Welcome everyone. Welcome everyone to the Center on Finance Law and Policy's November Blue Bag Lunch Talk. I am thrilled today to welcome Professor Eduardo Montero from the Ford School of Public Policy. My name is Christy Bear and I am the Assistant Executive Director of the Center on Finance Law and Policy. And as usual, before I can let you have what you came for, I have to do a little promo for an upcoming event, which is the Center on Finance Law and Policy is in less than two weeks hosting our second Central Bank of the Future Conference. This year will be co-hosting with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. If you are interested in financial inclusion and monetary policy in Central Bank digital currencies, then you definitely will want to stop in the conference is free. We have a impressive group of a few dozen speakers for this, including Mary Daly from the San Francisco Fed. Sorry, blanked for a second. Assistant Governor Shae Sarri from the Central Bank of Cambodia. Futurist Dr. Claire Nelson and former CFTC chair, Timothy Massott so it should be a good event and I hope that you will attend. I put the link in the chat so that you can see how to register. So without further delay, I want to tell you a little bit about Eduardo Montero, who has agreed to present to us today. He joined the faculty of the Ford School of Public Policy in 2018 as an assistant professor of public policy. He's originally from San Jose, Costa Rica. And he's an economist whose interests include development economics, political economy, economic history, and specifically he studies how variation in institutions, such as property rights and cultural norms, like mistrust, affect development and development policy in Central America and Central Africa. That is a mouthful he's going to make it sound so much clearer than I just did, which is why he is the professor and I am not. At the Ford School Professor Montero teaches microeconomics, applied methods for development, and a class that's called the economics of developing countries. Today he will be discussing one of his papers, cooperative property rights and development, evidence from land reform in El Salvador. And you should have seen a link to that paper in the email that you received advertising this talk. So if you have not had a chance to download it and read it, I hope you will. But if you didn't, good news, he's right here, and he is going to tell you all about it. And so without further delay, Professor Montero thank you very much for being here today. Thank you so much for the invitation and for the really nice introduction. Really excited to present this work to this audience. Just because it's so interdisciplinary it's a topic that I think is quite important for Central America but there's not much work but I think this audience will have a lot of interesting perspectives. So really come forward to that. The project is called cooperative rights and development evidence from land reform in El Salvador. And I'm an economist, and to a lot of economists, when they see this title, so they see cooperatives, they see land reform. The first thought that comes to their mind is an image like this, an image of Soviet collective farm propaganda and a really negative reaction, they're like why are we studying this we know these were a failure, like why are you wasting our time. The definition of a cooperative actually is, this is a firm where workers jointly own and manage production, and they make decisions on a one member one vote basis so they make decisions. Democratically, we see many examples of cooperatives around the world today. So even just in the US. For example, law firms in the US are cooperatives where the partners on the firm, and they share profits. It's a very common type of ownership structure in the US even though we don't think about it as cooperatives. Also in the US in the Pacific Northwest timber production is historically been done through these worker cooperatives as well so there's examples of them in the US. And across the world there's like many other examples we can think about. This is the famous kibbutz system in Israel, and agriculture cooperatives in Latin America. These cooperatives are particularly prevalent in agriculture in Latin America, because of land reforms that happened between 1920 and 1990, that really tried to create these cooperatives. So here's a map of Latin America and countries in dark blue are countries that experienced a land reform that actually created agriculture cooperatives managed by workers. As you can see it affected about half of the countries, even though today we'll be focusing on the country in red. So, just taking a step back, these cooperatives are very common form of organization. And there's been arguments about the pros and cons of this type of organization. So on the pro side, some people have argued that giving workers ownership stakes and decision making rights may have beneficial incentive effects, and also have beneficial equity effects. But there's been a lot of work arguing that this is actually bad for efficiency. This is because profit sharing may also lead to free writing problems. If we're all sharing profits I could potentially slack off and get some of your profits. So while cooperatives might increase equity potentially they decrease efficiency potentially. So, there's been a lot of this theoretical work in economics in particular about how cooperative ownership may differ from outside ownership. So by outside ownership I mean where there's an owner who contracts workers but isn't working himself or herself for equity and efficiency. But there's very little causal empirical evidence. And by that I, what I mean is that it's been very hard to study what are the cause like what how does being a cooperative affect equity and efficiency. The empirical challenge here is that property rights are not exogenously determined. Basically they're not randomly determined. The type of ownership structure that's chosen in different places is affected by a number of other characteristics that we think might affect our outcomes of interest, which is efficiency and equity. So for example, cultural values, Latin America has a long history of cooperative ownership, but not so much perhaps in other places. Capital requirements might also affect whether a firm becomes a cooperative or not, but also things like equity and efficiency. So it means that comparing all cooperatives so non cooperatives empirically won't provide causal evidence will give you correlational evidence but that's not causal, because this comparison could capture the effects of the other differences on our outcomes of interest, rather than ownership differences. So this meant we kind of lack this empirical evidence. For outcomes such as, you know how to benefit workers benefit what are the impacts for development. So what I tried to do in this paper is I asked this question. So what are the impacts of cooperative ownership relative to outside ownership for equity and efficiency. And to try to provide some empirical evidence on this, I examined the land reform program from a salvo in 1980 and take advantage of a particular feature of the land reform, which was that all land belonging to individuals with cumulative land holdings over 500 hectares was reorganized into individuals with cooperatives, but this didn't happen to properties below this threshold. So what I'll do is I'll use our aggression discontinued design, which just the intuition is very simple be comparing properties that are just above and just below this ownership threshold, where the properties above this threshold were reorganized into cooperatives managed by the But the properties right below that are probably quite similar remained in the outside own system. So specifically for the case of a salvo, these are also known as assiendas. And so I'll use this design to examine the impacts of cooperative ownership on outcomes such as the efficiency of production specialization so which crops they decide to produce an equity so how our worker incomes affected. And I think this contributes to three literatures, but I'm open to thinking about other literatures outside of especially like legal, for example, literatures. First, again, I think the main contribution here is providing some of these empirical evidence about equity and efficiency what are the implications of cooperative ownership, we don't have a lot of literature on that. Second, I have a model in the paper that tries to think about the effects of this. These types of ownership structures in settings within complete contracts when I mean by that words it's very hard to write very detailed contracts and that's kind of the case in agriculture and I'll talk about that later. And then more broadly just thinking about the development of Latin America. So historically there's been a lot of these land reforms. As I mentioned earlier, but we don't know what are their lasting consequences. It's also important for development policy today in Latin America, there's a lot of these cooperatives. And it's quite a contentious topic. So I think just providing any improve evidence is hopefully a contribution that might inform policy and I'll talk about that a bit more towards the end. Let me first start off by talking about El Salvador and the 1980 land reform. I'll then go into some of the data I collected. Some of the empirical results, specifically for agriculture. Then I'll go into some focus group evidence to try to understand the patterns I see in the data. And then I'll go over some of the results on incomes for workers. So first on El Salvador, El Salvador is actually the most densely populated nation in Latin America. It's about the size of Massachusetts in terms of area and it has a population about 6.5 million people. And historically it's had very extreme land inequality, even compared to other Latin American countries. So for example, in 1971, just 1.5% of landowners held half of all the agricultural land in El Salvador, it's pretty staggering amount. El Salvador experienced a very brutal civil war from 1979 to 1992 has a history of being run by military sponsored leaders. So since 1932, and a lot of elections with a lot of fraud, where the military would basically commit a lot of fraud. In 1937, there was a fraudulent election, violence broke out. And a coup was undertaken in 1979. There was a government that comprised both civilian and military, and so there was a lot of fighting until 1992. And land inequality was actually called the epicenter of this crisis. For the start of the civil war, there was a large demand for access to land that people are upset about how much land the elites controlled in the country. And to sum up this, on March 5, 1980, the military junta government passed decree 153 on land reform, and this reform focused on the reorganization of these asiendas into cooperatives, and it's supposed to be carried out in two phases. So phase one called for the immediate reorganization of all land belonging to individuals with cumulative land holdings over 500 hectares. Phase two called for the organization of all land