"Cal State LA offers segregated housing for black students"

‘A safe space for Black CSLA students …’

The arrangement comes roughly nine months after the university’s Black Student Union issued a set of demands in response to what its members contend are frequent “racist attacks” on campus, such as “racially insensitive remarks” and “microaggressions” by professors and students. One demand was for a “CSLA housing space delegated for Black students.”

“[It] would provide a cheaper alternative housing solution for Black students. This space would also serve as a safe space for Black CSLA students to congregate, connect, and learn from each other,” the demand letter stated.

The newly debuted Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community “focuses on academic excellence and learning experiences that are inclusive and non-discriminatory,” Cal State LA spokesman Robert Lopez told The College Fix via email.

Overheard At Reuters

'We have to make the effort to explain how we want to shape globalization in a fair way'
~German Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel, right after calling Donald Trump a threat to peace and security. Link

You have the floor, dude. Please explain.

"Bernienomics 101"

Megan McArdle: The day after Christmas, Bernie Sanders asked a question on Twitter: “You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”

Finance types may snicker. But I’ve seen this question asked fairly often, and it seems worth answering, respectfully, for people whose expertise and interest lie outside the realm of economics.

The short answer is: “Loans are not priced in real life the way they are in Sunday School stories.” In a Sunday School story, the cheapest loans would go to the nicest people with the noblest use for the money: single mothers who need money to buy their kids a Christmas present, say.

That’s splendid for the recipient. But what about the lender? Let’s say you had $150 that you really needed to have at the end of the month, say to pay your rent. Would you want to lend it to the single mother whose income is stretched so tight that she needs to borrow money for Christmas presents, or would you want to lend it to some heartless leech of a securities litigator with an 800 credit rating who happens to have left his wallet at home? C’mon. You know the answer; you just don’t want to say it. If you really need the money -- if you cannot afford to turn your loan into a gift -- then you lend it to the better credit risk with the higher income, not the person who may find themselves too short to pay you when the loan comes due.

In aggregate, most of the money in your savings account is loaned out using this cold calculus, and unless you could afford to have that contents of that account suddenly vanish, you want it to be. That’s why poor people, on top of all the other unfairness heaped upon them, pay higher interest rates. And that is why secured loans, like mortgages, get lower interest rates than unsecured loans, like credit card balances and student loans. (read more)

Via Instapundit

And Forgive Us Our Debts As We Forgive Those Who Debt Against Us*

The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.~T.H. Huxley

Overheard at Lem's:

Rhythm and Balls said... 

Democrats almost consistently bring debt down. Republicans ever since Reagan almost consistently raise it.  

December 18, 2015 at 8:53 PM

As proof, the author linked the following chart:

link to original

So far, so good. But I wondered why the Obama years were so truncated and so I went looking for more recent data:

link to original

I will leave it to you geniuses to explain away the "hockey stick."
____________________

[Added, 6 PM PST, December 19, 2015]:

Rhythm and Balls said...

And yet, she will become POTUS because Americans know that her lies are not as dangerous as the lies that Republicans can't stop telling themselves. See Chickie's new, selective disregard for facts in a later post comparing 1990 to 1941 if you want to see evidence of that.

December 19, 2015 at 11:14 AM

Apparently, the author misunderstood what I did with the charts. I used the second chart to show the astonishing growth in debt under the Obama Administration. I knew that it had spiked, and had approached FDR levels (and yet, we never saw FDR-like performance, did we?).

It seemed rather obvious to me that the data presented in the second chart augments the data in the first one; it doesn't supplant the first one. Plotted together, the deficits run by FDR and by Obama would look like sharp spikes at both ends of a hypothetical chart spanning the years 1932 to 2015.* Such a chart would still undermined the author's hypothesis that "Democrats almost consistently bring debt down. Republicans ever since Reagan almost consistently raise it."

Quarrel Est Demonstandum

"Swiss bank will go where no retail lender has gone before"

"...will begin applying negative interest rates on individual clients."

