Hundreds of woke Twitter employees have deserted the company and gone to work for Google and Meta over the past few months in anticipation of Elon Musk taking over the company, according to a Business Insider report.
The piece notes that in the past three months, a total of 530 Twitter employees have left, with many running directly to the tech giant’s direct competitors.
Over 1,100 employees have left Twitter since Musk announced his intention to buy the company back in January, with almost a third going to Google or Meta.
The figures come from a new analysis of LinkedIn data, with the report noting that other workers have moved to the likes of Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snap, and TikTok.
Musk, who has vowed to complete the Twitter acquisition by Friday, has said he intends to make huge staff cuts of up to 75% anyway, cutting worker numbers from around 7,500 to around 2,000 employees.
The Washington Post also notes that even if Musk doesn’t close the deal, Twitter officials have planned a $800 million cut in payroll by the end of 2023 regardless.
Musk previously mocked work-from-home enthusiasts at Apple with a lazy dog meme, and also stated that constantly working remotely is “phoning it in,” informing employees they can collect their belongings if they disagree.
In an email to Tesla employees earlier this year, Musk wrote “Remote work is no longer acceptable,” except in extreme cases.
“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” he wrote in correspondence then leaked by Tesla shareholder Sam Nissim.
Musk confirmed that the email was authentic and doubled down, saying anyone unhappy with it should “pretend to work somewhere else”:
hey elon a lot of people are talking about this leaked email, any additional comment to people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept? https://t.co/E3qSBVrJIJ
— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) June 1, 2022
Musk has promised that “work ethic expectations” at Twitter will be “extreme” when he takes over:
Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself
Yesterday, Musk was filmed entering Twitter HQ literally carrying a sink. He tweeted the footage with the caption “let that sink in,” clearly an effort to trigger his detractors:
Meanwhile, as Twitter stock is rising, Meta is collapsing:
JUST IN 🚨 Banks have started to send $13 billion in cash backing Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter, WSJ reported
Massive cut in market cap in after hours trading tonight – via @MarketWatch – ” #Facebook earnings cut in half, Meta stock sinks toward lowest prices in more than 6 years” https://t.co/FbtjJ9mqnK
Putin Blasts West’s Nuclear Narrative: “It Doesn’t Make Sense” To Use Nukes In Ukraine
Update(1534ET): Putin in his nearly four-hour long annual Valdai Discussion Club speech (which included a the lengthy Q&A portion) “appeared relaxed”, Reuters observed while at times questioned by journalists and panelists about the prospect of nuclear war.
Importantly, he rejected head-on the allegations from the West that he ever so much as hinted at plans to deploy nukes in Ukraine, describing a nuclear strike in the context of the “special operation” to be ultimately pointless. “We see no need for that,” Putin said. “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military.” He underscored, “it doesn’t make sense for us to do it.
He went on to emphasize that Russia had “never said anything proactively about the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia.” At the same time he lashed out at Washington, for being the “only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state” – in reference to WWII and the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He specifically referenced prior statements of Liz Truss and vague references to his saying he’s willing to defend Russia “by all means available” as having been intentionally misinterpreted and distorted:
Putin said an earlier warning of his readiness to use “all means available to protect Russia” didn’t amount to nuclear saber-rattling but was merely a response to Western statements about their possible use of nuclear weapons.
He particularly mentioned Liz Truss saying in August that she would be ready to use nuclear weapons if she became Britain’s prime minister, a remark which he said worried the Kremlin.
“What were we supposed to think?” Putin said. “We saw that as a coordinated position, an attempt to blackmail us.”
Literally as Putin was speaking, the Pentagon decided it was a good time to unveil a stunning nuclear strategy reversal, saying it would no longer rule out use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat.
As we detailed earlier, the Defense Department said in the long-awaited document issued Thursday that “By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries”. In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.
In the document, which was framed well before the invasion, the Pentagon says Russia continues to “brandish its nuclear weapons in support of its revisionist security policy” while its modern arsenal is expected to grow further.
