Citing information from uber-analyst Russell Napier, the blog Zero Hedge writes that Napier is declaring Nov. 16 as “the day money dies.” (That’s their headline, anyway.)
According to Zero Hedge, Napier says the G-20 will announce “that bank deposits are just part of commercial banks’ capital structure, and also that they are far from the most senior portion of that structure,” and as such, following a bank failure, “a bank deposit is no longer money in the way a banknote is.”
If this is the case, depositors with more on account than would be covered by deposit insurance would find themselves in line with everyone else trying to recoup what they can from an insolvent institution.
“Large deposits at banks are no longer money, as this legislation will
formally push them down through the capital structure to a position of material capital risk in any ‘failing’ institution. In our last financial crisis, deposits were de facto guaranteed by the state, but from November 16th holders of large-scale deposits will be, both de facto and de jure, just another creditor squabbling over their share of the assets of a failed bank,” Zero Hedge writes.
The solution? Basically, stuff your money in a mattress. Or in this scenario, a warehouse. The blog helpfully measures the size of 500-euro note, measures the size of a standard shipping pallet, locates a typical storage warehouse in Northern Ireland and measures it, too. After crunching the measurements and comparing the cost of the deposit rate in Europe to the cost of renting the warehouse, well, you get the idea.
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Today’s U.S. economic indicators begin with initial jobless claims at 8:30 a.m. EST, followed by Bloomberg consumer comfort at 9:45 a.m., JOLTS job openings report at 10 a.m., and the monthly budget report at 2 p.m.
U.S. earnings reports are coming from Kohl’s, Viacom, RCS Capital, and Wal-Mart before the opening bell. Nordstrom and Applied Materials report after market close.
F5 Networks, P&G, UPS, and News Corp. hold investor meetings today.
***
- EU, U.S. to discuss expanding Russian sanctions amid latest incursion into Ukraine. - Obama’s in Myanmar to meet with President Thein Sein and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. - Olivier Blanchard, IMF chief economist, speaks at the "Cross-Border Spillovers’’ IMF conference in Washington. - Bank of Canada releases its autumn 2014 review on the economy and central banking at 10:30 a.m. EST. - Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead: 2015 conference for global corporate and policy leaders begins at 6:30 p.m. EST in Washington. - NY Public Service Commission votes on the Time Warner/Comcast merger after delaying the decision for a month. - Hasbro said to be in talks to buy DreamWorks. - Syrian rebels reject UN plan for truce in Aleppo. - Xi masters first lesson of politics: Blame the media. - Comet-lander stable after bouncing around a bit, still not firmly attached. - Azerbaijan downing of Armenian helicopter opens old wounds. - Spain to sue Catalan leader for “disobedience.” - Libya is a mess. - Mexicans burn ruling party’s headquarters in Guerrero state over students’ murder. - In Hong Kong, they’re still on the streets, protesting comfortably. - Coal mining regulators come up short in NPR investigation. - Qatar, Russia cleared to host soccer world cups by FIFA panel. - U.S. marijuana legalizations violate international law, UN says. - Pre-Hispanic artifacts auctioned in New York over Mexico’s objections. - Glow-in-the-dark bike path debuts in the Netherlands. - Kansas struck by 4.8-magnitude earthquake. Yes, Kansas. - Gender equality one German traffic light at a time. - Teenagers can be so sneaky. - Someone make Urban Outfitters stop already. - Old Navy attempts to explain why big women pay more for jeans than big men. - Ugandan singer faces arrest for being the victim of revenge porn. - MLB’s most valuable players are announced at 6 p.m. EST. - Drew Bledsoe: Playing for Jets is “where quarterbacks go to die.” - Whatever they pay these workers isn’t enough.
***
Is Black Friday still a thing?
Consider the two women who are already waiting in line -- who are the line, basically -- outside a Best Buy in Beaumont, California. To get first dibs at the electronics retailer’s top deals, they plan to keep their vigil for the next two weeks.
“Black Friday shoppers already lining up at Best Buy in Beaumont,” the San Bernadino Sun reported, which would be true, except that Best Buy says its stores will open at 5 p.m. on the day before Black Friday, which is also known as -- give us a second -- oh yeah, Thanksgiving.
