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​First up, here's an abbreviated list of some of the main arguments that "This time REALLY is different" by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new  Bloomberg Markets interview of May 24, 2020 via Moneyweb. ​ This is an interview update of their 2009 history of financial crises "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly".

​CR: So pandemics are not new. But the policy response to pandemics that we’re seeing is definitely new. If you look at the year 1918, when deaths in the US during the Spanish influenza pandemic peaked at 675,000, real GDP that year grew 9%. So the dominant economic model at the time was war production. You really can’t use that experience as any template for this. That’s one difference.

It’s certainly different from prior pandemics in terms of the economy, the policy response, the shutdown... The reversal in capital flows in the four weeks ending in March matched the decline during the [2008-09] global financial crisis, which took a year. So the abruptness and the widespread shutdowns we had not seen before.

KR: Certainly the global nature of it is different and this highlights the speed. We have the first global recession crisis really since the Great Depression. 

The economic policy response has been massive and absolutely necessary... But certainly the aggressive crisis response reflects lessons learned in 2008.

CR: Let’s take monetary policy before the pandemic. US unemployment was at its lowest level since the 1960s. By most metrics the US was at or near full employment. It’s very possible that the path was toward rising interest rates. Clearly that has been completely replaced by a view that rates are zero now and that they’re going to stay low for a very long, long, indeterminate period of time, with a lot of liquidity support from the Federal Reserve. So that’s a big game changer, discounting futures.

What this does mean is that the market is really counting on a lot of rescues. The blanket coverage by the Fed is broad, and that is driving the market. And expectations are that we’re going to have this nice V-shaped recovery and life is going to return to normal as we knew it before the pandemic. And my own view is that neither of those are likely to be true. The recovery is unlikely to be V-shaped, and we’re unlikely to return to the pre-pandemic world. 

KR: It’s not just the people not working. What’s the efficiency of the people who are working? The monetary response has been done hand in hand with the Treasury. The market is banking on this V-shaped recovery. But a lot of the firms aren’t coming back. I think we’re going to see a lot of work for bankruptcy lawyers going across a lot of industries.

CR: There is talk on whether it’s going to be a W-shape if there’s a second wave and so on. That’s a very real possibility given past pandemics and if there’s no vaccine.

The shock has disrupted supply chains globally and trade big-time. The World Trade Organisation tells you trade can decline anywhere between 13% and 32%. I don’t think you just break and re-create supply chains at the drop of a hat. 

Another reason I think the V-shape story is dubious is that we’re all living in economies that have a hugely important service component. How do we know which retailers are going to come back? Which restaurants are going to come back? Cinemas? When this crisis began to morph from a medical problem into a financial crisis, then it was clear we were going to have more hysteresis, longer-lived effects.

KR: So we use a much more modest version of recovery. And still, with postwar financial crises before 2008-09, the average was four years, and for the Great Depression, 10 years. And there are many ways this feels more like the Great Depression.

And you want to talk about a negative productivity shock, too... There’s a lot of uncertainty, and it’s probably not in the pro-growth direction.

So there are going to be phenomenal frictions coming out of this wave of bankruptcies, defaults. It’s probably going to be, at best, a U-shaped recovery. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get back to the 2019 per capita GDP. I would say, looking at it now, five years would seem like a good outcome out of this.

“If it drags on, the forces that are pulling the euro zone apart are going to grow stronger and stronger.”

CR: The problem in emerging markets goes beyond the poorest countries. For many emerging markets, we’ve also had a massive, massive oil shock. Nigeria, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico—they’ve all been downgraded. So the hit to emerging markets is just very broad. Nigeria is in terrible shape. South Africa is in terrible shape. Turkey is in terrible shape. Ecuador already is in default status, as well as Argentina. These are big emerging markets. It’s going to be enormously costly.

For the G-20 initiative, I indeed hope it is the G-20 and not just the G-19. China needs to be on board with debt relief. That’s a big issue. The largest official creditor by far is China. If China is not fully on board on granting debt relief, then the initiative is going to offer little or no relief. If the savings are just going to be used to repay debts to China, well, that would be a tragedy.

KR: The IMF at this point is all-in on trying to find a debt moratorium, recognizing there’s going to be restructuring in a lot of places. But I don’t think the US is by any means all-in, and a lot of the contracts of the private sector are governed under US law. And if the US government is not in, if China’s not in, it’s not really enough. 

KR: The financial markets think there’s no chance interest rates will go up. There is no chance inflation will go up. If they’re right, and if another shoe doesn’t drop, it’ll be fine. But we could have costs from this. We’re talking about economies shrinking by 25% to 30%. And those [declines] are just staggering compared to the debt burden costs, whatever they are. So certainly we would strongly endorse doing what governments are doing. But selling it as a free lunch, that’s stupefyingly naive.

CR: If you look back to 2008-09, nearly everybody had a banking crisis. But a couple of years later, the focus had moved from the banking problem to the debt problem... And if there’s a shakeout that involves concerns about Italy’s growth, then we could have a transition again from the focus on the Covid-19 crisis this time to a debt crisis. But Italy, as I said, is on a different scale than the peripheral countries that got into the biggest trouble in the last crisis. It potentially also envelops Spain. So I think that if you were to ask me about an advanced economy debt issue, I think that is where it is most at the forefront.

KR: We argued at the time that the right recipe was to involve write downs of the southern European debts. And I think that would have been cheap money in terms of restoring growth in the euro zone and would have [been] paid back. And we may be at that same juncture in another couple of years where you’re looking at just staggering austerity in Spain and Italy on top of a period of staggering hardship. Advanced countries have done this all the time—finding some sort of debt restructuring or writedown to give them fiscal space again, to support growth again. If the euro zone doesn’t find a way to deal with this, maybe eurobonds might be in the picture to try to indirectly provide support. Again, we’re going to see huge forces pulling apart the euro zone.

CR: It’s hard to say in China what is public and what is private, but corporates in China levered up significantly, expecting that they were going to continue to grow at double digits forever. That hasn’t materialised. There’s overcapacity in a lot of industries.

China came into this with inflation running over 5% because of the huge spike in pork prices. So I think initially that the PBOC [People’s Bank of China] has been somewhat constrained initially in doing their usual big credit stimulus by uncertainty over their inflation. I think that’s changing because of the collapse in oil price. So I do think we are going to see more stimulus from China.