belonging to individuals with cumulative land holdings over 100 hectares. And it said a few years after phase one but it didn't specify when that was supposed to happen. And in fact, phase two would never carry it out actually due to organized opposition following phase one. So only phase one happened phase two never happened. Why did the government decide to do this land reform, officially, according to the law, the land reform had just three motives. The first was to try to diminish this land inequality that I talked about and try to increase agricultural productivity. They thought that the asiendas were unproductive and if workers got ownership rights, the agricultural sector would be more productive. Second, it was to try to increase incomes and reduce poverty in the rural areas of the country where poverty is very widespread. And third, it was to try to reduce the privileges for this economic elite that had basically ruled the country for many years. Unofficially though the land reform was also implemented to try to reduce conflict and keep people from joining the insurgency. So that was an important part of it as well but that isn't in the official, you know, law. So what was this land reform plan. So it was actually prepared under immense secrecy and execute a very full velocity is prompted by the unexpected addition to the junta leadership on March 3 of a pro land reform Colonel, Colonel Mahana. And between March 3 and March 6 so really fast in the span of three days. Basically the entire planning and execution of the slander form happened. So on March 4 they called for this inter agency coordination seminar was actually fake. And everyone from the Ministry of Agriculture was important there. And from other institutes these green key cards that barred them from leaving the hotel so they're basically locked in there for two days, and they were given national police escorts everywhere they went. There they drafted the law, they published it on March 5, and then the military gave them overnight transport to the SDS to notify these SDS owners of the reform. I mean, this 500 hectare threshold was just chosen to be a temporary threshold for implementation capacity reasons, they didn't feel like the military didn't feel like they had enough personnel to do phase one and phase two at the same time. So it decided to break it up and they just chose 500. So this is executed. So phase one was carried out immediately after the form was announced. So it was actually published on March 5, and then March 6 was when people were notified. The way this work is that intervention teams made up of agronomists technicians and military personnel were sent to notify the owners. These owners were compensated with these 30 or bonds based on their tax declarations from 1975. They didn't get compensated, but they're pretty upset about the compensation. It's a pretty contentious issue, because a lot of them had been, you know, claiming that their property wasn't very valuable to avoid taxes. So they kind of got a bit upset when these, these bonds were tied to these tax returns, but they did get compensation. And so by the end of 1986. So this is a map of El Salvador, where I'm showing you the cantons of El Salvador, which is the lowest administrative unit of El Salvador, there's about 1400 cantons, and I'm coloring in light blue, the cantons that had at least one asienda become a cooperative. And so as you can see here, the reform is pretty widespread across the country, it wasn't just concentrated in one area of the country. It was pretty widespread so the military went throughout the country to try to implement this, this law. A lot of the properties, the biggest properties happen to be on the coast because that's where the most fertile land is. But they did expropriate land in a lot of other places. So what is, what are the aftermaths of these, this land reform. So for landholders, obviously they weren't happy, it was called an economic, political and social earthquake in the countryside. Landholders saw before their eyes something that they never imagined could possibly happen on lands that they had always governed absolutely. And it's coming from a person in the military who helped draft the plan, but who was very tied with the elite. But what about for workers. So this is from focus group evidence that I did in El Salvador just talking to cooperative members who happen to be alive at the time of the reform just to get their memories of that time. And I heard this like throughout this phrase, they would say to me on March fifth, who ends to sleep as poor colonos or sharecroppers, and on March six we woke up rich as landholders to them it was a shock a complete shock, completely changed our lives. And in fact, since 2013, March six is known as the land reform commemoration day in El Salvador disperse importance in the country's history. So let me tell you a little bit about the data I gathered the empirical strategy I use. So I collected pre land reform, land holding data from the property registry of El Salvador from 1980 right before the reform was implemented. And this includes property size, location in the country at the cancel level, and the name of the owner for every property over 100 hectares so I wasn't able to find records for properties below that only properties above 100 hectares. Then I gather the land reform records archival records from the Ministry of Agriculture, and then this Easter which is the Institute for varying transformation which is created for these land reforms. And they continue lists of the properties that were reorganized into cooperatives with the name of the cooperative, and the name of the old ascenda. And the former owner for each of these. That was reorganized into cooperatives. So I'm able to match these two records. And that allows me to use this regression discontinuity design that I talked about earlier, where the intuition super simple I think economists can often do this they like give fancy names to something that's very simple. So let's be comparing properties just below and above the reforms ownership threshold so these properties in 1980 were probably very similar just one happened to be owned by an owner that had over 500 hectares. Whereas the other one was owned by someone who had slightly below 500 hectares. So here's the empirical specification but I won't go into the details too much but two things that are pretty important to assumptions for this type of design. Are that first owners weren't able to selectively sort by that they weren't able to sell off land and avoid the reform. If that was the case then people right above the 500 hectare threshold could have avoided the reform transferred land etc. This was difficult to do for two reasons one there was a freeze on all land transactions since 1977. So the blind reform like I said happened very quickly. So we can look at this empirically and see is there evidence that there's less, there's fewer properties right above 500 hectares, we don't see that so here I'm showing you the number of properties at each owner land holding them out and we don't see a discontinuity right at 500, suggesting that owners weren't able to selectively sort out to avoid the reform. If they did we might be worried that these owners who sort are different than the ones that don't. So the other assumption is that properties that happen to become cooperatives are very similar to those right below the threshold that remained as us and us. So we can look at this by looking at differences in geography. These are things we think might matter for productivity worker incomes etc. We can compare these things and we see that actually these properties right above and right below are quite similar consistent with the way the reform was planned and this arbitrary threshold being chosen. So on things like land suitability precipitation rainfall elevation, we see that these properties are very similar. We also can look at the suitability geographic suitability for a number of different crops. So coffee suitability shirking suitability and cotton suitability these are the three main cash crops in El Salvador historically cotton is no longer produced very much in El Salvador. But coffee and shirking are in there, big part of the agricultural sector, we don't see differences in suitability there, and then we can look at staple crops and two main ones in El Salvador are maize and beans, and we don't see differences there so what this suggests is that these properties are quite similar. They were quite similar before the reform, except that some became cooperatives and some didn't. Another important thing here though is because this reforms a bit unique is, did they actually enforce this threshold, you can imagine they might not have done that. But we actually do see that they enforce this threshold, pretty well, so not perfectly for sure. But we see here is that holdings over 500 mostly became cooperatives. So what I'm showing you here is on the x axis is the cumulative land holding of the owners, and then the y axis is whether or not the property became a cooperative. And as you can see there's this discontinuity right at 500. So, right as you pass 500 hectares and land holdings, you're more likely to have your property become a cooperative. So this is the variation I'm going to exploit. So some properties were able to somehow avoid the expropriation, for a number of reasons. And I'm happy to talk more about that, but about, you can think about like 80% of the properties that should have become cooperatives became cooperatives. Okay, so let me go into some of the empirical results, specifically for what choice crop choices are they making and their productivity in these crops. So I gathered data from the census of agriculture in El Salvador from 2007. This was the most recent census that they've done since 1971. They just because of the war and a number of other reasons they hadn't conducted. It's conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture of El Salvador, MAG, and it's pretty detailed it contains information on the types of crop produce the area cultivated by crop, and then the amount produced for each crop. One shortcoming is that it doesn't have information on worker hours or worker incomes do something we do really care about. So I compliment this data using household survey data from El Salvador. El Salvador is the proposal multiple in many ways of it. This is a smaller sample size is not a census but it contains very detailed information on the worker incomes hourly wages and their consumption. So I use these two datasets to look at efficiency and equity. So the first result that I found is that these cooperative properties so the ones right to the right of the threshold to vote less land to these cash crops so coffee and sugar cane, but to vote more land to staple crops, maize and beans. So here I'm showing you what are known as the regression discontinuity plots, and you can see there's a big discontinuity and the type of crop produced. When I look at the yields so a measure of the productivity. So how much is produced per area unit of land. I find that cooperatives are less productive at these crash crops as well.  