Of course, Putin is now essentially pointing the finger at Washington and its allies for being the real nuclear threat in the world. The DoD briefing certainly didn’t hurt his case, at least from the point of view of Moscow and its allies.
* * *
“Russia is not challenging the western elite. We are not trying to become the hegemon,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said early in an important speech before the Valdai Discussion Club meeting outside Moscow on Thursday. Each year the Valdai speech is a major one and closely watched by Western officials and media.
This year it was touted with the eye-catching title of “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone.” And of course, this year’s Valdai meeting comes against the backdrop of the biggest war Europe has seen on its eastern doorstep since WWII.
Putin said in his remarks that Russia merely wants to “defend its right to exist” and “won’t let itself be destroyed and wiped off the geopolitical map.” This as nuclear rhetoric and threats of defending red lines between Moscow and the West have reached heights not seen since the Cold War.
He repeated a familiar refrain of a crisis unfolding because the Western allies are using Ukraine for their “dirty game” in an ultimate drive for world domination. “Power over the world is what the West has put at stake in the game it plays. This game is certainly dangerous, bloody and I would call it dirty,” he said according to a state media translation.
“But in the modern world, sitting aside is hardly an option. He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind, as the proverb says,” he added. Repeating a well-known theme of his, juxtapositioning collapsing unipolar order vs. multipolarity, he said “new centers of power in the multipolar world and the West will have to start talking as equals about our common future.”
“[This game] denies the sovereignty of nations and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and has no regard whatsoever for other countries,” Putin added.
Commenting on one segment of the talk, The New York Times said the Valdai speech sought to appeal to conservatives in Europe and the US:
Mr. Putin insisted that Russia did not fundamentally see itself as an “enemy of the West.” Rather, he said — as he has before — that it was “Western elites” that he was fighting, ones who were trying to impose their “pretty strange” values on everyone else.
“There are at least two Wests,” Mr. Putin said in his speech at the plenary session in Moscow of an annual foreign policy conference. One, he said, was the West of “traditional, mainly Christian values,” which Russia was close to.
But Putin drove home in contrast that “There’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite.”
Ukrainian officials have been watching the speech closely, and commenting:
“Confidence in one’s infallibility is a very dangerous state, one step away from destroying those they don’t like” – Putin knows what he is talking about at Valdai. pic.twitter.com/0VRSjKlWiu
And more specifically on the Ukraine conflict, the Russian leader charged of the West’s actions, “They’re always trying to escalate…They’re fueling the war in Ukraine, organizing provocations around Taiwan, destabilizing the world food and energy markets.”
Putin warned that the West’s confidence in its “infallibility” is a “very dangerous” condition, with there only being “one step” between this self-confidence to the idea that “they can simply destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to ‘cancel’ them.”
Emphasizing that Russia is not a natural “enemy” of the West, Putin urged Western political elites to stop seeing “the hand of the Kremlin” behind all their internal problems.
On multipolarity, Putin’s message to Europe is essentially “take it or leave it”…
Putin is at it again. New Munich III speech at Valdai conference. He is laying the foundations of new multipolar world order. The message to Europe is “take it or leave it”. pic.twitter.com/oUixDO7Jmm
Western officials are also keeping a close watch on Putin’s words regarding nuclear doctrine and usage. Putin at Valdai underscored he sees “no political or military reason” to conduct a nuke strike in Ukraine. He also stressed Moscow’s nuclear doctrine is defensive in nature. “Russia has never talked about nuclear use, only replied,” he said.
He went on to warn that it remains Russia will never “put up with what the West tells it to do” – and that while Russia should not be seen as a direct challenge to the West, it reserves the right to develop. With this theme established, Putin asserted that Washington has discredited international finance“by using the dollar as a weapon” – thus he posited that in the future continued moves toward “settlements in national currencies will dominate.”
Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,
The real decline in stocks has yet to come, as inflation and recession threaten the historic overweight in equities versus bonds.
It has been a torrid year for financial assets. The paradigm shift in inflation has led to decades of market experience being turned on its head, with stocks and bonds commonly falling together. This year has seen a peak-to-trough drawdown of over 25% in the S&P, and an historic 15% drop in Treasuries.