KR: There will be a pretty sustained growth slowdown in China. We were on track for that anyway. But who can they export to? The rest of the world is going to be in recession. I think if they can average 1% growth the next two, three years, then that will look good. That’s not a bad prediction for China. And let’s remember, their population dynamic is completely changing. So 3% growth in that, with that Europeanising of their population dynamics, would not be bad at all. But there’s a big-picture question about their huge centralisation, which is clearly an advantage in dealing with the national crisis but maybe doesn’t provide the flexibility over the long term to get the dynamism that at least you’ve got in the US economy.

KR: So central banks all over the world are using the fiscal side of their balance sheet...  Monetary policy is essentially castrated by the zero bound.

CR: We really can’t look independently at central banks without also looking at the balance sheet, not just of the government, but the balance sheet of the private sector, which has a lot of contingent liabilities.

On the issue of negative interest rates, I do not share Ken’s views on that particular matter. When you have, as we do today, very fragmented markets, markets that became totally illiquid, I think the way I would deal with that would not be through making rates more negative, but by an approach closer to the one taken by the Fed, which is through a variety of facilities that provide directed credit. Sustained negative interest rates in Europe have led to a lot of bank disintermediation. And often bank disintermediation means that you end up with the less regulated, less desirable financial institutions.

KR: So the probability is, for the foreseeable future, we’ll have deflation. But at the end of this, I think we’re going to have experienced an extremely negative productivity shock with deglobalisation. In terms of growth and productivity, they will be lasting negative shocks, and demand may come back. And then you have the many forces that have led to very low inflation maybe going into reverse, either because of deglobalisation or because workers will strengthen their rights. The market sees essentially zero chance of ever having inflation again. And I think that’s very wrong.

CR: Some of the scars are on supply chains. I don’t think we’ll return to their precrisis normal. We’re going to see a lot of risk aversion. We’ll be more inward-looking, self-sufficient in medical supplies, self-sufficient in food. If you look at some of the legacies of the big crises, those have all seen fixed investment ratchet down and often stay down.

​READ THE FULL INTERVIEW TEXT "This time really is different" by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new  Bloomberg Markets interview of May 24, 2020 via ​Moneyweb.

Canada GDP % Growth Annualized

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The Canadian economy advanced an annualized 0.3 percent on quarter in the three months to December 2019, below a downwardly revised 1.1 percent expansion in the previous period and matching market forecasts. It was the weakest growth rate since the second quarter of 2016, when the economy shrank 2 percent. (BEFORE THE FIRST COVID 19 CASE HIT)
Source: TradingEconomics.com

In his final official speech May 25, 2020, the Governor of the Bank of Canada ​Stephen Poloz said:

“Although a minority of observers worry that these extreme policies will create inflation someday, our dominant concern was with the downside risk and the possibility that deflation could emerge... Deflation interacts horribly with existing debt, the two main ingredients of depressions in the past... In effect, then, we were saying that the downside risks were sufficiently dire that there were no relevant trade-offs for monetary policy-makers to consider. Picture the pandemic creating a giant deflationary crater in the middle of the economy; it takes what looks like inflationary policies to offset it.” 

A panel of experts assembled by the C.D. Howe Institute and led by David Dodge, a former Bank of Canada governor, on May 25 said the central bank and government should “reinforce their commitment” to the two-per-cent target.

Poloz said the economy will “need significant monetary stimulus in the rebuilding stage,” but that “it is well understood that the bank’s ability to lend without limit must be backed up by the inflation target to anchor inflation expectations.”

Canadian 5 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Rates 1951 = 05.46%​ +30yrs 1981 = 18.15% +30yrs 2011 = 05.19% April  2015 = 04.64%, a new low for 27 months MAY 13 2020 = 05.04% MAY 20 2020 = 04.94%

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"Eight centuries of global real interest rates, R-G [real wealth returns (R) and broader real growth (G)], and the ‘suprasecular’ decline, 1311–2018" Source Material
by Paul Schmelzing, January 2020. Bank of England Staff working Paper No. 845 (all 110 pages here)

The Introduction, in full:

The evolution of long-term real interest rates has in recent years attracted significant academic interest. Partly in the context of the “secular stagnation” debate and related contributions, which in different variants have advanced theories on the drivers behind a low rate environment, supposedly originating in the second half of the 20th century. Partly in the context of “inequality” and “wealth” debates, particularly stimulated by the contribution of Piketty (2014), and its peculiar view of long-term asset and wealth returns in their relation to broader income growth. Despite regular recourse to “history” from the proponents of such theories, it will be posited in this essay that both debates advance a misrepresentative view of long-run interest rate and wealth return trends – and only partly because they overwhelmingly omit archival and other historical factual evidence.

The discussion of longer-term trends in real rates is often confined to the second half of the 20th century, identifying the high inflation period of the 1970s and early 1980s as an inflection point triggering a multi-decade fall in real rates. And indeed, in most economists’ eyes, considering interest rate dynamics over the 20th century horizon – or even over the last 150 years – the reversal during the last quarter of the 1900s at first appears decisive.

Equally, the historical relation between real wealth returns (R) and broader real growth (G) has assumed a central role in the current debates on long-term inequality trends, culminating in the widely discussed contribution of Piketty (ibid.). The latter contended – on the basis of positing a “virtual stability of the pure return of capital over the very long-run” – that excess real capital returns over real growth rates would soon perpetuate an “endless inegalitarian spiral” (ibid, 206, 572).

From what are, at their core, return and capital cost debates, have sprung various related policy and academic contributions. For instance, more recently the spread between “Safe R” (the real capital cost for the “safe” sovereign debt issuer) and “G” (its respective real income growth rate) since 1950 has been documented, and highlighted as a key variable to assess public debt sustainability (Blanchard 2019).

This essay approaches these subjects from a historical perspective, arguing that the recourse to archives, printed primary sources, published secondary works, and assessed written evidence from the past, raises deeper problems for such recent debates. In what follows, I attempt to document for the first time the particular evolution of both GDP-weighted global and “safe asset provider” long-term sovereign real rates over a span of 707 years, relying on a collection of evidence from 14th century European municipal and imperial registers, over Habsburg, British, Dutch, crown documents, to (often ignored) earlier secondary sources, and to current Federal Reserve data.
 
First, the approach here modifies various of the empirical findings by what is perhaps the most comprehensive existing investigation on interest rate trends, the work of Homer and Sylla (1996, 2005). The latter do not take into account primary sources, and even the secondary source material is limited, once assessed in detail. Neither do they discuss real rate dynamics (bar four pages on the U.S. context), or attempt to build “GDP-weighted”, global series. In consequence, and for all the merits of their work, the timing and evolution of interest rate trends it suggests is partly inappropriate, partly inapplicable for current debates in both the historical and the economics literature.