But they're more productive at staple crops actually. So their maize yields are much higher and their bean yields is plausibly higher. And so what does this tell us just to summarize what we found so far. This is relative to Sien does these outside own systems cooperatives owned by workers are more likely to specialize in staple crops over these cash crops. They devote more land to them, and they're actually more productive with them compared to cash crops. I also really understand what was going on here it's an interesting pattern. And so I decided to go to a sovereign 2017 and interview a lot of these cooperative workers and some of the workers to try to understand these patterns and see why are they choosing these crop choices. I think a lot of economists think that cash crops are which everyone should be producing because they're higher returns, but I want to understand from their perspective why they weren't doing that. So let me just talk about a little bit of that and the conceptual framework for the paper. By interviewing a few cooperative members. They really highlighted that this, these stark differences between cash crops and staple crops in terms of contracting and sharing profits. So cash crops, like coffee and sugarcane basically require centralized processing to be valuable. Otherwise they rot really quickly they're not that valuable so think about coffee or sugarcane coffee beans themselves aren't really valuable you need to process them take off the pulp and dry them. Once they're dried, they have to be roasted. And once they're roasted that's when they're valuable. This happens to this only happens in a centralized manner same as sugarcane, sugarcane actually rots really quickly. So you need to process it very quickly. What they told me this meant is that it's actually really easy for them to pay workers based on how much each worker produces, and it's very easy for them to keep track of in this cooperative how much the person contribute to the cash crop production, and then decide to share profits based on that. So they share profits for cash crops. In contrast, for stable crops, these crops are quite different. They're not processed centrally, and workers actually can consume their own production very easily so if I produce maze, I could just set of, you know, bringing it to the central cooperative center. I can just consume it myself. What they told me this means is that it ends up being quite difficult to pay workers based on how much they produce. And it's very hard to share profits here. So imagine we're sharing profits for our maze production. Well, I could just consume some of my maze production and still get the benefits of other people's maze profits. So that means that cooperators are like it's not really worth it to us to try to share profits for stable crops, just because of these differences and this is something that I, they told me a lot about it and it's quite quite interesting to hear them talk about it. So just to summarize what I found here is that cooperatives really do share profits for cash crops, but not so much for stable crops. And this partially drives some of their decisions that they're making. I also learned that cooperatives have to agree to this cooperative constitution, which I think is super interesting too. So I think there's four things. So first is democratic decision making is is a rule. Most decisions have to be made by a one member one vote basis. Things like how much land to devote to different crops. That's often democratic. And a lot of these decisions and how much to pay workers how much profits to share. That's democratic and most of these things require just a majority a simple majority. So there are things that require super majority. So selling land requires super majority so say I'm a cooperative member and I want to sell some of the land. It's really hard to do that I need to get 67% of people to agree. And then there has to be a public government managed auction. This is partly done actually so that the former owners didn't go back and buy the land. So that's why the government manages these options that they make sure the land isn't going back to the former owners. So selling a cooperative actually pretty hard as well. So, because profits are shared across members they want to be really careful about who they let in. So they often require a super majority. In the case of a family member joining after the death of someone, they're only allowed one member for family for sure. The other members can then apply to join. So selling a cooperative is also hard. So if I'm a part of a cooperative and I want to leave. This also requires a super majority. And I lose all value of my membership otherwise so I lose the value of my land. Anything else that's provided like schools or other things like that that are provided by the cooperatives. And so, if we think about this from an economics perspective it's actually interesting design. There's been some work in economics about potential incentive issues in cooperatives because of this profit sharing. There's been three things so the first is adverse selection. What that means is that people who are not going to contribute the good of the cooperative might join just to benefit from the profit sharing. So it's actually kind of addressed by two and three it's pretty hard for people to sell or join. There's also the sphere of brain drain. What that means is that the most productive members might decide to leave the cooperative because they don't want to share profits you know they're they're producing a lot of the, you know, the total amount in the cooperative. But they have to share some of it, they might be better off producing on their own. That's called brain drain, but that's kind of addressed by 24. Then there's this other thing that's known as moral hazard and effort, which is the focus of the conceptual framework which is this idea that profit sharing might lead to me working less hard because I know I'll get some profits from you. So how likely is that to apply in this case, especially compared to outside owned asian thus that also suffer from this problem. So, to try to structure the interpretation. I provide a principal agent models to structure the analysis. So, in the model, again, just cooperatives make decisions via voting workers are the ones who decide. And that's really important. And the outside owner system. There's just an owner. Maximize their own, which is very different. So the model explains what are the implications of these two types of decision making rules and things like choices to two main features. So first is owners can't perfectly observe and contract on effort. They can only contract on output. They can't write contracts that say you have to work this hard.  The small assumptions that workers are heterogeneous. And then crops different their contract ability matching focus group evidence so cooperatives can share profits for cash crops but not stable crops. So outside ownership systems, what this means is that it's really hard for the owner to pay people share cropping contracts for cash for stable crops but not cash crops. So model has two main sets of predictions I'll test in the subsequent analysis. So interestingly, if you're able to specialize in different types of crops, neither ownership structure necessarily reaches what we think about as the efficient outcome. There are two different reasons. In asian does the, there's this motivation rent extraction trade off. The owner wants to increase his own profits. To do so he doesn't pay workers as much as he ultimately should, giving them less than ideal incentives. And so he's trying to balance these two forces I could pay them more they work harder but then I get less profits. So there's this inefficient trade off that happens there in properties. It's the standard profit sharing problem. If people can vote, then you might have too much profit sharing has another a number of other predictions for crop choices productivity and equity. So equity I haven't talked about that. And that's what I'll talk about next, but it matches some of the other results I've shown you so far. So cooperatives are less likely to specialize in cash crops. So cooperatives will specialize much more in staple crops and are really productive at them is because workers really care about them and they benefit from producing staple crops. It also predicts that cooperatives will have higher equity. So there'll be less income spread. So let me talk about these two predictions. So first what are the implications for just aggregate efficiency before going into implications for equity. So when I look at aggregate profits, very little evidence that they're that they're starkly different looking at figure 16 this is showing you the standard measure for the productivity of a, you know, an agricultural firm just profits per Hector in this case but any land unit. We see that there aren't huge differences in their profits, which is really interesting. There's some differences in their revenues per Hector. But what we really care about is profits. This is because cash crops have very high input costs as well. So they might give you higher revenues but also higher costs. And that's why we don't see much differences in profits. And these differences are a bit imprecise. But I think this kind of goes against the stark idea that some economists have which is that these cooperatives are for sure going to be much, much less efficient. It doesn't seem like a strong evidence for that but it's imprecise for sure. And so just to summarize the agricultural results before I turn to worker incomes. I find that cooperatives. If they're able to they specialize in staple crops over cash crops these are workers that these are crops that really benefit workers they can consume their production and workers don't have to share as much of their income for this. And I find inconclusive evidence for aggregate productivity differences, we can think about that as like overall efficiency. And I think the model helps us think that it's probably due to the ability to specialize in different crops. If they just focused in cash crops, probably wouldn't be the case. They just focus in staple crops. Maybe we'd have a different pattern, but here because they can allocate work to different tasks. We don't see these differences which I think is quite interesting. You could apply to a number of other cooperative firms where there's this ability to do different tasks. The labor has a number of robustness checks and extensions that I won't really talk about right now just in the interest of time, but I'm happy to talk about them much more in the Q&A. But let me go to the income results. So income and distributions of cooperative workers. So here we're going to look at how does cooperative ownership effect worker incomes in El Salvador. So to examine this, I use the household survey data. And the survey includes a number of questions on where people live, whether they're a cooperative member or not. And then the number of employees for that property. So