The stock-bond ratio has declined precipitously, but we are likely just getting started.
The ratio tends to revert to its mean, but with big overshoots.
Those to the upside typically lead to overshoots to the downside of a similar magnitude. The enormous fiscal and monetary injections during the pandemic led to a dizzying bubble in financial assets, sending the stock-bond ratio skyward.
But the fall in stocks and bonds this year has only taken the ratio to just below its mean.
We are in the process of an overshoot that could take it much lower still, driven by the twin specters of inflation and recession.
It’s a common misconception that equities are an inflation hedge. Some stocks and sectors, particularly those related to real assets, do make good inflation hedges, but equities overall are terrible at protecting against persistent price rises.
In fact, equities were the worst-performing main asset class in both real and nominal terms during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. This is because they became a shunned asset.
Why?
Stocks have an infinite duration with a fixed coupon, the return on equity. Bonds, on the other hand, have a maturity date where there is an opportunity to renegotiate the coupon.
When inflation is high, equities have to compete with bonds and they begin to look less and less attractive. Today, the real dividend yield of the S&P is -5.6% and the real earnings yield is -7.2%, while the real 10-year yield on a Treasury bond is -3.5%. Why bother with equities when you can get a comparatively juicy, less risky return from bonds?
The big overweight in stocks versus bonds is therefore at great risk. The prospect of higher returns has meant a strong preference for stocks over bonds is the norm in the US. That overweight currently sits at its highest level since the tech bubble of 2000, after hitting even greater extremes during the pandemic.
As it becomes apparent inflation is entrenched and not returning to a low-and-stable regime any time soon, the penny will drop that equities are more of a leaky ship than a water-tight revenue generator, prompting an exodus to comparatively inflation-resilient bonds.
This exodus could be sizable, taking the stock-bond ratio considerably lower and decimating the long-term real return of equities. The 1970s saw a similar rebalancing, with the equity overweight in the late 1960s morphing into a record underweight that persisted until the late 1980s. Inflation, like a skin disease, gave equities a rash that made them unattractive for many years. They face the same risk today.
A recession only makes the risk of further stock underperformance more immediate. Leading indicators point to a US recession in the next 3-6 months as being all but inevitable. Stocks face more downside in a downturn, while bonds are likely to catch their usual haven bid. History shows that the stock-bond ratio falls at a median of over 12% in the six months after a recession begins. Leaving aside that in real terms both assets are still likely to lose you money, the stock-bond ratio is poised to fall further in any economic slump.
Ultimately, though, stocks are more at risk than bonds as governments do not borrow in equity markets.
High inflation means yields could rise much higher, and at this point equities would be sacrificed to limit how much governments have to pay to borrow by way of financial repression. This, later on, may mark the final capitulation in the stock-bond ratio.
The long-term outlook for bonds is less than rosy in the current inflation paradigm, but the prospect for stocks is dimmer still.
2 GOP Lawmakers Call For Investigation Into Soros-Backed Group Over Misusing Federal Money
A former Trump administration official and two Republican lawmakers are demanding an immediate investigation from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over an advocacy group’s use of $8.5 million taxpayer dollars.
As Rita Li reports via The Epoch Times, Alianza Americas, a pro-mass immigration group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, may have unlawfully used funds granted by agencies under HHS, according to Friday letters by Brian Harrison, the former chief of staff of the department, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas). Federal grants are banned under U.S. law from being leveraged to weigh on government positions on legislation or policies, including lobbying.
“Despite statutory and regulatory restrictions on lobbying for recipients of federal funding from all federal agencies, forms submitted to the Internal Revenue Service by Alianza Americas appear to show activity in direct violation of the law and federal regulations,” Roy and Van Duyne wrote in an Oct. 21 joint letter sent to HHS Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm, calling for “a review of all grants received by Alianza Americas as well as the publicly disclosed actions” taken by the group.
Besides calling to defund U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Alianza Americas launched in September a lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after the state flew illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts under the governor’s order.