One key empirical result analyzed here is that there is no evidence of a “virtual stability” of real capital returns, either expressed in R or “R-G” over the very long run: rather, – despite temporary stabilizations such as the period between 1550-1640, 1820-1850, or in fact 1950-1980 – global real rates have shown a persistent downward trend over the past five centuries, declining within a corridor of between -0.9 (safe asset provider basis) and -1.59 basis points (global basis) per annum, with the former displaying a continuous decline since the deep monetary crises of the late medieval “Bullion Famine”. This downward trend has persisted throughout the historical gold, silver, mixed bullion, and fiat monetary regimes, is visible across various asset classes, and long preceded the emergence of modern central banks. It appears not directly related to growth or demographic drivers, though capital accumulation trends may go some way in explaining the phenomenon. But whoever posits particular recent savings-investment dislocations in the context of an alleged “secular stagnation” needs to face the likelihood that such “imbalances” may have been a continuous key driver for five centuries.

Similarly, negative long-term real rates have steadily become more frequent since the 14th century, and I show that they affected around 20% of advanced economy GDP over time, a share that has historically risen by 1.2 basis points every year: once more, this suggests that deeply-entrenched trends are at work – the recent years are a mere “catch-up period” in this and a number of related aspects.

Together, I posit that the private and public assets covered in the following also go some way in enabling the reconstruction of total “nonhuman” wealth returns since the 14th century. Prior to the recording of robust public statistics, wills and tax assessments suggest that around one-third of private wealth is tied to public and private debt assets, with another third in real estate – in an environment where wealth-income ratios may plausibly have reached 150-250% of GDP. Aggregating such evidence, and constructing plausible long-run R-G series over the last 700 years, suggests that real returns on nonhuman wealth are equally downward trending over time. They are by no means “virtually stable”, a cornerstone of Piketty’s (2014) framework. In fact, if historical trends are extrapolated, R-G will soon reach permanently negative territory – a first since at least medieval times.

With regards to “secular stagnation” debates, I argue that in contrast to prevalent theories, global real rates are not mean-reverting within a certain corridor (Hamilton et al. 2016), and history does not suggest that they reach a steady-state value in the medium-term, even if that value is negative (Eggertsson, Mehrotra, and Robbins 2017, esp. 41). The “real safe rate” is not “normally fluctuating around the levels we see today” (Jorda et al. 2017, 4). In this sense, the decline of real returns across a variety of different asset classes since the 1980s in fact represents merely a return to long-term historical trends. All of this suggests that the “secular stagnation” narrative (Summers 2014; 2015; 2016; Rachel and Summers 2019), to the extent that it posits an aberration of longer-term dynamics over recent decades, appears fully misleading.

The data here suggests that the “historically implied” safe asset provider long-term real rate stands at 1.56% for the year 2018, which would imply that against the backdrop of inflation targets at 2%, nominal advanced economy rates may no longer rise sustainably above 3.5%. Whatever the precise dominant driver – simply extrapolating such long-term historical trends suggests that negative real rates will not just soon constitute a “new normal” – they will continue to fall constantly. By the late 2020s, global short term real rates will have reached permanently negative territory. By the second half of this century, global long-term real rates will have followed.

The standard deviation of the real rate – its “volatility” – meanwhile, has shown similar properties over the last 500 years: fluctuations in benchmark real rates are steadily declining, implying that rate levels are set to become both lower, and stickier. But downward-trending absolute levels, and declining volatilities have persisted against a backdrop of a secularly growing importance of public and monetary balance sheets. This would suggest that expansionary monetary and fiscal policy responses designed to raise real interest rates from current levels may at best have a cyclical effect in the longer-term context.

Finally, this paper is not naïve about the remaining limitations of the very long-term historical evidence. The robustness checks below cannot deflect from the fact that late medieval and early modern data can of course never be established with the same granularity as modern high-frequency statistics. One still has to rely on interpolations here, deal with the peculiarities of early modern finance, and acknowledge that the permanency of wars, disasters, and destitution since the times of medieval Condottieri and Landsknechte has irrecoverably destroyed not an insignificant share of the evidence ideally desired. But I suggest that whoever invokes “history” in the present debates needs to advance against the backdrop of these limitations.

This paper will proceed by first discussing empirical aspects across various assets and geographies, and elaborating on the technicalities of aggregating such evidence, before relating it to other economic and (geo-) political variables, and constructing main derivative series including R-G, the real rate standard deviation, and the long-run negative real rate frequency. This is followed by a discussion of robustness aspects, and, finally, by a closer focus on capital accumulation factors during the late 15th century.

The Suprasecular Rate Decline

The Conclusion, in full:

This concludes the long-term survey. First, this paper has argued that – partly given their methodological shortcomings (such as the sole focus on secondary source, nominal, country-level, “lowest-issuer”, scattered rate evidence) – relying on existing narratives obscures historical interest rate dynamics: for one, there is across a multitude of assets no evidence of a “virtual stability” of real capital returns, and I have argued that with the approach here it is now at least able to approximate quantitatively actual trend falls over (sub-) periods and asset classes. This empirical basis, for one, suggests that it was not the Black Death that stands out as an inflection point (Epstein 2000, 61ff.), or the 13th and late 17th centuries as Homer and Sylla’s (1991, 556f.) semi-centennial sketch suggests. A far more relevant turning point – one that initiated a “slope” in real interest rates to which the post-Napoleonic period has once more returned – occurs in the late 15th century. That episode coincides with a sharp surge in capital accumulation trends, and a jump in plausible savings rates – an inflection which also clearly precedes institutional “revolutions” such as those proposed by North and Weingast (1989).

But the value of constructing the first multi-century, high-frequency GDP-weighted real rate dataset for both the global “safe asset provider”, and advanced economies on aggregate goes beyond purely empirical qualifications. In its applied dimension, I sought to suggest that a long-term reconstruction of real rate developments points towards key revisions concerning at least two major current debates directly based on – or deriving from – the narrative about long-term capital returns. First, my new data showed that long-term real rates – be it in the form of private debt, non-marketable loans, or the global sovereign “safe asset” – should always have been expected to hit “zero bounds” around the time of the late 20th and early 21st century, if put into long-term historical context. In fact, a meaningful – and growing – level of long-term real rates should have been expected to record negative levels. There is little unusual about the current low rate environment which the “secular stagnation” narrative attempts to display as an unusual aberration, linked to equally unusual trend-breaks in savings-investment balances, or productivity measures. To extent that such literature then posits particular policy remedies to address such alleged phenomena, it is found to be fully misleading: the trend fall in real rates has coincided with a steady longrun uptick in public fiscal activity; and it has persisted across a variety of monetary regimes: fiat- and non-fiat, with and without the existence of public monetary institutions.
 