Just because it’s entirely commercial in nature, lacking in history or tradition, and prone to bring out some of our violent tendencies, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about whether Black Friday is in trouble.
On the positive side, it appears that shopping is now one of those activities permanently connected to the Thanksgiving holiday, along with traveling, eating, watching football and regretting that Aunt Gladys had to marry that man.
On the other hand, the characteristics that long distinguished Black Friday shopping -- the only-today bargain prices, the early-morning opening times, the crowds and lines and stampedes that bring out the very best in holiday spirit -- are fraying fast.
Wal-Mart said yesterday that Black Friday will span five days this year, with sales beginning on its website at 12:01 a.m. on Thanksgiving and continuing online and in stores through what has traditionally been called Cyber Monday.
Online shopping is only one threat to Black Friday.
The push by brick-and-mortar stores to sell, sell, sell on Thanksgiving has one mall in Buffalo, New York, threatening to fine stores that don’t open by 6 p.m. that day. And RadioShack employees successfully rebelled against a plan to open their stores for 16 hours on the holiday. They “will now close between noon and 5 p.m., giving ‘‘employees more time with their families,’’ Lauren Coleman-Lochner reported yesterday.
Much more of this, and we’ll have to start calling Black Friday by another name: TFFKAB. The Friday Formerly Known as Black.
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In the early 1600s, a hunter in southern Africa introduced hunting baby seals with a wooden stick to the world. But do people today still club baby seals to death?
Yes, but with government permission.
Hunters clubbed almost 26,000 baby seals to death this harvest season in Namibia. That number is the smallest on record for Namibia, Felix Njini reports today. Last year, hunters killed almost twice as many seals.
The Namibian government sets the annual limit of seal pup deaths at 80,000. Namibia has said the culling is necessary to keep the fish population in check. Because as any commercial fisherman will tell you, we have to keep the global fish stocks from getting out of hand.
Namibia is not alone in the practice either. The country on the southwestern coast of Africa has only the second-biggest seal hunt. The biggest participant in the seal bludgeoning: our neighbors to the north. Canada’s quota is around 400,000 seals. Norway, Iceland, and Greenland also still hold annual hunts of seals.
Before the 20th century, sealers went after the sea mammals to make a buck off their pelts and oil. Now that petroleum and electricity exist, baby seals are used exclusively for their skin. Hunters also target adult male seals -- their genitals are sold as an aphrodisiac in Asia.
The method of culling seals, however, hasn’t changed too much over the years. It goes something like this: a seal between seven and 10 months is separated from its mother. As it begins to run toward the sea, the hunter clubs the pup to death with a wooden stick. After the seal is skinned, it becomes a pair of boots or a hat.
While the U.S. doesn’t take part in the annual seal cull, we do still allow bear and wolf hunting from airplanes. And that’s just for sport.
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With the ascendancy of the every-man-for-himself theory of U.S. politics, with the wealth divide widening, and with the digitization of community as a concept into something virtual and less virtuous, finding someone willing to stand up for something that might benefit others even at a personal cost will be more difficult than finding a black, female software engineer in Silicon Valley.
Luckily for us, Sarah Frier and Peter Burrows found one. They introduce us to her, Emuye Reynolds, and others, and to realities most of us would never contemplate and many would never tolerate.
The assumptions about your standing based on your gender, the tendency to start talking to yourself because your isolation and those assumptions have even you questioning your standing, the ignorant, racist or sexist questions lobbed at you as if you were standing there wearing a zebra suit and not just a skirt -- it’s enough to make you consider steering your daughter away from this industry only because you couldn’t bear the pain.
But the saddest thought to the story is that most of the people profiled say speaking up about all this would be worse than just enduring those moments, like when you’re the director of a company arriving for a meeting and asked by a man to get him a cup of coffee because you have ovaries.
Brocade Communications Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Carney, who’s black, tells Frier and Burrows he advises women and racial minorities, ‘‘Don’t you dare advocate for diversity. Your career would be over.”
Great. Just great.
So you’re young and you’re among few (if you’re not the only one, period) who looks like you do, and you have no one to talk to who knows you like you know you and, in the case of one black man interviewed in the story, you even have to cut your own hair because there isn’t even a barbershop for your kind around you, and here you’ve got a man who’s made it to a position of potential leadership on this issue, and he tells you to shut it.
