the debate stage? Not only does Biden make a tepid standard-bearer for 2020 progressivism, the question of whether his bodily frame - particularly the command center within his skull - is up to the rigors of the last eight months of a presidential campaign now looms large.

Again, as in the case of the coronavirus, I'm far from able to conclusively assess someone's mental fitness, but evidence that Biden's is not at its peak is piling up.

If he really is cognitively fading, what does it say about Democrats, and that strange sliver of conservative Trump skepticism that finds Biden a viable alternative, that they might be willing to put a man through the coming ordeal when he should be resting comfortably at home? Is that really any way to rescue a nation from the present incoherence, and the cult following that sustains it?

So that is the LITD snapshot of where things stand in post-America mid-afternoon March 9, 2020.

We'll muddle through in some fashion. There's a sense, though, that developments are occurring that will have ramifications for our range of options on a number of levels of daily life for at least the intermediate term.

Everyone remain calm, says Steve Mnuchin

No doubt he means to soothe rather than rattle with this move, but I'm not sure how effective it is in achieving that aim:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary called top U.S. bankers on Sunday amid an ongoing rout on Wall Street and made plans to convene a group of officials known as the “Plunge Protection Team.”

U.S. stocks have fallen sharply in recent weeks on concerns over slowing economic growth, with the S&P 500 index .SPX on pace for its biggest percentage decline in December since the Great Depression.
“Today I convened individual calls with the CEOs of the nation’s six largest banks,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Twitter shortly before financial markets were due to open in Asia. 

U.S. equity index futures dropped late on Sunday as electronic trading resumed to kick off a holiday-shortened week. In early trading, the benchmark S&P 500’s e-mini futures contract ESv1 was off by about a quarter of a percent. 

The Treasury said in a statement that Mnuchin talked with the chief executives of Bank of America (BAC.N), Citi (C.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N), JP Morgan Chase (JPM.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Wells Fargo (WFC.N).
“The CEOs confirmed that they have ample liquidity available for lending,” the Treasury said.
Mnuchin “also confirmed that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly,” the Treasury said. 

Mnuchin’s calls to the bankers came amid a partial government shutdown that began on Saturday following an impasse in Congress over Trump’s demand for more funds for a wall on the border with Mexico. Financing for about a quarter of federal government programs expired at midnight on Friday and the shutdown could continue to Jan. 3. 

The Treasury said Mnuchin will convene a call on Monday with the president’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which includes Washington’s main stewards of the U.S. financial system and is sometimes referred to as the “Plunge Protection Team.”
The group, which was also convened in 2009 during the latter stage of the financial crisis, includes officials from the Federal Reserve as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wall Street is also closely following reports that Trump has privately discussed the possibility of firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Mnuchin said on Saturday Trump told him he had “never suggested firing” Powell. 

We're now getting to the juncture that everybody but the throne-sniffers saw coming from the outset of the VSG phenomenon: Can he be gotten to by grownups on a consistent basis, so that the idiots don't have his ear at all? Can we keep the protectionists and the wall-obsessors out of the room?

 

Wall Street's gyrations occur in a larger context

My buddy Justin Hohn does a great job of explaining that stock-market ups and downs are just one piece of the economic picture:

As of this writing, the stock market continues the slide it began last week with the largest drop since the Great Recession. Positive economic news abounds, so what gives?

Don't let the President's comments mislead you: the stock market is not the economy. To the contrary, I've argued that at times a high stock market results from a weak overall economy. The Obama Administration illustrated very well this dichotomy: The Dow was just under 8000 points when Obama took office, and when Trump took office, it was nearly 19,900. Over an 8 year period, that's a return of over 12% per year for 8 years in a row. Yet, the real economy-- the American GDP-- grew at a much lower 3.8% nominal value. And that's NOMINAL, so that reflects the typical 1.5%-2% inflation as well. Thus, real economic growth was likely only about 2% per year (on average).

Other contradictions between the real economy and the stock market are readily observed. For example, rising interest rates usually point to improving economic conditions as the economy makes its own money and creates inflationary pressure. Rising home prices, rising fuel prices, etc are evidence of rising demand, increasing spending, and a generally more optimistic view of the economy.

Yet we know that Wall St responds very negatively to a rise in interest rates. Indeed, it's likely that this negative response explains much of the recent tumble in the markets; they are afraid that the Fed will raise interest rates.

Why do they care so much about rising interest rates, even when it means the overall economy is improving?