Secondly, sovereign long-term real rates have been placed into context to other key components of “nonhuman wealth returns” over the (very) long run, including private debt, and real land returns, together with a suggestion that fixed income-linked wealth has historically assumed a meaningful share of private wealth. There is a very high probability, therefore, to suggest that “non-human wealth” returns have by no means been “virtually stable”, as posited by recent popular accounts (e.g. Piketty 2014, 206): only if business investments have both shown an extreme increase in real returns, and an extreme increase in their total wealth share, could the framework be saved. If compared to real income growth dynamics over the same timespan, R-G, we equally detect a downward trend across all assets covered in the above discussion.

There is no reason, therefore, to expect rates to “plateau”, to suggest that “the global neutral rate may settle at around 1% over the medium to long run”, or to proclaim that “forecasts that the real rate will remain stuck at or below zero appear unwarranted” as some have suggested (Hamilton et al. 2016, 663; Rachel and Smith 2017, 37). With regards to policy, very low real rates can be expected to become a permanent and protracted monetary policy problem – but my evidence still does not support those that see an eventual return to “normalized” levels however defined (for instance Eggertsson, Mehrotra, and Robbins 2017, 41, who contemplate a “nadir” in global real rates in the 2020s): the long-term historical data suggests that, whatever the ultimate driver, or combination of drivers, the forces responsible have been indifferent to monetary or political regimes; they have kept exercising their pull on interest rate levels irrespective of the existence of central banks, (de jure) usury laws, or permanently higher public expenditures. They persisted in what amounted to early modern patrician plutocracies, as well as in modern democratic environments, in periods of low-level feudal Condottieri battles, and in those of professional, mechanized mass warfare.

In the end, then, it was the contemporaries of Jacques Coeur and Konrad von Weinsberg – not those in the financial centres of the 21st century – who had every reason to sound dire predictions about an “endless inegalitarian spiral”. And it was the Welser in early 16th century Nuremberg, or the Strozzi of Florence in the same period, who could have filled their business diaries with reports on the unprecedented “secular stagnation” environment of their days. That they did not do so serves not necessarily to illustrate their lack of economic-theoretical acumen: it should rather put doubt on the meaningfulness of some of today’s concepts.

Schmelzing on Bonds, Why Investors Face Years of Losses
January 10, 2017

"Leading psychologists explain how Trump’s self-delusions make him stunningly effective at predatory deception." by Daniel Kriegman, Robert Trivers & Malcolm Slavin, APR 6, 2020 RawStory.com 

Trump utilizes a propaganda principle—the Big Lie.

Trump is involved in the business of selling himself as an angry, righteous savior to the masses, resulting in a growing number of cultic devotees. ​

It is the outrageousness of the Big Lie that a listener normally expects would create self-conscious awkwardness in the liar.  In turn, this results in a need for a great liar to hide any nervousness that might give away the fact that he is attempting to deceive his audience.

The evolutionary theory of self-deception in the service of deception... if a liar can deceive himself into believing he is telling the truth, he will be far more effective in convincing others.

If certain motives can be removed from consciousness, one can be far more convincing in complex social negotiations. 

There is, however,  a new science emerging regarding psychopaths, suggesting that they have been shaped by natural selection, meaning that their sociopathic behavior was selected because it was adaptive. 

There is a “psychopathy scale” in which the higher you score the more likely you are to favor close relatives over more distant ones—exactly what you would expect natural selection to produce; they show a greater tendency toward psychopathic behavior the lower their relatedness to their victims.

If the behavior of psychopaths entails an evolving, adaptive evolutionary strategy, then they are setting up a co-evolutionary struggle with the rest of us.

Why don’t people spot the telltale signs indicating Trump’s awareness of his own lies?

The answer appears to be that for Trump there is only one reality, one truth:  Donald J. Trump is the world’s greatest genius and he, and only he, can solve the problems we face.  Yes, that does sound crazy.  But that’s precisely the nature of narcissistic personalities; they have delusional beliefs about their own importance and greatness.

Trump uses “fake news.” to refer to any challenges to this great truth. The way things are has no importance if noting the reality would interfere in perceiving and promoting the One Great Truth.

When Trump puffs himself up, he apparently eliminates any awareness of the possibility of failure.  This is the narcissist’s sense of personal greatness and ability.

Remember, he is a great genius, probably greater than Einstein.  Therefore, he can set aside general reality theory and focus instead on his special theory of reality:  Trump alone is here to save the day.

With the notion that reality matters effectively removed from his awareness, Trump never concerns himself with whether the words he speaks jibe with objective reality.  He then experiences no trepidation about whether the things he says are actually true.  This is the reason he is so convincing to the many people who comprise his base:  Donald Trump has no tell.

Please read the whole analysis for citations and references at RawStory.com ​

​Trump doesn't want coronavirus testing: His instinct is always to hide the truth "His whole life, Trump has lied about the numbers: From the beginning, he's tried to deflate the coronavirus count." by Amanda Marcotte, APRIL 22, 2020 Salon.com

​Donald Trump's go-to excuse for why the federal government hasn't done more to ramp up efforts to test Americans for the novel coronavirus... "Governors must be able to step up and get the job done," Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon, while also weirdly declaring that the U.S. was the "King of Ventilators." Is he going to start selling them in late-night infomercials?

When governors complain that they can't ramp up coronavirus testing, because there's nowhere near enough capacity, Trump denies it, claiming that governors "don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created."

Maryland's Republican governor, Larry Hogan, told Jake Tapper of CNN, "Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests," and said it was "absolutely false" to claim there's enough testing capacity. 

Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, also pointed the finger at Trump, saying that her state has "the capacity to double or triple the number of tests that we're doing," but because Trump refuses to enact the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force the production of those materials, they are falling short.

A bit of truth slipped out during Monday's briefing, when Trump muttered, "We really don't need it," apparently referring to the DPA.

Trump isn't capable of seeing widespread testing — and more accurate information about the spread of the virus — as being in his self-interest. He sees it this way: The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to conceal that larger number if he possibly can. So he's trying to keep the official case count as low as possible through the only method he understands: Lying and cheating. In this case, by preventing testing such that no accurate count is possible. 