I can use these questions to match individuals to cooperatives and as in this. And I check the matching using some household surveys or actually do have the property and cooperative name where they work. The caveat here is that it's a smaller sample properties in the census the census includes, you know, like 98% of properties in El Salvador but it doesn't the household survey doesn't include that. So that's just the caveat, but turn to the results. In column one, I'm showing you differences between cooperative workers and Asienda workers today on their earnings per capita in the previous month in dollars. So here, we're finding that cooperative workers on average seem to have make $50 more per month than Asienda workers, which is actually a really large amount because in these areas, individuals make about $100 a month in agriculture. There's a pretty stark income effects they're a bit imprecise, but they're pretty large. And turn to the distribution here measuring the spread of income so let's compare all workers in a cooperative and find out how spread out their incomes are same thing for Asienda workers. You find that cooperatives have less spread out income so more equitable income so not only do they have higher incomes, they also have more equitable earnings, which is really interesting. This doesn't take into account the earnings of the owner for the Asienda us, but it does show you that the workers so the people actually doing the production have higher and more equitable earnings. And we can try to dig into this a bit more and see who benefits the most from cooperatives. Low income workers in particular or is it like high income workers in particular. And so here we're looking at quanta estimates. What that is is split all the workers by their income earnings and look at cooperative versus Asienda workers for low income workers and go off the quanta. And as you can see by this estimate, it's very positive for low quanta and then zero for high quanta and perhaps somewhat slightly negative. What it suggests is that cooperative ownership really benefits the low income workers, the most. This is very consistent with this idea that cooperative share income across workers. So if I'm a low income worker, and I happen to be in a cooperative with a high income worker. That's really good for me because we're helping each other out we're sharing earnings, which doesn't happen on Asiendas are outside of own firms this type of ownership structures particularly beneficial for low income workers, like the workers in all Salvador, I think that's very important. So, let me just conclude right now. What I do in this paper is I examine the 1980 land reform, I use it as a setting to try to understand what are the empirical differences, causal differences between cooperatives and non cooperatives, and I find three main things. So first is that cooperative ownership induces different patterns of specialization, particularly specializing things that workers care more about or benefit the most from. So in this particular setting what that means is that cooperatives are less likely to specialize in cash crops and more likely to specialize in staple crops where workers are the residual claimants. I don't find strong evidence that cooperatives are less productive. So not strong evidence on efficiency, but do find large impacts for equity so cooperatives tend to have higher and more equitable incomes. And I think these these results are potentially informative for cooperative policies more broadly. We don't know very much about cooperatives I think people have very strong gut reactions about cooperatives. But it's very important for policy to the point that the United Nations for example deemed 2012 the international year of cooperatives for their potential to help low income workers, but also did note that there isn't a lot of evidence on this. So just providing something that helps helps us understand when our cooperatives good or bad where their impacts on workers can potentially be informative. Thank you. That's all I have in terms of the main presentation, but I'm really looking forward to any questions and and comments as well. Thanks. Terrific. Do you want to stop sharing screen and then we'll kick it off, Professor Yang, do you want to go first. You're muted. Sorry, Professor Yang I was trying to call on you. Go ahead. Great paper. Yeah, so this is, it's striking that there's not not an income difference that you're finding. And I guess, you know, I interested in what you think about, you know, just the broader impacts on life satisfaction. When you think about non pecuniary being in a cooperative versus being a Hacienda worker. Certainly, I think I would presume that people are happier. All things equal. Yeah, being a cooperative member, you know, part of the decision making structure of the enterprise versus just being an employee or a tenant farmer.  What your thoughts are on that and whether there's any way you can measure, you know, sort of broader life satisfaction like just the phpm survey have a question along those lines. Yeah, no, that's an awesome question. Thank you. The HPM doesn't have a very good question on that they have questions on consumption. I also find positive effects on consumption, which you would expect just given the income levels. But I can tell you from just some like focus group evidence, I think you're right like, I don't speak to this but speaking to corporate workers there they there's a lot of pride and owning and making your own decisions which I don't think that's captured and being an Asyanda worker. And I think that's critical. And that's one thing that interested me interested me a lot originally in this project was thinking about the differences and how they see themselves, like sense of self and agency just to get very good data on that. I think that's definitely the case. You could potentially imagine that very productive Asyanda workers are happier like if they're, if they don't have to share income, but you're very productive in an Asyanda you might be better off potentially because then I don't have to share income, but that doesn't capture these non-procurenery things that you're talking about the ability to make your own decisions to feel part of a community I think that's something that they talk about a lot that they're in this together that they can help each other out during shocks. And that's something I don't look at in this favor too much but it would be very interesting to see like workers in both types of properties were after facing shocks. My sense is that there's so much more resilient in cooperatives because they come and help each other out, share income which you wouldn't also have in an Asyanda and that's hard to value gives you utility if you're risk averse, which we think people are, but that's hard to capture, you know, in surveys or something but yeah I think there's a lot there that would be super interesting like these other outcomes. So if you want to ask questions, otherwise just raise your hand and otherwise you know I have questions. So I thought it was so interesting when you were talking about how people went like overnight boom they became landlords. And then when you were spelling out the differences between staple crops and cash crops and talked about the processing now I don't know what's involved in making coffee, or in making sugarcane but my immediate thought was, well, there's really some equipment that would need to that you would need and so you didn't go where I thought you were going to go, which is like oh well now you need the capital to be able to buy the equipment to process these crops and so I'm curious if you if capital factors into it or if you looked at that. Absolutely. I think that's an important part of potential difference between just broadly cooperatives and outside owners, like, it's hard for workers, especially in the setting to gather capital you would think. I think one thing that are yes two things are important in this setting is like you said the, the reform happened very quickly. So kind of like overnight, which meant that workers were owners weren't able to like take their processing capacity with them or destroy it and a lot of other land reforms, like if the reform was announced people are like okay I'm going to take the important parts of production. So I meant that mostly the cooperatives already had some infrastructure so they didn't need to raise capital for that infrastructure. Historically like the big infrastructure now there could be differences in credit access today, which could drive the effects. But the important thing in El Salvador is, so in this in the data, there are no differences in credit access. And the reason is that the cooperatives in El Salvador actually can use their land as collateral as as like the cooperative as a whole. So I think that's different than some settings where you can sometimes can't use a firm as collateral here because it's land, they can, you know, access loans, actually very good loans from banks and stuff, using their like pledging their land as collateral and there are because prices of agricultural commodities go down, but if that's a default on loans, this also happens in Aciendas, but they do have access to credit here through that mechanism which might not be the case for cooperatives and other settings where you can't you know pledge land as collateral. I think that's an important thing. I do think credit access is huge if you're thinking of like expanding a policy like this to other types of industries. Workers might not be able to raise credit. They might be constrained and that might be another reason for differences. So I think that's critical question I think the setting of El Salvador is interesting for that reason land in particular but I think you're right like that's specific to this setting. Interesting. Amy and then Triana. Hi, thanks for a really good presentation. Thanks. I had a question actually very similar with respect to infrastructure. The reason that I ask is because I was recently in El Salvador and Guatemala also do reviews and I spoke with just a couple of cooperatives and certainly not about these topics. But something that consistently came up is that they often were receiving external assistance for these kind of hard infrastructure inputs. So those processing pieces farm to market roads. And those were allowing them to start to make some of that transition from kind of more stable crops to more cash crops. And I suppose I was interested if you see that that's kind of, you know, maybe just this kind of random noise or if you think that there's any sort of role that might be played that cooperatives are going to qualify for you know this type of assistance to potentially increase productivity, whether it be you know nationally some sort of regional assistance or even kind of international assistance or whether his cooperatives and qualify as he had is obviously not. And I'm interested in whether you see that you know that potentially plan you will and give it totally similar. That's a really interesting question. Oh, thank you. Thank you on about