Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred seventy-seventh day.
On this day in 1944, elements of Patton’s Third Army arrive to break the Siege of Bastogne.
Recommended for reading in full:
Annie Lowrey asks What Was Steve Mnuchin Thinking? Three Possibilities:
Imagine having a runny nose, itchy eyes, congestion, and a sore throat, and your doctor telling you that you shouldn’t worry about cancer—she consulted her colleagues and they’re certain it is not cancer, and if it were, they could fight it.
This is roughly what happened on Sunday evening, when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put out a press release on calls he held with executives from the country’s largest banks. Mnuchin’s statement assured the public that they had not been having liquidity problems or “clearance or margin” issues—the sorts of things you would worry about if the country were on the brink of a financial crisis.
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Option one: The Treasury secretary was speaking to an audience of one. Mnuchin is under enormous pressure from President Donald Trump, who is upset about the market sell-off and mad at the current Federal Reserve chairman, Jay Powell. The press release was perhaps an attempt to show Trump that Mnuchin was doing something, anything, to talk the markets back into stability.
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Option two: The Treasury secretary believes that the market correction is due in part to animal spirits—animal spirits he could quiet by reminding everyone that the financial system is in fine shape. Perhaps he anticipated further declines in stock prices due to the government shutdown, and wanted to calm the markets.
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Option three: Mnuchin has some troubling insider knowledge, and he wanted to broadcast to the markets that he is aware and in charge. Maybe some financial firms are teetering? Maybe rising interest rates and falling asset prices are straining some important market participants, and it just has not yet become evident in public reports?
(A fourth possibility is that Mnuchin has no reasonable idea what he’s doing.)
Danielle Kaeding reports UW-Extension Sees Historic Faculty Turnover:
The University of Wisconsin-Extension, UW Colleges and UW-Stevens Point saw the greatest rates of faculty turnover in the 2018 fiscal year. About a quarter of faculty left UW-Extension, followed by UW Colleges at around 11.5 percent and UW-Stevens Point at roughly 10.5 percent.
UW-Extension had 45 out of 188 faculty either retire or resign in the last fiscal year, according to UW System’s fiscal 2018 faculty turnover report. Karl Martin, dean and director of Cooperative Extension, said the higher rate of turnover was due to faculty who took advantage of buyouts.
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UW-Extension has been dealing with a $3.6 million cut as part of the $250 million reduction in state funding to UW System under the 2015-2017 state budget. Approximately 90 percent of UW-Extension’s budget funds salaries for employees.