"I like the numbers being where they are," Trump said back in March, in justifying his decision to prevent passengers on a cruise ship where the coronavirus was spreading from disembarking. His logic was simple, if idiotic: As long as those infected people stayed on the water, Trump didn't have to count them in the "official" numbers, which at that point were extremely low. Manipulating that number matters more to him than the health and well-being of human beings.

Trump's strongest instinct is to manipulate the statistics. He can no more stop trying to cheat on the numbers than he can stop cheating on his wives. 

Lying about statistics is at the heart of who Trump is. The man has never met a number that he didn't think he should immediately improve to flatter himself through straight-up lying and manipulation.

Trump compulsively cheats at golf. 

His first act as president was to force his press secretary to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd, and then to force official photographers to edit the photos to make his crowds look bigger. 

Trump spent ungodly amounts of effort bullying and manipulating the staff at Forbes to believe he was richer than he was, in order to get on the Forbes 400 list, where he clearly didn't belong. 

Trump has lied constantly on both his tax returns and his loan applications to banks. 

Trump's favorite game as a real estate developer was to quote one set of numbers to contractors and then, when they finished the job, to renege on the deal and refuse to pay them what was owed. 

Trump has obsessively lied about how many women he's slept with, calling tabloid reporters while pretending to be a publicist to plant stories about dating numerous women that were almost certainly not true.

Trump lies about his television ratings from his time as a reality TV host. 

Trump relentlessly lies about his poll numbers, and just this week falsely claimed that 96% of Republicans approved of him. 

Trump has lied about his charity giving, claiming to have donated millions of dollars when, in fact, he mostly took checks written by other people and passed them off as his own.

Trump wants to keep people from getting tested so the official case load in the U.S. remains artificially low. But as long as people aren't getting tested, they'll keep spreading the virus around and more people will get sick. Plus, the lack of testing hurts the economy, keeping people from returning to work and leading to more bankruptcy and more economic hardship. 

There's no need to tiptoe around the situation here. Trump is doing everything he can to stop Americans from getting coronavirus tests, and lying about it, because he wants to artificially deflate a number he thinks makes him look bad. His every instinct is to lie and cheat, especially when it comes to concealing truth and manipulating numbers, and he simply will never believe there's any situation he can't lie and cheat his way out of. Understand that, and you understand why we can't have adequate coronavirus testing under this president.​

​Please read the whole analysis for citations and references at Salon.com ​

Is Trump killing people on purpose? By Chauncey Devega, April 25, 2020 Salon.com

Psychologist and psychotherapist John Gartner, contributor to the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” and co-founder of the Duty to WARN PAC, has an answer: Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. Our president’s mental pathologies inexorably compel him to hurt and kill large numbers of people — including his own supporters.

Gartner explains that sadism and violence are central to Trump’s malignant narcissism and his decision-making about the coronavirus pandemic. Gartner also warns that Donald Trump is an abuser locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and that, like other sadists, Trump enjoys causing harm and suffering.

Gartner concludes that Donald Trump is engaging in “democidal behavior” and cautions that the tens of thousands of dead (so far) from the coronavirus pandemic are not simply collateral damage from Trump’s policies, but rather the logical outcome of Trump’s apparent mental pathologies and the poor decisions that flow from them.

SALON: How does the human mind remain in denial about Trump’s nature when on an almost daily basis he reveals his true nature through his cruelty, lies, violence and other anti-social behavior? There are many Americans who oppose Trump who continue to claim that they are somehow surprised by his behavior?

GARTNER: Malignant narcissists are very sick people. They are sick in such a deep, disturbed and dark way that a normal person cannot comprehend such behavior. Therefore, normal, mentally healthy people cannot imagine or understand the mind of a malignant narcissist.

SALON: How does someone with his type of mind reconcile claims like “I have total power” with “I take no responsibility”? He has said both things within a few days of each other.

GARTNER: That is a function of how the psychology of a malignant narcissist is structured. When Trump says things such as, “I have total power,” that’s the grandiosity. “I’m in total control” is a function of Trump’s paranoia, where everything bad is projected outward. Therefore, anything negative or bad is someone else’s fault.  Bad things are other people in Trump’s mind. The grandiosity and “greatness” are all him. Trump’s mind runs on a formula which bends and twists facts, ideas and memories to suit his malignant narcissism. This is why Trump contradicts himself so easily. He lies and makes things up. His fantasies all serve his malignant narcissism and the world he has created in his own mind about his greatness.

The fourth component of Trump’s malignant narcissism is sadism. That part of Trump’s mind is more hidden. People such as Trump are malignant-narcissist sadists because they, at some deep level, are driven to cause harm to other people. Trump’s life is proof of this. He enjoys ripping people off and humiliating people. He does this manically and gleefully. He has lied more than 16,000 times. He threatens people online and elsewhere. I believe that Donald Trump is also a sexual sadist, who on some basic level enjoys and is aroused by watching people be afraid of him. In his mind, Trump is creating chaos and instability so that he can feel powerful.

Professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called that phenomenon “omnipotent destructiveness.” The bullying, the violence, the destruction, frightening people, humiliating people, getting revenge and the like — such behavior is what Donald Trump has done his whole life. It is who Donald Trump really is. Unfortunately, too many people are still in denial of that fact.

SALON: I envision Donald Trump as a megalomaniacal puppet master. The American people are his little marionettes. The American people must acknowledge that relationship to cut the strings.   

GARTNER: That is a great analogy. Donald Trump is a master at getting negative attention, and the more people he can shock and upset, the better. Donald Trump has been doing such a thing for years.

The pandemic has provided Trump with the opportunity to use his skill at doing such things into overdrive. America, with this coronavirus crisis, is now “The Trump Show.”

SALON: Society is a type of family. Leaders are fathers, mothers, and other types of parental authority figures. In that role, Donald Trump is abusing the American people.  

GARTNER: Yes, the American people are being abused by Donald Trump. This is a key dimension of sadists. I also believe that Donald Trump is democidal. I would even go so far as to say that he is a “democidal maniac”. If you look at human history there is one trait that all malignant narcissistic leaders have in common: They kill mass numbers of their own people. Why would Donald Trump be any different?

SALON: Beyond mere negligence, much of Trump’s and his regime’s behavior is malevolent. Trump and his sycophants knew that potentially millions of Americans could die but chose to do nothing. His administration has gone so far as to purge people from the government who were trying to warn the public.

GARTNER: Again, that behavior is part of the psychology of malignant narcissistic leaders. They are democidal. Malignant narcissistic leaders kill many of their own people through wars and political terror, but also through willful incompetence. These types of leaders actively do things that will kill large portions of the population. Causing harm is a type of addiction for them. Donald Trump’s addiction is only getting worse.