it for a while but it is the case that like international organizations are quite especially in El Salvador interested in these cooperatives a lot, and they do get access to that so in the census data there's a question on, do you get help from NGOs and I mean there's a there's a jump there. So cooperatives are more likely to help from NGOs today, compared to us in this. So yeah I think that's definitely the case. I'm not sure how. So I think one thing I've done is look at the cooperatives that don't get NGO assistance, and I find similar patterns there. And that to me suggests that maybe this these NGOs are helping but they're not drastically changing their decisions. Because you're right it's a lot of it's kind in some ways I was I thought about a little bit like getting credit access another way to get credit really cheap credit, you know, because it's like input assistance or things like that. Something that they did talk about a lot and do you know this much more than I do is they're, they're able to like get access to inputs and things like that that they need up for the further farms. And sometimes through NGO help but also through banks, but what they complain a lot about is like roads and road maintenance. So it's things outside of the cooperative I think they're, they struggle with that I mean historically there's reasons for that so the government. That's it go over and after 9092 after the Civil War was very right wing. And they were really against these cooperatives. They are actually, they didn't invest in road maintenance and reasons with more cooperative and stuff like that so I think I think there are these political forces at play as well. In 2013, though, another government doesn't want any other government to go over. That's more amenable to these cooperatives and has helped them out a lot so they say things about a much better but I think there are these ideology forces at play here, for sure for things like road building and things like that. There's a think about a bit more how to test that yeah. Brianna. Hi can you hear me. Yeah, so I was thinking about the heterogeneity of like geography no salad and how that might affect like the proportion of lands like below and above the thresholds and how that might affect like the concentration of asiendas and cooperatives in different areas and whether that had an effect in terms of like, maybe if there's a higher proportion of cooperatives in some areas maybe they'll like they'll be like increased production or because of like, like network effects and maybe the sharing knowledge or whatever or not and whether you saw something like with that or whether you studied it or whether you had enough information to analyze it. Yeah, no that's a great question I think I mean I do think that there's a lot of these network effects for agricultural production like you really learn from what people around you are doing. In a lot in general, the coastal areas I mentioned this really quickly. Those are the sugar cane areas, except land is super suitable for sugar cane. There was a lot of cooperatives there, but they choose not to produce as much sugar cane. So, so they happen to just the case of sugar cane specifically. What I would say for a bit is, you would think that would go against some of the findings, they happen to be in areas with a lot of sugar cane production around these networks of sugar cane producers, but they choose not to produce as much they definitely produce it but not as much. So I think that was interesting to me that that kind of suggested it's always for sure. It's not as driven by by geographic, like geographic location, a little bit more by these workers making these decisions like we'll produce but we also want to produce some other crops for ourselves, which I think it's kind of what's going on. Coffee is a bit trickier because coffee. It really depends on the altitude so like even in a like a small region, like, like really tiny region, there's so much variation in coffee production quality because it depends on the altitude but also the shade and like a number of other factors. I have to think about how to look at that much more but I have tested whether there's differences in like the altitude of these places so elevation, which is really important for coffee. I don't see differences but again that's coffee is very tricky like it you know you could have like a property that's at this level but one that's like that and that one's better for coffee because of the shade and it's really tough. I have to think about that more but yeah just for sure again I think it would it goes in the opposite direction of what I find. I have a question from the chat. Can you say a little bit about how are the original co-op members chosen and relatedly it sounds like they can never leave. Good Lord. Yeah it's not that bad. So just on the first question the original workers or the co-op members originally so the way they did it is that the government got there or the military got there and then just told workers that were on the property so these are Asyandas that are really big so workers often reside on the properties so whoever was residing there that morning and then they kind of just trusted the people so they were like hey you guys are the workers here right now everyone who happened to work on the Asyanda before they're a co-op remember give me all their names but they limited the family members so like then you might cheat and be like yeah yeah my family also works here but they only allowed one family member at a time and then they allowed them to have this voting and let people in so that's kind of how they did it but yeah actually the planners talk about how that wasn't perfect necessarily you could imagine some fraud happening and some people claiming to work on Asyanda that didn't but in theory so it was supposed to be the people who worked on the property before which is nice for the empirics because that means that like the workers on these two types of properties are probably similar so some happened to then own it but there might have been a little bit of fraud I've looked for those records of what the names of or at least I haven't been able to find it in terms of leaving you can leave but you forfeit a lot so yeah I think you're right like that's that's one thing that I think is in the paper I'm not able to study but I think it's really interesting to study is how it might hold back you know migration to the city center if there are opportunities into the capital because I can leave but I forfeit a lot like I forfeit land I forfeit I mean the community I forfeit the profits that were sharing there's a lot of things that might tie I guess some historians have called us that cooperatives tie you to the land. It keeps you in the countryside and that might be bad for the economy moving to something like manufacturing and stuff so I'm not able to study that so much here but I think that is definitely an important mechanism to explore is how it might impede you know migration to city centers or things like that. So it sounds like they're making a lot more money to yeah being a co-op so maybe they don't care like why go to the city if you're making so much more money. Yeah, so something I think is important too is that it's very good for intergenerational ability. So I might, if I'm a cooperative member, it might be hard for me to move to the city because of all these benefits, but talking to a lot of cooperative members there, their kids were often in the cities because they were able to pay for their school there or for the university degree. So they have I have higher income therefore I can pay for better education for my kid. Therefore the next generation might be better off and isn't in the cooperative. So that's a potential benefit so it might restrict migration for the current generation, but actually help migration intergenerational migration and mobility for the next generation. So that's also quite important. So the next question you get the last question unless it's a short one. And then somebody gets to show them no pressure. I hope. Thank you so much for professor. I guess my question was, my question was with one of the transition periods that you were talking about was basically that if a family, a family, if the family of the person and the person passes away, they elect one of the family members to take their place. Has that always been the case. And if somebody doesn't it's even an occasion where they haven't replaced that person with a family member or do they just, and if that doesn't happen to the deep that's he'd open or do they like, is there a particular way to do they select someone to take that particular spot. I don't know. I don't know. That's a great question. And so that varies so much by cooperatives.  So there definitely are cases when I heard about a few examples of this where someone passes away and their family members actually don't want to join because they're in sunset about or you know working somewhere else. And that happens like someone passes away and then there's one fewer member. There's no like mechanism there, like a spot doesn't open up or something. If people want to join them they can go through the standard process but there's no exception made there. So there are cases where someone passes away, either they didn't have kids or their kids and or wife doesn't like they don't want to join or husband don't want to join the cooperative. So that can happen for sure. The thing that's also there's a lot of variation is to say someone passes away. Some cooperatives are like no we're really strict we only let one person in the other people have to go through a very formal process. Other people other cooperatives are like someone passes away we kind of let all their kids in pretty easily you know like there's not this formality of like who's the chosen person you know we kind of just let everyone in but that depends a lot by cooperative and the rules that they have in place. Yeah, some people are like we don't want to do that because like what if they let in their laziest kids you know like there's a whole there's a whole like internal dynamics of what the rules should be but I think there's a lot of various. I think it also actually depends on how tight or close knit the cooperative is like if the cooperative is small and close knit. They often like, like yeah we let everyone's family member in but I noticed in the very big ones. They were a bit more like no no no we really follow this rule they have supply it's very strict. So, yeah, that's a good question. Thank you. Great. Well from here, we are going to wrap up. If we could all take a moment to either push the button or show your video and acknowledge Professor Montero. Thank you very much for coming. And for all the questions is awesome really good questions. I hope you'll come back. We have one more lunch talk of this academic semester, Luke Schaefer will be with us on December 3 from the Ford School of Public Policy. And he is of course, one of the co faculty directors of poverty solutions. So, please come back and thank you again. Thank you. Okay.