The Alternative Bank Schweiz (ABS) caused shockwaves with a letter sent to all clients in mid-October informing them that it would begin imposing interest charges on deposits in 2016.

For current accounts, the bank said it would impose a -0.125-percent rate, while slapping a -0.75-percent rate on client deposits higher than 100,000 Swiss francs ($98,650, 92,420 euros).

So far individual depositors have been shielded from the burn of decisions by several central banks, including Switzerland's, to introduce negative interest rates to light a flame under growth or ward off unwanted currency investors.

ABS, which grew out of the ideals the 1960's protest movement, justified the unprecedented development by saying it would provide manoeuvering room for financing "meaningful projects".

The move did not go unnoticed in Swiss financial circles as banks in the wealthy Alpine nation search for ways to deal with the negative rates imposed on them by the central bank in January.

"This decision on negative rates is costing us a lot of money -- pretty much the equivalent of our entire annual profit last year," ABS chief Martin Rohner told AFP.

The Swiss central bank introduced a negative deposit rate in January after it abruptly abandoned its three-year effort to hold down the franc's exchange rate to protect exports.

The -0.75 percent rate is meant to dissuade foreign investors buying and holding Swiss francs as a safe haven investment, which had been putting upward pressure on the currency.

Yellen Out Loud: ‘Deficits Will Rise to Unsustainable Levels’

Link

And "I don't know what to call our system."

How about "Ouroboros For Our Time"?

 

Whoa. This Snake Is Eating Itself (Video) 

"NASA Study: "Collapse Is Very Difficult To Avoid"

"As any long-time reader of this column knows, we routinely draw from historical lessons to highlight that this time is not different."

Throughout the 18th century, for example, France was the greatest superpower in Europe, if not the world.

But they became complacent, believing that they had some sort of ‘divine right’ to reign supreme, and that they could be as fiscally irresponsible as they liked.

The French government spent money like drunken sailors; they had substantial welfare programs, free hospitals, and grand monuments.

They held vast territories overseas, engaged in constant warfare, and even had their own intrusive intelligence service that spied on King and subject alike.

Of course, they couldn’t pay for any of this.

French budget deficits were out of control, and they resorted to going heavily into debt and rapidly debasing their currency.

Stop me when this sounds familiar. READ MORE

"[T]here are no safeguards in human nature. We're wired to overreach. Look at history, all the countries that have ever ruled the world - Portugal, with its big, massive navy... All they've got now are salt cods and cheap condoms... And Brits? Now they're just sitting in their dank little island, fussing over their suits." - Limitless (2011)

Who Writes What in Newspapers and Magazines

Economics is a terrible outlier. pic.twitter.com/HYWeEqtMnc
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) March 18, 2014

The awful gender optics at FiveThirtyEight.

It's All Going According To "The Plan"

The only way to achieve greater income parity in this country is to shrink the economy, downsize it, and deflate it. Well, except for the Washington, DC bubble. That must remain untouched and intact as the new shining example on the Hill of the way things should be.

"An ebbing tide strands the yachts first" was the unspoken rally cry.

By the way, I saw it coming:

Consider a spherical, sealed glass container of gas. Further suppose that the gas inside is all the same -like helium in a balloon. Room temperature and stable. Everything equal inside...but it's not. The individual gas atoms in the container have unequal energies because there's a range--a statistical distribution--of energies present: Some atoms move more slowly than others, some more quickly, some much more quickly. Slow atoms may become fast atoms and vice versa through energy exchange. No single atom is "trapped" at low energy. 

How can we make things fair? How can we make it such that each individual (atom) has the same energy as its next nearest neighbor? We cannot. The only way to approach that state is to remove energy from the entire system. Cool the economy. Everything slows. Eventually, approaching zero Kelvin, all motion stops. Of course catastrophic things like condensation (downsizing from gas to liquid) and solidification (loss of liquidity) occur along the way. But the goal is achieved: every atom is finally the same (or nearly the same) energy-wise. Link