Recall with me that all loans are denominated in nominal dollars. Inflation reduces the value of those dollars over time. So lenders charge an interest rate partially to protect against that loss of value from inflation. But what happens if the actual interest rates go far above what was used to secure a debt instrument? The lender can actually lose buying power. If I borrow money at 2% interest and inflation goes up to 4%, the lender is actually losing money through inflation.

The vast majority of Wall St profits have to do with finance, and Wall St banks are on the lending side of the transaction. So what harms them is a windfall to the borrower and vice versa.

Meanwhile, main street businesses in your locality benefit from increasing consumer confidence and the spending boom that is driving higher interest rates.

The upshot here: not only is our economy much more than just Wall St., there are times when a declining stock market can be evidence of real economic growth, just as there are times when a high stock market is driven by a stagnant economy that has nowhere else in which to place investment capital.

As the poet William Carlos Williams said, truth lies in particulars.

Thoughts on the sum total of the day's big news stories

This isn't a hot take. It may be a bemused - or maybe saddened - look at the day's hot takes.

Every outlet is full of perspectives on the release of the Nunes memo. The distillation of the most credible of them is that it's pretty much of a dud. You can go really deep into the weeds to find questions to kick around. How much of a factor in the FISA warrant was the Steele dossier? How did Steele come to the FBI? Why was the FISA judge not told Steele was paid by Madame BleachBit's campaign?

Bottom live: There is no bombshell yet and the American people are therefore not very concerned.

Then there is the 665-point Dow plunge. Again, nothing to hold one's breath over. These occur from time to time. It depends on what it's followed by. It usually only takes a few days for markets to find a stable level again. And it behooves us to remember that there are many other kinds of indicators as to how the economy is doing.

But I've seen some really stupid comments about it. Conspiracy stuff, like someone's out to get the heroic Very Stable Genius and orchestrated this.

People, not everything that happens in this world signifies a win or a loss for your tribe. The FBI as an organization is neither corrupt through and through nor devoid of partisan elements. There's something that needs to be rooted out there, but we still don't know what that is. Likewise, dramatic DIJA drops have happened on all kinds of presidents' watches.  Knock it off either rushing to defend or demonize the Very Stable Genius.

I wouldn't be surprised if cultural and social observers start to note the increasing appearance of turf-battle burnout. You can get better-crafted turf-battle stories by watching the soaps.

The truly pressing matters on post-America's plate remain what they were before Christopher Steele cooked up the Golden Shower story and got it to the FBI.  They remain what they are even if our investment portfolios take a momentary hit.

A whole lot of people are expending superfluous verbiage because they feel compelled to have something to say. The Nunes memo makes the FBI look like it's fraught with problems, but I just don't think this thing is going to dwarf Watergate in magnitude.

Saturday morning roundup

Think about the post immediately below this one; fully take in the degree of humiliation to which Iran subjected post-America in the Navy-boat incident. Now, avail yourself of the vile dog vomit Josh Earnest spewed at yesterday's White House press briefing:

 There’s no doubt Earnest is saying what his boss thinks here.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that Republicans seemed “unhappy” that 10 U.S. Navy sailors, captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard this week were released, and said following their advice would have led to war…

“I think the only people unhappy about it are the Republicans for some reason,” Earnest told reporters…

“If followed advice of some of the Republican critics of the administration, we’d probably be in a bloody war with Iran right now over our sailors,” Earnest added. “The fact is our sailors right now are out of harms way.”

There’s the ol’ “our way or war” straw man. Republicans aren’t angry because Obama declined to fire a cruise missile across Iran’s bow to hurry along the sailors’ release. They’re angry because Iran made a spectacle of American sailors in captivity, which is an oddly hostile thing to do when Obama’s getting ready to release $100 billion in sanctions.

World stock markets continue to take a severe beating. Worst start to a year since the Great Depression. The DIJA was off 391 points at closing Friday. Is this a blip that will settle down into something, if not robust, at least not so hair-raising, or is the global economy just plain slowing down?

And how's this for a campaign-season stat?

Hillary’s national lead, and her standing in the first two voting states, is worse today than it was at a similar point in 2008.

At this point in 2008, Hillary still enjoyed a 20 point lead against her rivals for the nomination in national polls. Today, however, her lead over Socialist Sanders is just 8 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls.

It should be noted that Hillary’s nearly 20 point lead in 2008 at this point in time was against TWO credible rivals, Sens. Barack Obama and John Edwards. Today, Hillary’s only rival for the nomination is Sanders. Yet, she enjoys less than half the polling advantage.

Even with the vote split three ways in 2008, she enjoyed a stronger base of support in absolute terms than she does today against a single rival. In other words, Hillary today is up against an historic mathematical conundrum.