Official records show Soros’s Open Society Foundations website awarded nearly $1.4 million to Alianza Americas between 2016 and 2020.
Yet lawmakers said official grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) totals $8.5 million over the past two years.
CDC granted Alianza in February 2021 $7.5 million in funding, which will terminate in September 2025, “to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate impacts among Latinx and Latin American immigrants.”
Since last July, the group had also received a total of $1 million from HRSA to “increase COVID-19 vaccine access” among local communities.
Van Duyne asserted that unchecked spending under President Joe Biden is “out of control.”
“I have continued to monitor actions taken by the Department,” Harrison wrote in his letter to HHS, saying he is “deeply concerned” that taxpayer dollars may have encouraged illegal immigration to the United States, both at home and in foreign jurisdictions, the Washington Examiner reported.
“This month (so far) has been the worst for the Nasdaq since the stock market was in the throes of the Great Financial Crisis back in 2008. And it shouldn’t be hard to understand what is plaguing the Big Tech stocks that make up the bulk of this index. In addition to capital flows, macro economic trends, risk appetites and insider activity, all of which warned of the current weakness in stock prices well ahead of time, there are two major bearish forces at work.”
I wrote that six months ago and, if you change “month” in the first sentence to “year,” it is just as true today as it was back then.
Put the market caps together of Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and Amazon and compare that figure with their aggregate free cash flow and you get a multiple of over 50 times, down from nearly 70 at the start of the year.
This historic level of overvaluation was only made possible by massive money printing on the part of the Fed that supported both cash flows and the multiple applied to them.
Now that inflation is raging, however, the money printer has been shifted into reverse and that’s already having a visible impact (both “bearish forces,” the reversion in valuations and falling liquidity, have been consolidated into one chart this time below).
Furthermore, if the Fed follows through on its commitment to normalize the balance sheet over the next few years then this reversion in valuations has only just begun.
In fact, price-to-free cash flow ratios could still halve from their current levels. Of course, if free cash flow (the denominator in the valuation ratio) continues to grow as it has over the past decade, this process will be much less painful than if free cash flow also goes into reverse.
Worryingly, that reversal in cash flows is actually what has happened over the past year in which growth went from double digits positive to double digits negative.
As I wrote in the prior piece, “Considering the nature of the pandemic and the stimulus enacted as a result, it’s not unreasonable to think there was a significant pulling forward of demand for Big Tech products and services that will now leave a vacuum of demand for a prolonged period of time.”
We’re just now beginning to find out how much of a vacuum of demand now lies in front of us. And a Fed-induced recession resulting from the rapid rise in interest rates and draining of liquidity isn’t likely to improve things in that regard.
In Stunning Strategy Reversal, Pentagon Will No Longer Rule Out Use Of Nuclear Weapons Against Non-Nuclear Threat
Well, we’re finally there: stocks are officially trading off nuclear war headlines.
Moments ago, as part of his closely-watched speech, Vladimir Putin appeared to talk down the likelihood of a nuclear attack in Ukraine:
*PUTIN: NO POLITICAL, MILITARY REASON IN NUKE STRIKE IN UKRAINE
Which, however, is more than can be said about the US.
As Bloomberg just reported, the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejects limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates (and, in the not too distant past, by Joe Bide) citing burgeoning threats from Russia and China.
“By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the Defense Department said in the long-awaited document issued Thursday. In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.
In yet another stark reversal for the senile occupant of the White House basement, in his 2020 presidential campaign Biden had pledged to declare that the US nuclear arsenal should be used only to deter or retaliate against a nuclear attack, a position blessed by progressive Democrats and reviled by defense hawks. But, like with every other position held by the pathological liar who even trumps Trump in the untruth department, this one has just been reversed as well as “the threat environment has changed dramatically since then” and the Pentagon strategy was forged in cooperation with the flip-flopping White House.