SALON: What would you tell those Americans and others who would object to your analysis of Trump and the danger he represents? Because many people would protest that whatever Trump’s flaws may be, of course he loves America, and it’s inconceivable we would have a president who would actively seek to harm the American people.

GARTNER: Follow the facts to the obvious and true conclusion. If all the facts show that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist with these powerful sadistic tendencies, this omnipotent destructiveness, where he’s getting pleasure and a sense of power from dominating people and degrading people and destroying people and plundering people and laying waste to people, both psychologically and physically, then to deny such obvious facts is willful ignorance.

Salon: What do you think Donald Trump will do if, shortly before Nov. 3, it appears clear that he is going to lose the election?

GARTNER: Rather than making a prediction as to Trump’s specific actions, it is more helpful to describe the type of actions he will take. Rather than trying to say, “This is the move he’ll make.” Like in a relationship, Donald Trump is the abuser. He is the husband or father who is abusing his partner or children or other relatives. The American people are like a woman who is leaving her abuser. She tells her abuser, “That’s it! I am done with you!” She has her keys in hand and is opening the door of the house or apartment to finally leave. What happens? The democidal maniac Donald Trump will attack us, badly. Make no mistake. Donald Trump is going to find a way to attack and cause great harm to the American people if he believes that he will lose the 2020 election.

​Please read the whole analysis for citations and references at RawStory.com ​

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe
Translated by Libby Meintjes
Duke University Press - Public Culture, Winter 2003 Project Muse

INTRODUCTION
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its [End Page 11] fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

CONCLUSION
In this essay I have argued that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power [End Page 39] of death. Moreover I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. The essay has also outlined some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and has suggested that under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.

Please read the whole analysis for citations and references at Muse.jhu.edu

​
​DEATH BY GOVERNMENT ~ Definition of Democide By R.J. Rummel

Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).

Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes.

Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government.

Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.

Throughout this book a death constitutes democide if it is the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command (as in the Nazi gassing of the Jews). It is also democide if these deaths were the result of such authoritative government actions carried out with reckless and wanton disregard for the lives of those affected (as putting people in concentration camps in which the forced labor and starvation rations were such as to cause the death of inmates). It is democide if government promoted or turned a blind eye to these deaths even though they were murders carried out "unofficially" or by private groups (as by death squads in Guatemala or El Salvador). And these deaths also may be democide if high government officials purposely allowed conditions to continue that were causing mass deaths and issued no public warning (as in the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s). All extra-judicial or summary executions comprise democide. Even judicial executions may be democide, as in the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s. Judicial executions for "crimes" internationally considered trivial or non-capital, as of peasants picking up grain at the edge of a collective's fields, of a worker for telling an anti-government joke, or of an engineer for a miscalculation, are also democide.

I have found that in the vast majority of events and episodes democide is unambiguous. When under the command of higher authorities soldiers force villagers into a field and then machine gun them, there should be no question about definition. When a group armed by the government for this purpose turn the teachers and students out of their school, line up those of a particular tribe and shoot them, it is surely democide. When all food stuffs are systematically removed from a region by government authorities and a food blockade is put in place, the resulting deaths must be democide. Sad to say, most cases of government killing in this century is that clear. The number of deaths will be hazy for many of these cases; the perpetrators and intent will not

After eight-years and almost daily reading and recording of men, women, and children by the tens of millions being tortured or beaten to death, hung, shot, and buried alive, burned or starved to death, stabbed or chopped into pieces, and murdered in all the other ways creative and imaginative human beings can devise, I have never been so happy to conclude a project. I have not found it easy to read time and time again about the horrors innocent people have been forced to suffer. What has kept me at this was the belief, as preliminary research seemed to suggest, that there was a positive solution to all this killing and a clear course of political action and policy to end it. And the results verify this.

It is true that democratic freedom is an engine of national and individual wealth and prosperity. Hardly known, however, is that freedom also saves millions of lives from famine, disease, war, collective violence, and democide (genocide and mass murder). That is, the more freedom, the greater the human security and the less the violence. Conversely, the more power governments have, the more human insecurity and violence. In short: to our realization that power impoverishes we must also add that power kills.

Through theoretical analysis, historical case studies, empirical data, and quantitative analyses, this web site shows that:

Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations and international treaties, and is the heart of social justice.

Freedom is an engine of economic and human development, and scientific and technological advancement.

Freedom ameliorates the problem of mass poverty.

Free people do not suffer from and never have had famines, and by theory, should not. Freedom is therefore a solution to hunger and famine.

Free people have the least internal violence, turmoil, and political instability.

Free people have virtually no government genocide and mass murder, and for good theoretical reasons. Freedom is therefore a solution to genocide and mass murder; the only practical means of making sure that "Never again"

Free people do not make war on each other, and the greater the freedom within two nations, the less violence between them.

Freedom is a method of nonviolence--the most peaceful nations are those whose people are free.

The purpose of this web site, then, is to make as widely available as possible the theories, work, results, and data that empirically and historically, quantitatively and qualitatively, support these conclusions about freedom. This is to invite their use, replication, and critical evaluation, and thereby to advance our knowledge of and confidence in freedom--in liberal democracy. It is to foster freedom.

Dedicated to those who are not yet living in freedom, who suffer repression, regime-made famine, torture, gulags, and fear for their lives and those of their loved ones; and thanks to the internet, have reached this home page.

Professor Rummel passed away on March 2, 2014. His "Powerkills" website will be maintained by the University of Hawaii Political Science Department.

​The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.  R.J. Rummel's Death By Government, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994 NOTES

​Please read the whole analysis for citations and references at  https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html

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We are preoccupied with the novel coronavirus and its global wake of death. ​Today is Earth Day and our environmental problems have been overshadowed by our woeful unpreparedness to face this pandemic which we have been warned about for years. "Here are 11 people who seemingly predicted the coronavirus pandemic." APR 2020 BusinessInsider.com ​The chart to the left is from the new Biological Conservation paper which outlines four broad, global problems leading to insect loss.

​In FEB 2019 Vox.com abbreviated the report: "When insects go extinct, other species follow. 
The researchers in the new Biological Conservation paper outline four broad, global problems leading to insect loss. They won’t surprise you. Habitat loss as a result of human development, deforestation, and the expansion of agriculture. Pollution, particularly via pesticides, fertilizers, and industrial wastes. Parasites and pathogens like the viruses that attack honeybees and invasive species. Climate change. In summary: Human activity is to blame." 