Jihad never sleeps. This time it's a luxury hotel in Burkina Faso.

Per Generation Opportunity, 48 percent of millennials believe the American dream is dead.

Let's end on a light note. At today's WSJ, Dion DiMucci tells the story of how "Runaround Sue" came about.

China's free fall only partially explains it

The Dow and the S&P 500 went on a wild ride coincident and commensurate with that of Chinese markets late last week and early this week, and much of it was due to contagion.

There was a uniquely post-American factor as well, though:

the fact of the matter is that Wall Street's steep sell-off wouldn't have happened to the degree it did if the U.S. economy were running at full throttle.

Job creation has been anemic. Economic growth has been stuck in the 2 percent range. Consumer spending is nothing to write home about. Wages remain flat, the retail sector is weak, and the housing sector is stuck in neutral.

The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that new home sales came in at around 481,000 last month, less than the 510,000 housing economists had forecast.

These and other disappointing developments have sent America's economic confidence into a nose dive, Gallup says.

"Americans' perceptions of the economy's direction became more pessimistic last week, as the outlook component score fell six points to -21, the lowest weekly average since the end of July 2014," the polling firm said.

Gallup's latest survey found that only 37 percent of Americans say the economy is "getting better", while 58 percent said it is "getting worse."

Predictably, as global markets began falling last week, U.S. investors followed suit on Monday, fearing the worst.

The stock market wasn't the only number in a free fall. President Obama's job approval polls sank to 45 percent this week. And 51 percent now say they disapprove of his job performance as president.

As for Obama's insistence that the unemployment rate has fallen into the low five percent range, Gallup's daily job polls paint a darker employment picture.

A devastating 14.7 percent of part-time Americans are "underemployed" and need full-time work, but can't find one.

The blame falls squarely on the Most Equal Comrade's agenda of planned decline.

But listen to me, post-America, and listen carefully: The solution is not a manically narcissistic, utterly incoherent, shallow, vulgar pop-culture icon.

There is a bench of candidates who understand, and have fealty to, the free market. For once, post-America, I implore you, let's make one of them president.

Plain truths are simple, but require a grownup's mindset to be embraced

There's a lot of buzz lately - for good reason - about the book Popular Economics by Forbes and Real Clear Markets editor John Tamny.  His basic thesis is that economics is not nearly so complex as most economists try to make it.

Basic principles are basic principles.  No amount of obfuscation can render them non-existent.

I've long said - I didn't get this from Tamny; I've been asserting it for years - that probably the most basic principle of all is this: The money has to come from somewhere.  You can earn it, you can borrow it, you can receive it as a gift, or you can steal it.  Those are the four ways you get it.

Speaking of borrowing, a corollary principle would be this: If you borrow money, your lender will expect to get it back.

True among individuals.  True between individuals and banks.  True between nations and international financial institutions.

So Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis's whinings in Washington this week ring a bit hollow:

"The fact is that Greece is out of the markets and it has been redeeming its debts for the last few months using its own scarce liquidity. It can't go on," he said.

Waaahhhh.

Look, pal, if you weren't all ate up with the ideology of your radical-leftist Syriza party, you'd see that the only way out of this for Greece is for government to extricate itself from the country's economic life - knock it off with the pension funds and state-supported industries - and for the Greek people to actually produce stuff of value.  Sure, you have tourism and olive oil, but it's clearly not enough.

To reiterate another of life's basic truths, culture is upstream from politics and policy.  Greek society must make the course correction from dependency and entitlement to inventiveness and enterprise.

A post-American is saying this because, pal, your refusal to face the basic truth has implications for us all:

George Osborne has warned that Greece's battle with Europe's creditor powers is nearing a "crunch" point and threatens to detonate a fresh global crisis if mishandled over the next days and weeks. 

The Chancellor said the escalating crisis in Greece is now the biggest threat to the world economy and has become a haunting theme for finance ministers and central bankers meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington this week. 

"The mood is notably more gloomy than at the last international gathering, and it is now clear to me that a misstep or a miscalculation by either side could easily return European economies to the kind of perilous situation we saw three or four years ago," he said.

And when the digestive byproduct hits the fan, we don't want to hear a lot of gobbled-gook.  The plain fact is that you, Greece - the Greece that elected Syriza - owe this money to European creditors and you have no actual plan to pay it back.