In a stunning move that should – or rather “should” – spark outrage among the so-called progressives but will at best prompt some very sternly retracted letters, the nuclear report that’s part of the broader strategy said the Biden administration reviewed its nuclear policy and concluded that “No First Use” and “Sole Purpose” policies “would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage” to the US and allies.
meanwhile…
Putin: The only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state is the United States of America
The nuclear strategy document doesn’t spell out what non-nuclear threats could produce a US nuclear response, but current threats include hypersonic weapons possessed by Russia and China for which the US doesn’t yet have a proven defense.
It does spell out, however, in the strongest terms, what would happen to another nuclear power, North Korea, if it launched a nuclear attack on the US, South Korea or Japan. That action “will result in the end of that regime,” it says. US nuclear weapons continue to play a role in deterring North Korean attacks.
So, the brilliant neocon minds behind the report concluded, it is better to instill the fear of a disproportionate nuclear retaliation, thus making an outright nuclear attack far more likely (if the US will nuke you anyway, may as well go all out).
In the document, which was framed well before the invasion, the Pentagon says Russia continues to “brandish its nuclear weapons in support of its revisionist security policy” while its modern arsenal is expected to grow further. In other words, the Pentagon knew what Putin would do even before he did it and that defined the dramatic revision in US nuclear posture. Almost as if the Pentagon directed the entire sequence of events…
Meanwhile, China remains the US’s “most consequential strategic competitor for coming decades,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a letter presenting the new defense strategy. He cited China’s “increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences,” even as it rapidly modernizes and expands its military. China wants to have at least 1,000 deliverable nuclear warheads by the end of the decade, the nuclear strategy document says, saying it could use them for “coercive purposes, including military provocations against US allies and partners in the region.”
The nuclear strategy affirmed modernization programs including the ongoing replacement of the aging US air-sea-land nuclear triad. Among them are the Navy’s Columbia-class nuclear ICBM submarine, the ground-based Minuteman III ICBM replacement, the new air-launched Long-Range Standoff Weapon and F-35 fighter jets for Europe carrying nuclear weapons.
The review confirmed previous reports that the Pentagon will retire the B83-1 gravity bomb and cancel the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile program. But the review endorses a controversial Trump-era naval weapon, the low-yield W76-2 submarine-launched nuclear warhead, which is described as providing “an important means to deter limited nuclear use.”
The broader strategy report also offered gently worded criticism of major US weapons programs, which often runs years behind plans and billions of dollars over initial budgets.
“Our current system is too slow and too focused on acquiring systems not designed to address the most critical challenges we now face,” the Pentagon said. It called for more “open systems that can rapidly incorporate cutting-edge technology” while reducing problems of “obsolescence” and high costs.
The Pentagon strategy documents were sent to Congress in classified form in March so they were considered during congressional approval of the fiscal 2023 defense budget.
* * *
So how to trade all of this? Well, the initial instinct now that nuclear war headlines are being lobbed around is that it may be time to sell… but as Art Cashin so insightfully put it some time ago, “Never bet on the end of the world, because it only happens once.”
Now thanks to the Biden admin, that “once in a lifetime” event is that much closer to taking place.
Putin Says Russia Will Never Be “Wiped Off Geopolitical Map” As West Plays “Dirty Game” In Ukraine
“Russia is not challenging the western elite. We are not trying to become the hegemon,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said early in an important speech before the Valdai Discussion Club meeting outside Moscow on Thursday. Each year the Valdai speech is a major one and closely watched by Western officials and media.
This year it was touted with the eye-catching title of “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone.” And of course, this year’s Valdai meeting comes against the backdrop of the biggest war Europe has seen on its eastern doorstep since WWII.
Putin said in his remarks that Russia merely wants to “defend its right to exist” and “won’t let itself be destroyed and wiped off the geopolitical map.” This as nuclear rhetoric and threats of defending red lines between Moscow and the West have reached heights not seen since the Cold War.
He repeated a familiar refrain of a crisis unfolding because the Western allies are using Ukraine for their “dirty game” in an ultimate drive for world domination. “Power over the world is what the West has put at stake in the game it plays. This game is certainly dangerous, bloody and I would call it dirty,” he said according to a state media translation.