We learned yesterday that to be a woman at Goldman Sachs is still the most difficult way to make partner -- 14 percent of their newest partner class are female out of a 36 percent representation of the bank’s total workforce. Of those 14 percent, will any of them say anything about that? Doubtful.
“If that stuff makes you angry, it will hold you back,” Carney says. “You can’t be angry. You have to be better than that. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is.”
Only if we let it, Lloyd.
***
Did you hear the one about the tourist who visited Italy for the food, Egypt for the history and China for the comedy?
We haven’t either. Maybe it’s only a matter of time.
“U.S.-inspired stand-up comedy and improvisational skits have gained popularity as a release valve for ordinary Chinese to vent daily frustrations such as pollution and rising costs of living,” our colleagues in Asia report today. Chinese comedians are taking advantage of relaxed rules on speech but “still need to be careful what they say about topics that may be deemed sensitive by the government.”
As in a comedy routine, some of the best material in the story comes in the small details, such as the name of Shanghai’s main English stand-up club (Kungfu Komedy) and the warning that comics receive to avoid “the three T’s -- Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen.”
Four more off-limit words and China is ready for its George Carlin.
***
Stepping out to collect the mail yesterday after many hours indoors brought genuine surprise at how pleasant the conditions were for mid-November. Direct sunlight was still warm. We lingered as long as possible, because we knew that today things would be different.
It still seems like after last winter, there should have been an extra spring-and-summer rotation, but instead comes the resignation that the eastern U.S. will now be seeing its breath.
Of course, the folks out in the Midwest got this bracer already and, with snowfall amounts in double-digit inches, there will be little sympathy heading eastward along with their temperatures.
Brian Sullivan says we’ll all feel the bite this weekend, with the coldest temperatures since March, and that we’d better get used to it. Why would anyone want to do that?
***
Turns out New York City’s 311 complaint hotline actually works, at least for sanitation matters.
As you recall, we called 311 on Monday to ask about certain sidewalk trashcans that were overflowing after the weekend. Not only was the 311 operator attentive, but the superintendent responsible for the part of the Upper West Side that we griped about called back yesterday.
Hands are indeed a bit tied in terms of sending out more than one truck on Sunday evenings, he said, “but we did send one after your call Monday, and please feel free to call me directly in the future.” Then he supplied his direct number.
Next: those smelly cloth seats on MTA buses that should be made of plastic.
***
At first, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s indictment of the NCAA system yesterday on the website of Jacobin magazine -- a quarterly, self-styled “leading voice of the American left” -- had the whiff of self-pity. Here was a college student and future member of both John Wooden’s dynastic UCLA basketball program and the NBA hall of fame complaining that he “was always too broke to do much but study, practice and play.”
Poor Lew.
But then the justifications for his resentment started to accumulate, from the obvious -- the millions of dollars UCLA was making off his unstoppable hook shot -- to the underappreciated:
“Unlike those with academic scholarships, if we were injured and couldn’t play anymore, we lost our scholarships but still had medical bills to worry about,” he writes.
The NCAA’s catastrophic injury relief provision kicks in at medical expenses that exceed $90,000, which means those whose bills total $80,000 are liable for the expense and liable to find they’ve been dropped from their scholarship, he writes. The NCAA’s Student-Athlete Disability Insurance only covers those students -- remember, they’re students (except, for a time, at the University of North Carolina) -- who can never return to the sport.
“But most injuries can be repaired to some extent, even if the athlete is no longer as good and gets cut from the team. Only a dozen such claims have been successful over the past 20 years,” Abdul-Jabbar writes.
Academic scholars can take side jobs and coaches can take side jobs. Those on athletic scholarships cannot.
“Life for student-athletes is no longer the quaint Americana fantasy of the homecoming bonfire and a celebration at the malt shop. It’s big business in which everyone is making money — everyone except the 18- to 21-year-old kids who every game risk permanent career-ending injuries,” he writes.
This is a man who operated inside the system and who made it out with fame and fortune. Unlike Lloyd Carney, he’s not satisfied with it, and he’s telling those coming up in it not to be either.
Next week, we’ll try to figure out how the NCAA football playoff system works.
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