Speaking of the IMF meeting in Washington, there are also rumblings of concern about post-America:

As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
“It’s almost handing over legitimacy to the rising powers,” Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the government of India, said of the United States in an interview on Friday. “People can’t be too public about these things, but I would argue this is the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”

Notice how Jonathan Weisman of the NYT chalks it up to "dysfunction" and how Jack Lew of the Most Equal Comrade's nomenklatura attributes it to "bitter division."

Again, this is a smokescreen.  The plain fact is that post-America is saddled with its own version of Syriza, and its agenda is planned decline. This fading of leadership is on purpose.

And so the peak of civilization recedes into the ever-more-hazy past, and we spin tales to comfort us about how culpability is just a relative thing, and besides, decline is actually rather pleasant.

Until the Huns appear on the scene.  Which, by the way, they have.

The wild-west model does not apply to the banking industry

In the course of a piece looking at a Dissent magazine symposium on why the economy remains in the doldrums, Kevin Williamson at NRO makes the point that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial banking from investment banking, was not the cause of the 2008 financial crisis:

Glass-Steagall was set aside with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, and progressives consistently blame that fact for the financial crisis, but no person familiar with the facts of the situation seriously believes that — even Elizabeth Warren has admitted as much.

Glass-Steagall kept commercial banks from getting into the investment-bank business, which may or may not be a good idea, but the firms at the center of the 2008–09 crisis were pure-play investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch), an insurance company (AIG), and two government-run enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Had Glass-Steagall been in effect, none of those institutions would have been subject to it. Of the commercial banks that found themselves in trouble during the crisis, few had any significant problems related to investment banking. Bank of America and Wachovia suffered from having acquired companies with terrible loan portfolios. At most, Glass-Steagall might have reduced some of the problems experienced by Citigroup.

The Left, daftly committed to its black-hats/white-hats model of economics, has never been able to account for the fact that the financial crisis was not the result of a criminal conspiracy; it was the result of financial institutions making bad investments.

This is a broader problem, the importance of which extends well beyond the analysis of the unpleasant events of 2008–09. The Left suffers intellectually from a retreat into moralism and, even more significantly, from a retreat into abstraction and aggregation. The financial crisis was not a “failure of capitalism,” but the failure of specific firms and specific institutions and specific individuals . . . 

Another example of the Left wanting to find macro explanations for micro issues.

Apparently all that talk about the Eurozone's financial crisis abating was a bit premature

. . . and, ironically, one of the EU's tiniest members, Cyprus, is the catalyst of the latest round of jitters.

As night follows day . . .

Stocks plunged across the board today.  The Dow closed below 13000 for the first time since August.

One of the main culprits in the financial crisis the MEC is always talking about having inherited is . . . himself

By agitating, during his community-organizer days, against red-lining in the mortgage industry, the young MEC helped bring about the conditions that led to the sudden popping of the bubble in 2008.

Mediterranean jitters

Interest rates on Spanish government bonds go through the roof after the lastest Moody's downgrade, and Italian borrowing rates are reaching the point at which it may not be possible to raise money in financial markets to deal with its enormous debt.

The arrival of the inevitable

The Greek economy is collapsing.  It will soon exit the Euro system.  Continent-wide ramifications are already being felt.

One thinks of all the meetings, all the agreements, all the elections, all the taxpayers and investors who are just plain out big sums of money. 

The pointy-heads in designer suits kept cobbling together new arrangements when it was clear to all - even them  - that such overly clever maneuverings were no substitute for the kind of basic sound economic behavior that fosters prosperity and fends off trouble everywhere and always.

There are some basic facts about human nature and the nature of reality that can't be ignored.

Free markets work because they're based on the way reality works

Mark Calabria of the Cato Insitute on the JPMorgan loss.  He's a wonk's wonk, but all he needs to do here is go over basic principles: 

1.) All of life involves risk

2.) Personal responsibility is the other side of the freedom coin.

3.)  JPMorgan's loss was a tiny fraction of its assets.

4.) The bank's stock has taken a hit, people were fired, and Dimon, the CEO, has been up to his eyeballs in fielding tough questions since it happened.  In other words, market discipline worked.

5.) Government interviention distorts the process of market discipline.

About last week's much-vaunted EU summit . . .

It didn't solve the continent's crisis and may have made things worse. World markets certainly haven't reacted well.

It doesn't increase the sum total of productivity anywhere in the world by one tiny bit

Kevin Williamson at NRO says that the Fed's move yesterday - lowering the dollar-financing costs to European banks - still does not satisfy the first law of economics: the money has to come from somewhere.

There's not enough money

Cato Institute scholar Gerald O'Driscoll serves up the most understandable explanation of the European fiscal crisis I've seen - as well as its implications for us over here on this side of the Atlantic.