“But in the modern world, sitting aside is hardly an option. He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind, as the proverb says,” he added. Repeating a well-known theme of his, juxtapositioning collapsing unipolar order vs. multipolarity, he said “new centers of power in the multipolar world and the West will have to start talking as equals about our common future.”
“[This game] denies the sovereignty of nations and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and has no regard whatsoever for other countries,” Putin added.
Commenting on one segment of the talk, The New York Times said the Valdai speech sought to appeal to conservatives in Europe and the US:
Mr. Putin insisted that Russia did not fundamentally see itself as an “enemy of the West.” Rather, he said — as he has before — that it was “Western elites” that he was fighting, ones who were trying to impose their “pretty strange” values on everyone else.
“There are at least two Wests,” Mr. Putin said in his speech at the plenary session in Moscow of an annual foreign policy conference. One, he said, was the West of “traditional, mainly Christian values,” which Russia was close to.
But Putin drove home in contrast that “There’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite.”
Ukrainian officials have been watching the speech closely, and commenting:
“Confidence in one’s infallibility is a very dangerous state, one step away from destroying those they don’t like” – Putin knows what he is talking about at Valdai. pic.twitter.com/0VRSjKlWiu
And more specifically on the Ukraine conflict, the Russian leader charged of the West’s actions, “They’re always trying to escalate…They’re fueling the war in Ukraine, organizing provocations around Taiwan, destabilizing the world food and energy markets.”
Putin warned that the West’s confidence in its “infallibility” is a “very dangerous” condition, with there only being “one step” between this self-confidence to the idea that “they can simply destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to ‘cancel’ them.”
Emphasizing that Russia is not a natural “enemy” of the West, Putin urged Western political elites to stop seeing “the hand of the Kremlin” behind all their internal problems.
On multipolarity, Putin’s message to Europe is essentially “take it or leave it”…
Putin is at it again. New Munich III speech at Valdai conference. He is laying the foundations of new multipolar world order. The message to Europe is “take it or leave it”. pic.twitter.com/oUixDO7Jmm
Western officials are also keeping a close watch on Putin’s words regarding nuclear doctrine and usage. Putin at Valdai underscored he sees “no political or military reason” to conduct a nuke strike in Ukraine. He also stressed Moscow’s nuclear doctrine is defensive in nature. “Russia has never talked about nuclear use, only replied,” he said.
He went on to warn that it remains Russia will never “put up with what the West tells it to do” – and that while Russia should not be seen as a direct challenge to the West, it reserves the right to develop. With this theme established, Putin asserted that Washington has discredited international finance“by using the dollar as a weapon” – thus he posited that in the future continued moves toward “settlements in national currencies will dominate.”
Roughly 61% of Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen’s voting members oppose deal intended to head off strike…
Count the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (BRS) as another union to reject the tentative labor agreement that representatives of the rail unions and the freight railroads negotiated under pressure from the White House.
The union and the organization representing the railroads plan to return to the negotiating table, but BRS’ vote further clouds the question of whether a freight rail strike could occur — something that the tentative agreement had sought to stave off. Members of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division rejected that union’s tentative agreement earlier this month.
BRS announced Wednesday that 60.57% of voting members opposed ratification, while 39.23% voted in favor.
BRS represents more than 6,000 members affected by the negotiations, which is about 5% of the 115,000 union members involved in the negotiations process.
BRS President Michael Baldwin said the percentage of members who voted — 73.18% — was the highest participation rate in BRS history.
The union was represented at the negotiating table by the Coordinated Bargaining Coalition and later by the United Rail Unions. The National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC) represented the freight railroads.
In response to BRS’ vote, NCCC said it was “disappointed” in the outcome, saying that the failure to ratify the agreement would delay the benefits of the tentative agreement for BRS members.
Both NCCC and BRS have agreed to maintain the status quo until early December, which means any potential service disruptions by BRS members would not occur before then. Both parties will be going back to the bargaining table for further contract negotiations.
NCCC says the tentative agreement includes recommendations by the Presidential Emergency Board (PEB), a three-person independent group appointed by President Joe Biden over the summer to work with the railroads and the unions on finding ways to resolve the labor contract impasse and avert a strike. The railroads and unions have been negotiating a new contract since January 2020.