​And if we don’t act, the researchers give a stark warning: "The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least, as insects are at the structural and functional base of many of the world’s ecosystems since their rise at the end of the Devonian period, almost 400 million years ago."

Earth Day 1970 - 2020: 50th Anniversary
American Museum of Natural History

Time Will Tell 
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In the ensuing years, our population has doubled. We eat more meat, fly more often, use more energy, and produce more stuff. Fortunately, our understanding has also changed. Decades of careful observation have given us a detailed picture of how Earth is responding to our habits. The past is clear. What will the future look like? It depends on the choices we make today. Watch our Climate Change Playlist (from the American Museum of Natural History) to understand what and how we're learning about anthropogenic climate change.

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Some of My Easter Reading in Order of Publication Date

​The Search For Nijinsky's Rite of Spring (2004 Documentary)

While we wait for the March housing data to be released, here is an updated Confirmed Cases and Deaths by Country, Territory, or Conveyance of the "top" 19 countries from WorldoMeters.info. Canada at this time of writing (MAR 31, 2020, 11.45am PST) reports the following: 8467 total cases​ 1019 new cases 95 total deaths 6 new deaths 1162 total recovered 7210 active cases 120 serious critical cases 224 total case per 1 million population 3 deaths per 1 million population First reported case: January 24, 2020 ​We should of course be "physical distancing". We can still socialize electronically and in person in our virus free local environments. In these two photos I am shopping for a digital thermometer and isopropanol which I did manage to find and buy.

Understanding the Virus that Causes COVID-19, Animation

Bill Gates makes a prediction about when coronavirus cases will peak

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Covid-19 MAR 27, 2020 The incubation period (time from exposure to the development of symptoms) of the virus is estimated to be between 2 and 14 days. A very long incubation period could reflect a double exposure. 24 days represented an outlier observation that must be taken into consideration in the context of the main finding of the World Health Organization study. CLICK CHART TO ENLARGE

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The February housing data for Calgary shows that the average price of a condo is trading at prices from nearly 15 years ago and two and a half years before the July 2008 WTI Crude Oil peak. ​The Canadian Federation of Independent Business released their March 2020 "Business Barometer" suit of charts: ​"The index now stands at a record low 30.8, well under the previous lows near 39 recorded in both the 2008 and 1990 recessions. The scale of the negative perspectives appear pretty consistent across industry groupings..." Earlier this year, Jason Kirby via Macleans.ca released their 6th annual "Most important Canadian economic charts to watch in 2020." Note the Calgary trend changes unfolding since February 8, 2016 when WTI Crude Oil prices hit USD$28.49. CLICK CHART TO ENLARGE

Alberta’s Double-Dip Recession?
"Oil producing provinces have faced a difficult five years. Low oil prices cut into revenue, investment, employment, wages, and overall economic activity. Government budgets are increasingly strained, unemployment is stubbornly high, social assistance enrollment is at record highs, and the end is not yet in sight. In fact, a second recession might (just might) be in Alberta’s future. As this graph illustrates, my index of monthly economic activity in Alberta has been negative for most of 2019 – signalling a possibly contracting Alberta economy. A worsening economy in Alberta affects employment and growth throughout Canada, but the ripples go far beyond the dollars and cents. Rising frustration and disappointment are increasingly directed at perceived failures of the federal government and Alberta politicians are happy to oblige. A second recession may exacerbate these tensions and further strain Canada’s confederation. For these reasons, and more, this indicator will be one to watch in 2020." Chart above thanks to Trevor Tombe, associate professor of economics, University of Calgary and research fellow at The School of Public Policy.

CANADIAN EMPLOYMENT RATES
in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and their Provinces
See also my previous posts with charts related to DEFLATION and what to expect:
Asset Prices Drop
Investment Spending Drops
The Savings Rate Rises
Debt Delinquencies Rise
The Credit Boom Turns to Bust 

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ITEM: "People are hitting the wall’:
Delinquency rate highest since 2012  GlobalNews.ca MAR 5, 2020

"Canada’s so-called 90+ day delinquency rate on non-mortgage payments climbed to 1.2 per cent in the final three months of 2019, an 11 per cent jump compared with the same period in 2018, Equifax data shows... Delinquency rates had been “marching higher” for much of 2019 and will likely keep going up in 2020... The trend is strongest in British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta, where delinquencies are now back above their 2016 level."

Canada sees rising numbers of consumers defaulting on their debts even amid a healthy economy and solid job market. Consumer insolvencies were up more than 10 per cent in January 2020 compared to the same month in 2019, according to the latest figures from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.

Scott Terrio, manager of consumer insolvency for Hoyes, Michalos Licensed Insolvency Trustees said "much of the debt he sees from clients filing for insolvency is much older than two years... "We’ve run up debt for most of a decade... Some borrowers are simply getting to the end of the runway... That may be especially true among renters, who, according to Terrio, made up more than 90 per cent of debtors who filed for insolvency with Hoyes Michalos over the last couple of years... While sky-high home prices allow many homeowners in expensive cities to keep borrowing against their home equity, renters have fewer options to keep borrowing and consolidate debt."

“Outside of mortgages, we have seen a significant pullback in demand for credit,” Johnston noted. Consumers, Terrio said, are “entering a period here of self-policing.”

ie: DEBT REVULSION

​"Deflationary Spiral" - The Khan Academy
"EMPLOYMENT DRIVES DEMAND"

​TEXT FROM VIDEO ABOVE Created by Sal Khan: So in a normal economy we know that employment will drive overall demand. If we have high employment or low unemployment, then people are going to have more jobs, and they're going to have higher wages, and that will have higher demand. Or if the other way goes around, if they lose their jobs, demand is going to go down, wages will start to go down, and people aren't going to have money in their pockets. So employment drives demand. And we can view the demand-- and I'm making a huge simplification here-- demand will drive production. Or maybe we could think of it as supply. It'll drive supply, and it can also be a driver of price. And of course, there is a little bit of a negative feedback loop for both of these things. If the demand is high and the price goes high, that might produce a little bit of negative feedback on the demand. Instead of an arrow, this line here means negative feedback. I'll put a little negative sign here. And let's say the demand is high and then the supply goes high. Well actually, the supply going high would drive the price going down. So maybe I should draw a negative feedback like here. High supply would mean lower price. But that's not what I want to focus on in that video. And we could keep adding more lines here. But this is roughly simple take on it. But the general idea is supply and price will then drive corporate profits, or just profits in general, even for an individual business owner. And then profits are going to drive employment.