Hi shoes seven and big. Okay, so I know I've been in my for a while, but I'm back. Okay, so today I want to tell y'all about Not being so Cleanly, okay ladies when you are in a relationship when you are trying to get into a relationship when you are dating You do not need to be clingy. Okay? This is the first sign of insecurity When a woman is too clingy always wants to call you text you know where you are Wants to do stuff with you. Even if you already have plans tries to get you to break on This is called being too clingy.  Okay, so this sets your relationship up already for lies and trickery. Okay, so When you enter into a relationship or when you first start dating or you're in a relationship You don't need to be clingy. You need to have something to do. You need to have a hobby You need to have friends on your own that are not associated with him or his friends You need a night or you know an activity to do without him at least once or twice a week Okay, you need to not Be all of under him all the time If there's you know Don't always sit by him and cuddle with him sit on the next chair at let him ask you to come over Okay. Oh, why are you sitting way over there come over here? If you're always on him? You know, he can't breathe. He can he's gonna get tired of you faster.  Come over here. Don't don't Get so close to him or he can't even ask you to get closer You know I'm saying because at that point he's probably wishing you would move Okay And a lot of women make this mistake. They are so in love so infatuated So in la la land that they forget that they're smothering someone. Okay, so it is very important ladies I don't care if you don't have plans or not make plans do something by yourself Go to the mall go walk around but do not try to smother this person or this man in the relationship Because that's how it ends fast. Okay, you can't just smother someone with all this attention and expect them to stay Interested, you know for a long amount of time So also if you're one of those ladies that always have to know what your man is when he's doing who he's calling That's understandable, but you don't need to let that be known, you know, if you're gonna Inquire about those things do it in secret. Don't let him know that you're doing it Don't ask him all the time where you are Let him tell you you know I'm saying don't tell him where you are let him ask you.  It's that's what they want to do Okay Usually people that have more freedom or flexibility and not as smothered are more eager to get back To their girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse. Okay, because they don't feel smothered.  They're more comfortable to be on time They're more comfortable to tell you things that you didn't ask and volunteer information and tell you about their day without Fear of you getting jealous and say well, why didn't you tell me and why didn't you invite me? You know, so all this insecurity All this clinginess has to go out of the window if you want a successful relationship with a man, okay?   Have you ready to settle down have your kids move to the suburbs? Go get you an older guy because these young guys. They're not ready to settle down I don't care how much in love you are with them. There's always that freedom that That they crave and they're not going to rush to settle down with someone unless they're desperate and need a place to live Okay Most guys do not mature as fast as women and want to settle down for families They still want to go on adventures have fun. See what else is out there. Okay, they don't have this biological clock like women So they're not in a rush to settle down so Putting that pressure on a younger person is just gonna push them away You know if you're really serious and you're like look I'm 25 26 27 I'm trying to get married go get you an older man at least in late 30s early 40s They're ready. Okay, they've already been there done that You know been to the clubs explored seen options have a good career by now And they're they're ready to go ahead and settle down. Okay And plus their maturity level is probably going to be the same as yours because women do Mature a lot faster as far as you know wanting to settle down get their life at a certain point Okay, so this is like very Important, you know if a lot of people that get married at this, you know, who are the same age or close to the same age You know, it works out sometimes But sometimes it doesn't because you grow apart you want to do different things, you know You one wasn't ready and you know, there's too much um There's like a gap Of you know maturity level one is more responsible than the other So you have to take all that into consideration. Okay, and being clingy you know makes Makes people not want to even be with you.  You want to hold and you want to you feel this urge to squeeze and hug kiss something go get a pen and Spare this person because I have seen this type of thing ruin so many relationships People are very uncomfortable with clingy people and I know I would be you know if Unless I was just as in love and as infatuated and just You know the same type of personality this person was clingy to me and we were clingy to each other That doesn't last very long. Okay, and After that feeling is gone You can't still be there and they don't feel that way.  Okay And then a lot of times they're disappointed they put too much effort into it They put too much stock into it. They put too much planning into it and then they mess it up The man is opposed to chase you ladies. You're not supposed to Do any you know Of this and still be seen as you know Oh, this is the woman I want to marry. She's always over me all over me. She's clingy. She asked me everywhere I go. No, that's not what they're gonna say. They're gonna say dang I need to get out of this relationship so I can be free. I feel like I'm back at my mom's house, you know So ladies give your man space. Okay, if they're gonna cheat they're gonna cheat anyway There ain't nothing you can do about it.  There's nothing they can do about it But if they miss you if they want to see you if they ask where you are if they Say come sit next to me. That means they want you and they're Looking for you and they are asking you to become closer to them instead of pushing you away. Okay, so it's better not to be too clingy In the beginning of a relationship as well as in the relationship If you are codependent, you need to get a pet You need to get a friend because this ruins more relationships than anyone a lot of people. Oh, I can't do this by myself Oh, I need I need someone I need to get it. No, if you're not happy and Fulfilled within yourself, no one will ever make you happy You will always be Have a void in you and you will always be looking for someone to feel it who can't Only you can feel that void and if you look for it by being clingy with someone else, you're just going to be Pushed away even further and your feelings are going to be hurt even worse. Okay ladies, so Don't make this mistake.   That's someone you need to Depend on for emotional support 24 hours a day and always be touching and know where they are, you know that Most parents don't even have that type of close relationship with their kids And then you're gonna put this on some man. That's crazy. You know what I'm saying? You need to be able to let go and trust even though you can't really ever trust anybody you need to at least Give them the benefit of the doubt because they're gonna cheat anyway. They're gonna find a way They will lie to you if they cheat if they don't cheat but What they value is their option and their freedom Not to have to report back to someone or Worry about coming home and getting cussed out because oh, you didn't answer your phone That's crazy. Okay, and let me tell you I'm I'm older. I've been in Relationships. I've been married forever All that where you've been what you're doing. Don't work out. Don't even worry about it, you know Let them ask you that when you walk through the door Flip the script. All right, I'll see y'all on my next video Thank you guys so much for watching if you're new subscribe if you have any ideas for a video topic Put them in the comments and see y'all later. Bye


