Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 5:10 PM, for 10h 04m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred eighty-second day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson are killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
Recommended for reading in full —
Mitchell Schmidt writes The Iowa caucuses are Monday, but in 2020 the center of the political universe is Wisconsin:
All eyes might be on Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Monday, but political experts say the road to the White House this year will likely once again run through Wisconsin, where the battleground state’s sliver-thin margin could tip either way and potentially decide the 2020 election.
Wisconsin is the only state listed as a toss-up by all three of the major national political prognosticators, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Cook Political Report and Inside Elections.
“Wisconsin could be the decider,” said Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “There are only a handful of states that are truly competitive and that switch sides with any regularity, and Wisconsin is one of them.”
Wisconsin’s significance in the presidential election, where close to a dozen Democratic candidates are vying for the nomination and their shot at derailing President Donald Trump’s re-election plans, comes down to the Midwestern state’s nearly even partisan split.
Desmond Lachman writes This Too Shall Crash:
During the 2008 global financial market meltdown, we were painfully reminded of the teachings of the late economist Hyman Minsky, the renowned expert on financial and credit market cycles. Minsky never tired of warning that credit bubbles and prolonged bull markets generally end in epic economic and financial market collapses.
Evidently President Trump and his economic team have either never been warned about “Minsky moments” – sudden, drastic collapses of asset values following prolonged growth — or else they are making the classic mistake of thinking that this time will be different. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why, 10 months before the election, President Trump is placing a booming stock market and a strong economy at the front and center of his re-election campaign.
There can be no doubt that we have been experiencing a global credit market bubble that would have made Minsky shudder – one that an unprecedented and prolonged period of ultra-easy monetary policy by the world’s major central banks helped to inflate. Indications of this monetary largesse can be found in the world’s four largest central banks’ balance sheets, which together have increased by a staggering $10 trillion.
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Minsky taught that markets and politicians have short memories and that they repeatedly delude themselves into believing that this time will be different. Sadly, once again he is being proved correct. President Trump is giving too much prominence to the stock market in his re-election campaign. Today’s market exuberance – and the political exuberance it begets – are foolish in the face of mounting economic and political risks.