Those recommendations included the largest wage increase in nearly five decades, maintained rail employees’ platinum-level health benefits and added an extra day of paid time off, NCCC said, noting that six other unions had already voted in favor of ratifying their labor agreements.
NCCC said PEB’s recommendations “represent a carefully considered compromise of all parties’ interests.”
“BRS asserts that the tentative agreement is inadequate because it does not provide for additional paid sick time. However, the vast majority of BRS members work predictable schedules and all have access to time off,” NCCC said. “Like other rail employees, they can and do take time off for sickness and already have paid sickness benefits beginning after four days of illness-related absence and extending for up to a year.
“The structure of these benefits is a function of decades of bargaining where the unions have repeatedly agreed that short-term absences would be unpaid in favor of higher compensation for days worked and more generous sickness benefits for longer absences,” NCCC continued. “The three experienced arbitrators appointed to PEB 250 by President Biden thoroughly reviewed and rejected a union proposal to add paid sick time for short-term absences to the existing system, noting in their report that union concerns had been considered in formulating the PEB’s historic wage recommendation.”
But BRS said the vote “spoke loudly and clearly that their contributions are worth more.”
“I have expressed my disappointment throughout the process in the lack of good-faith bargaining on the part of the NCCC, as well as the part PEB 250 played in denying BRS members the basic right of paid time off for illness,” Baldwin said in a statement. “The NCCC and PEB also both failed to recognize the safety-sensitive and highly stressful job BRS members perform each day to keep the railroad running and supply chain flowing.
“Without Signalmen, the roadways and railroad crossings would be unsafe for the traveling public, and they shoulder that heavy burden each day. Additionally, the highest offices at each Carrier, as well as their stockholders, seem to forget that the rank-and-file of their employees continued to perform their job each day through an unprecedented pandemic, while the executives worked from home to keep their families safe.”
The six unions that have approved their agreements are the American Train Dispatchers Association, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Transportation Communications Union, the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the National Conference of Firemen & Oilers, and the mechanical and engineering division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation (SMART) Workers.
Two of the largest unions representing train engineers and conductors — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and SMART-Transportation Division — have yet to vote on whether to ratify their agreements.
Musk Reassures Advertisers: Twitter “Will Not Become A Free-For-All Hellscape”
As the moment of peak crisis arrives for the left, losing control of the narrative-management tool known as Twitter, there are stories (for example, here at Bloomberg) running rife citing no sources at all while claiming that advertisers are nervous of the nazi, child pron, hate-speech that will inevitably return to the social media platform now that the richest man in the world is in charge.
“There’s no commercial viability for a network that doesn’t have some level of content moderation. Advertisers and users aren’t going to show up and post during their workday alongside pornography and extremism — and Twitter is already reportedly struggling with losing its most active users. So in deciding how “free” Musk wants speech to be, he may have to alienate users to get there.”
The Wall Street Journal also warned that “Madison Avenue isn’t sold on the deal,” suggesting advertisers are anxious to be on the Musk-owned platform.
About a dozen of GroupM’s clients, which own an array of well-known consumer brands, have told the agency to pause all their ads on Twitter if Mr. Trump’s account is reinstated, Kieley Taylor, global head of partnerships at GroupM, said.
Others are in wait-and-see mode. Ms. Taylor said she expects to hear from many more clients if Mr. Trump’s account returns.
“That doesn’t mean that we won’t be entertaining lots of emails and phone calls as soon as a transaction goes through,” Ms. Taylor said. “I anticipate we’ll be busy.”
Ad agency Omnicom Media Group evaluates the major social-media platforms’ progress on brand-safety tools every quarter. In July, Omnicom rated Twitter’s progress behind that of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, according to a document reviewed by the Journal. Robert Pearsall, managing director of social activation at Omnicom Media Group, said Twitter has made agreements to improve its brand-safety controls to meet Omnicom’s standards, but it hasn’t introduced those changes to the market yet.
“There are significant concerns about the implications of a possible change to content moderation policy,” he said.