Yep, there goes Twitter and the reason why of course is you probably know if you've been trying to access your Instagram account or WhatsApp widespread outages and of course those two social media platforms owned by Facebook and how have Facebook shares performed today? Well, not well at all. We've just gone through the close on Wall Street and Facebook shares have actually had their biggest drop. As you can see here 4.89% on the session, it's the biggest decline that they've actually had in an intraday session since November of 2020 and in fact, if we just look at this heat map, there is quite clear distinct sector rotations happening here, which I wanted to talk about a little bit. Why am I doing this briefing now? Well, I'm actually going to be stuck in meetings all day tomorrow and Tuesday. So I thought just given some really interesting moves in the equity space, sector rotations or look at the tech and the Nasdaq 100 futures on the chart. Also want to take a look as well about Bitcoin and talk a little bit as well about the farmer stocks as well as being some interesting movement today, as well as look at the head to Tuesday session. But yeah, just sticking with this this theme here, very similar to what the head of trading peers was covering on the briefings last week. And that is mega cap tech getting a pounding again, technology stocks in general under performing the Nasdaq finished down about 2.2% comparative to losses of just shy of a percent for the Dow and around 1.3% in the case of the S&P 500. Now the underperformance in tech stocks coming as they're likely getting hit the hardest because of higher interest rates means higher discount rates for future earnings. And as summarized quite eloquently by the chief strategist at Deutsche Bank, Jim Reed, he said we have an energy crisis. We've got a supply chain crisis and issues. We've got higher inflation and signs of weaker growth with lots of talk of stagflation. And all of this is what's contributing to particular more magnified weakness. If you like in the technology names on the flip side, though, it's not all doom and gloom read on the board. You can see down here in the right hand corner, energy killing it again, as is utilities at the moment, really bright green spot here in Merck. Also Tesla after their weekend unveiling of those strong delivery results on a record level also helping them buck the trend. But just taking a look here on the rationale, why were energy stocks up again? You can see here, ExxonMobil finished up 1.3, Chevron up 0.4, Conocoa Phillips up 2%, EOG up 3%. And all of this came after WTI crude saw a real breakout day to the upside. You can see here, this is looking on a 30 minute candlestick on front month futures, breakout up through that high that we saw through Tuesday of last week. And we've printed, if we go on a weekly bar here, we're now trading the highest in seven years for WTI crude. You can see here that peak that we had back in July of this year. Also going back to the 1st of October of 2018, and now we've busted through that today, we're now eyeing up levels really next technical resistance not seen for another few dollars away from the current price at 77.60 up at 79.85. Why that level? Well, it starts to bring in some of the cluster of that inflection point from some of the price activity in October of 2014, but also as well starts to bring in some of those relative price points going further back in time. And above there, 83, 84 dollars, really the marker there for the next interesting levels of technical resistance, and then 91.24. And hence the reason why you've had a lot of bullish commentary coming out of a number of big banks. I mean, just quickly to tell you one, Bank of America, they came out last week and they were talking about $100 oil and their bullish view was to do with one gas to oil substitution of up to two million barrels per day due to high gas prices. So switching from gas to oil, given the crisis that we're seeing at the moment, .2, a rising crude demand of up to half a million barrels per day due to the cold winter yet to come. And three, a jump in aviation consumption of up to 500,000 rounds per day for the first quarter of next year due to an air travel boom as the economy continues to reopen. And so at the moment, technical breaches meant that the move got a bit further momentum today, but the upside just continued to look quite bullish here for crude Bank of America. Not the only moment of very bullish forecast at the moment. And a trigger point, of course, for oil today was this was what happened with OPEC. So OPEC Plus recommended producers maintain its schedule of monthly production increases of 400,000 barrels a day. And reason why that was a bullish catalyst was because there was some speculation the group could have opted for a larger hike. And of course, that did not materialize. Now looking elsewhere here, one of the other really bright green spots, one of the day's best performers was Merck MRK. They were up about 2.1%. Why were they up sharply?  And if cleared by regulators, it would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19. Now, as you can imagine, who's not going to react well to that news? Well, it's the other traditional vaccine producers. So the likes of Moderna today were actually down around 11%. Pfizer were down close to 2% on the back of the news. And this was all despite an EU advisory committee earlier today, endorsing extra shots of Pfizer's vaccine for all adults, as well as extra doses of Moderna for those with severely weakened immune systems. The other big pharmaceutical company in the COVID vaccine space, J&J, they're planning to ask US federal regulators this week to authorize a booster shot of its COVID-19 vaccine according to the New York Times as well, just so you're aware. Interestingly though, with this sector rotations here, with everything that's happening, particularly with inflation and higher rate pricing at the moment, really impeding technology firms, really interesting commentary out of Morgan Stanley, they note that defensive stocks should hold up better as earnings revisions start to come under pressure from decelerating growth and higher costs, while financials can benefit from a higher interest rate environment. And we have seen that before today, diversified banks down here in the bottom left, not really outperforming too much, but definitely nowhere near as weak, if anything, they finished positive compared to the tech space. And the other thing here on the other side of the ledger then are consumer discretionary stocks. And according to MS, they say they remain especially vulnerable to a payback in demand from last year's overconsumption. Actually, I think I read that Apple having finished today down of two and a half and now down 11% from their recent peak only a few weeks ago, which means that technically now they're in a correction. If you're looking at the plus 10% move. And so the risk to earnings may also be higher than average for some tech stocks levered to the work from home dynamic, which of course is now fading. And similarly, then that's one of the third points that's really emphasizing the more bullish factor for further reopenings in the economy, which is also going to see a jump in aviation consumption, which boosts oil and lifts oil and gas and energy names in particular. So some interesting take there to be aware of. One of the other things to just quickly mention is Bitcoin eyeing 50,000 for the first time since El Salvador rollout. Let me just quickly flick up the chart and give you a bit of a flavor what we're talking about here. And it's been a bit of a bit of a comeback for the crypto space of late after really September was a pretty bad month overall. And that was really initiated by the checkered rollout of the crypto currency as legal tender that we had at the start of September.  But you can see here the last really three days of price action has really lifted the price. And then this is looking at Bitcoin futures on the daily, you can see here finding resistance right on the 50 K mark. Any breach of that, of course, really opens up technically the potential for a quick run up to that high that we printed on the seventh of set. That would be a 53125. And anything beyond there starts to bring up the highest price levels that we would have seen since April, May time of this year, the bigger broader target being up at around the 60 K mark, which we are printing back on the 10th of May. So not talking up too much at this point, but certainly technically speaking, a breach of 50 K over the 24 hour period could well be quite interesting for Bitcoin and the Bitcoin balls short term. A quick look then to wrap things up and looking at the overnight session, you do have the RBA interest rate decision. So do be aware of that. One thing is that mainland Chinese markets are still closed through Thursday because of Golden Week holidays. As far as the RBA is concerned, they're set to leave its main policy levers as you can see here unchanged, even as surging home prices drive calls for lending curbs. So not expecting too much then the overnight from the RBA going through the morning. These are all final service PMI numbers out of Eurozone. So not expecting too much movement on the back of those. So really, it takes us through into the US afternoon where really the main focal point is going to be ISM services PMI for September. Now the data should benefit from a decline that we've seen in COVID cases with more people engaging in the service sector in the US. And of course, with non-farm parallels happening on Friday, people will be keeping a very close eye on that employment constituent as well, which previously came in at 53 spot seven. Otherwise API energy infantry data coming out as usual later on that evening. Speaker wise, do note the ECB President Lagarde is speaking at five 15 London time. So late afternoon as well and fixed income supply comes predominantly out of the UK's debt management office with the 2025 and 2039 guilt auctions taking place in the morning. And so, yeah, sorry, this was the calendar here that I was just looking at. So RBA overnight, US ISM services PMI tomorrow afternoon. Lagarde is speaking as well just to be aware of and some UK fixed income auctions as well happening. But yeah, hopefully that gets you up to speed. As I said, this will replace the briefing I'd normally do tomorrow morning just because I'm going to be traveling. So hopefully that's useful. Remember, you can always check out my Twitter account for full rundown of everything I've just covered, some of the commentary around the sector rotation play from MS as well if you're interested. Drop me a comment if I can help on anything. Don't forget to subscribe if you're not already done so on the channel. Have a good night and I'll speak to you soon. Take care.