Now, let's imagine a scenario. We are in a bad economy, maybe a depression-like economy. So in that situation, you could start really at any point in this circle. I'll just start at employment. So let's say employment is really low. That's going to make demand really low. And if demand is really low, then supply is going to go down, and price is going to go down. And then that's going to make profits go down. And that's going to make employment even lower. And so what we find ourselves in this kind of recessionary or depression area environment, this would be called a deflationary spiral. And it's a spiral because a bad economy is driving lower prices, which is in turn driving a bad economy. And to make matters worse, if this continues long enough, or if these price declines are severe enough, you could imagine people saying, look, I have this dollar in my pocket. I'm not going to spend this dollar because, one, I might lose my job at any moment, and I know that that dollar is becoming more powerful, that I can buy more every minute that I wait. So as the price goes down, so as all of this scary stuff happens-- so the employment is going down, profits are going down, prices going down-- this makes people not hoard goods the way that they would do in an inflationary spiral. But it makes them hoard money.

​And why it's ultra scary for central bankers or for governments is they start to not have as much control over the economy. They can't just run the printing press and try to stimulate the economy in this situation, because if they did people are so conservative right now-- You could imagine maybe a depression is going on for years and years and years. And let's say that they take some type of a helicopter-- And this isn't how you actually distribute money to the money supply, but it's just to show an extreme example. So they take a helicopter, and they start dumping cash on people. They print cash, and they start dumping it on people. So every man, woman, and child in the country gets a $10 bill. Well, if people are really scared and really afraid, they're just going to take that $10 bill and stuff it into their mattress, and it's not going to change anything. That dollar isn't going to actually enter into the money supply. The velocity on it will be 0." 

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​On February 25th, The Economist published an article "Single Women are Losing Out in the Property Market" on Gender Gap Wealth with the lead that ​in 2015 women held just 30% of all global private wealth according to the Boston Consulting Group.  The chart presented here, one of many, is based on data from nine million housing transactions in the U.S. between 1991 and 2017 presented in January 2020 by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Kelly Shue of the Yale School of Management in a PDF titled The Gender Gap In Housing Returns.

"Data on repeat sales reveal that women buy the same property for approximately 2% more and sell for 2% less."

THE GENDER GAP IN HOUSING RETURNS
PAUL GOLDSMITH-PINKHAM & KELLY SHUE
January 2020 Abstract

Housing wealth represents the dominant form of savings for American households.
​
Using detailed data on housing transactions across the United States since 1991, we find that single men earn 1.5 percentage points higher unlevered returns per year on housing relative to single women, with couples occupying the intermediate range. The gender gap grows significantly larger after adjusting for mortgage borrowing: men earn 7.9 percentage points higher levered returns per year relative to women. 

Approximately 45% of the gap in housing returns can be explained by gender differences in the location and timing of transactions. The remaining gap arises primarily from gender differences in execution prices: data on repeat sales reveal that women buy the same property for approximately 2% more and sell for 2% less. Women experience worse execution prices because of differences in the choice of initial list price and negotiated discount relative to the list price.

Gender differences in upgrade and maintenance rates, and preferences for housing characteristics and listing agents appear to be less important factors. Overall, the gender gap in housing returns is economically large and can explain 30% of the gender gap in wealth accumulation at retirement.

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​In 2018, female employees aged 25 to 54 earned $4.13 (or 13.3%) less per hour, on average, than their male counterparts. In other words, these women earned $0.87 for every dollar earned by men.

The gender gap in hourly wages has narrowed by $1.04 (or 5.5 percentage points) since 1998, when it was $5.17 (or 18.8%).

The reduction in the gender wage gap between 1998 and 2018 was largely explained by changes in the distribution of men and women across occupations; women’s increased educational attainment; and the decline in the share of men in unionized employment.

The two largest factors explaining the remaining gender wage gap in 2018 were the distribution of women and men across industries, and women’s overrepresentation in part-time work. These were also the largest explanatory factors behind the gap in 1998.

Similar to other studies, nearly two-thirds of the gap in 2018 was unexplained. Possible explanations for this portion include gender differences in characteristics that were beyond the scope of this study, such as work experience, as well as unobservable factors, such as any gender-related biases.

New Study Provides Clearer Look at Canada's Gender Pay Gap
Global News, January 14, 2020

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"Last year (2019), nine Narwhal companies raised rounds exceeding $131 million CAD ($100 million USD). Over the last three years, the financial velocity required to make the list and the average financial velocity of companies on the list has increased, meaning companies are moving faster in securing capital. The number of Narwhals on track to become ‘Unicorns’ has also grown from seven to 42." Charles Plant, the founder of the Narwhal Project, FEB 4, 2020.

Three years ago, we at the Impact Centre initiated the Narwhal Project to conduct research to discover the root causes of Canada’s challenges in creating a world-leading innovation economy. We thought it would be useful at this juncture to summarize our findings. This Report  highlights some of the issues we have identified.

For fifty years, the federal and provincial governments have been spending billions to improve our innovation economy, but without performance improvements. The usual discussion is centered on Canadian businesses and their lacklustre performance on research and development (R&D) and intellectual property (IP) protection. In addition, our productivity has lagged relative to the US because of insufficient investments into productivity-enhancing technologies, along with the lack of available capital and talented people to grow technology firms.

But we believe that a critical challenge is our inability to scale companies to a world-class size. Larger companies boast several advantages. They have greater revenue per employee, pay better salaries, undertake more R&D, and take out more patents.

We lack large companies, particularly in the technology sector. We have only one Unicorn (with perhaps another one qualifying but not listed as such at the date of this publication) compared with over 150 in the US. Few tech companies in Canada grow large enough to go public. This means less R&D, fewer patents, and, ultimately, lower income per capita and productivity.

Perhaps the solution to our innovation challenge is not more R&D and more patents, but rather scaling and building of companies. But why are we challenged do this in the tech field? What we have found is that:

• Few Canadian companies are founded in large consumer markets capable of generating the desired scale.
• We invest less per company relative to the US.
• Canadian firms spend less on marketing and sales (M&S), activities that are critical to building the customer base.
• We have fewer qualified people in marketing functions.

The underinvestment and underspending result in lower growth rates for Canadian tech firms compared to their US counterparts. Fundamentally then, Canadian firms do not look as attractive as potential investments due to slower growth. Because of this, they do not attract large amounts of late-stage capital and are often sold before they can scale to worldclass size.

All of these factors converge to create serious barriers to growth of Canadian companies, thus necessitating smarter and more strategic thinking about how we will overcome these challenges.

Full Report Here

Top 3 Technology Trends for 2020 | YBF Ventures