Twitter has said it is working on tools to give advertisers a better idea of where their ads appear.
Advertising provided 89% of Twitter’s $5.08 billion revenue in 2021.
I wanted to reach out personally to share my motivation in acquiring Twitter. There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising. Most of it has been wrong.
The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.
In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of traditional media has fueled and catered to those polarized extremes, as they believe that is what brings in the money, but, in doing so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.
That is why I bought Twitter. I didn’t do it because it would be easy.
I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.
And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility.
That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!
In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.
I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you.
For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs. Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!
Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.
To everyone who has partnered with us, I thank you. Let us build something extraordinary together.
Remember his words from yesterday:
“A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”
And Peter Schiff thinks the central bank has folded with a soft pivot. He explained why on his podcast.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that we’ve already seen the Fed pivot. Now, it wasn’t a pivot in the sense that the Fed has gone from hiking interest rates to cutting interest rates. It hasn’t gone from quantitative easing to quantitative tightening. But it is a pivot in rhetoric. And what it amounts to is an easing of monetary conditions. Because what the Fed is going to be doing going forward is starting to walk back just how aggressive its rate-hiking campaign is going to be.”
The shift may be subtle, but it will be significant. Instead of talking about the urgency of the inflation fight, Peter said he thinks the central bankers at the Fed will start talking about how much progress they have made.
Since they’ve made progress, maybe not completely declaring victory, but indicating they’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel — that maybe they don’t have to raise interest rates as high as they thought, or maybe leave them as high for as long as they thought. And so the path back down to 2% inflation may not require as aggressive a rate-hiking campaign as they may have previously thought before they started to see the evidence of their success.”
What led Peter to this conclusion?
Last Thursday (Oct. 20), the bond market looked close to a complete collapse. That morning, the yield on the 30-year Treasury nearly rose to 4.4%. Meanwhile, the curve between the 10-year and the 30-year moved positive out of inversion. This was a sign investors were beginning to price in prolonged inflation. Meanwhile, the stock market was also under pressure due to the weakness in the bond market.
The Achilles heel of this bubble economy is interest rates because we’ve got so much debt. And if interest rates rise high enough, the whole thing is going to collapse.”
Consider this tweet Peter sent last Friday.
The 10-year Treasury yield hit 4.33%, its highest since Nov. 2007, when the Nation Debt was under $9 trillion. Today it’s over $31.2 trillion. At 4.33%, annual interest on the National Debt would exceed $1.35 trillion, more than is spent on National Defense or Social Security.
That would make the interest on the debt the biggest US government expense. (You can read a more in-depth analysis of the national debt HERE.)
Do you see the problem here? Debt is spiraling out of control and is going to crowd out all of the other government spending.
At the rate the National Debt and interest rates are rising, before the decade ends interest on the National Debt will exceed 100% of federal tax revenue. The entire Federal Government would then consist of the Treasury Department, which would just collect taxes and pay interest.
Basically, the US government would become a conduit from taxpayers to bondholders. Now obviously, this can’t happen. At some point, something has to give. And I think that something already gave. I think it gave on Friday morning, and that’s why I think the Fed folded with this ‘soft’ pivot. The reason I’m saying a soft pivot and not a hard pivot is because the Fed is still on the trajectory of hiking rates. I just think it shifted into a lower gear. So that, in and of itself, constitutes an easing. Even if the Fed is tightening, if it’s tightening less aggressively than the markets had thought, then it’s an easing. It’s a forward guidance that is easing conditions a little bit and telling the markets, ‘Hey, you’re too tight. You’re pricing in too many rate hikes. Because we’re probably not going to have to hike as many times as you think. The terminal rate is not going to be as high as you think because we’re already making good progress.’”
The soft pivot was telegraphed to the markets by a Wall Street Journal report saying some Fed members were expressing “unease” and were concerned about overtightening. The story reported that San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said, “The time is now to start planning for stepping down.”
Peter went on to detail some of the bad economic data the Fed will also have to reckon with including contractionary October PMI, tanking consumer confidence, and rising shelter costs (even though housing prices are falling).