Hello to everyone out there. I am Neeraj Vyasa. I have completed my Bachelor's of Engineering in Computer Science from Swami Karan College of Engineering in Thore. I have been placed in multiple MNCs, namely TCS, Yesh Technology and Impetus. I am currently associated with Impetus. There is a hidden asset which gave me strength while appearing in interviews. I completed one course, Data Science for Engineers from NPTEL IIT Madras. I scored pretty superior marks in it. As by increasing my technical skillset, this course helped me to a great extent in technical interviews. And the certification from the esteemed institute had a great impact with the resume I presented in my interviews. I would like to extend my gratitude towards the faculties and program as everybody has a dream to study from IITs but only some people acquire it. So I would highly recommend to people to enroll NPTEL courses as it can help you enhance your skillset and it would build a better learning foundation. Thank you.


My name is Leanna Marshall. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the program with working with our sisters, your role? Sure. So my role is I sit on the National Collective of Walking Other Sisters so I help support the communities prepare for for having a bundle and so there's a lot of logistical things that I help so you know making sure that they have the financial resources making sure that they have the you know the you know the people that need to be a part of it and making sure that there's there's so much protocol that's involved in it and so ensuring that that protocol is being followed and with Walking Other Sisters there's four like principles that we like to teach people so it's it's in order for the the community to kind of for it like that for that whole process to flow you know we're we're teaching them to practice those principles to kind of help with what they're doing. Right? When Walking Other Sisters came here to Thunder Bay it was myself and Kara Luda who were the co-leads like the co-organizers and so my role here at Thunder Bay was just to organize the community and yeah that I still am processing that whole experience. That's a lot. Yeah I still don't like to go to meetings. So yeah my role was just to kind of make sure everything was on track and that things were being done in the way that they needed to be done so yeah. What what's the group our age or target audience for the Walking With Our Sisters? Everybody. So I guess like with Walking Other Sisters I've never thought of it in a program sense because it's it's not a program but I can see how it would be relevant for this interview in terms of the education and awareness and community. So with Walking Other Sisters it's serving like primarily it's serving the family it's like for creating a space for the families to come and for the community to help support them as they grieve and honor their loved ones and so first and foremost it's about them and then I suppose after that because the community is creating that space for them for the families it becomes about the community and so the community is everybody so it's it's not just indigenous people it's not you know it's it's everybody it's an indigenous led commemoration it's led by women it's led by the grandmothers like the grandmothers in the communities lead the whole thing and so I think that's what makes Walking With Our Sisters particularly unique that there's no formal there's no formal structure and hierarchy which I think is really really refreshing and so we're relying on the knowledge and experience and wisdom of the grandmothers but then also the ceremonial people within the communities which are sometimes women and sometimes men so we're we get to we get to learn from just these amazing people who know so much about about our ways like our ceremonial ways so yeah yeah so it's it's everybody yeah and I'm using the word program but yeah project uh it's art installation um and I think you just kind of spoke to this but I'll ask again but so what is the aim of the project so the aim is to the aim is to create that space for the families there's been so many many people affected by indigenous women getting harder than who are missing and so Walking With Our Sisters came it came from a dream so a lot of like it came like Christie Belfort had a dream that what that became Walking With Our Sisters um it didn't come from her head it came from somewhere else and and so in that vision it really was about creating that space for our people by our people not to do it in a political way not to make it an issue not to have an agenda the the only objective is to create a loving space for the families who choose to come to be a part of it and what's beautiful about it is that how the community does that is it's so multifaceted so you have like the actual vamps that got made by people across Canada and the states and Europe and like even Australia so there you have you see you have like this visual you can this visual representation of love right in the space but then you have all the people's actions that contribute to it as well um all the boring kind of behind the scenes stuff of like getting sponsorship money you know getting the fabric like all of these kind of logistical things that um if you're part of ceremony or actually really that's part of it it's not the actual like you know it's not it's not like I think I'm making this assumption that like when there's ceremony it's like you're waiting for the actual ceremony to happen but for me what I've learned in this whole process is that it's everything that comes before and all how we act and behave in those actions of doing like that day to day kind of logistical stuff that also was a part of it and that energy that we carry in those actions contribute to uh to when we do the actual ceremony for the family this is kind of weird it's so it's um describing some of the different activities that the program participates are involved in oh yeah well this is the beautiful thing about this is that like with walking with their sisters like because it's so like it's completely grassroots um and it has traveled like all across Canada I don't even know how many times the communities get to choose what how how that looks like so of course like when walking with their sisters like the actual like how it's laid out is always going to be the same but what makes it also unique is that the community can do all sorts of events to lead up to walking with their sisters they can do education workshops awareness building sharing circles and honestly like people have gotten so creative with um what they've done they've they've people have made quilts they've done bead ins they've done bead and reeds they've had specific circles for um people who identify as as two-spirited like you name it people have done it and so it's it's it's really quite amazing and even in Thunder Bay like before and after like even now like we like we still do bead ins and we bead like this the idea came from my sister Jean who um like one of the guiding principles of walking with her sisters is when we do anything like anything to do with walking with her sisters whether we're talking about it um participating in it whatever that looks like it's coming from a place of love it's coming from a place of kindness because we don't know who's been affected and so we don't we want to make sure that people get treated in a good way and so my sister thought if we taught people how to bead hearts so just like a melting cloth that was the that was one of the most popular workshops that we do is people bead like these little hearts and um and it's really simple but it teaches people number one like a skill I mean you know my sister's always very practical is that people need to learn how to do stuff so once you learn how to bead like you can't unlearn that and so so there's that function but then there's also like you're building a community and you're also creating a space to talk about issues related to it to like um the violence against indigenous women in particular so it's and so we we still do that after walking with her sisters it's been I think four years um since walking with her sisters came through our community and you can still hear people talking about their experience with it and those in so much of our community got connected because of that event in our in our city which is really beautiful again I feel weird asking some of these but it's like so how do you measure the success of the project we don't we just don't we don't measure because it's not about it's not about it's not about success it's uh yeah I think in this context when you think about that word you can really impact the colonial um expectations and the heaviness of what that word is and so when you think about Anishinaabe way of being the indigenous way of being um it's not about that at all like it's not even in the picture um so yeah we don't we don't we don't measure we used to take numbers like we used to tally the number of people that would come through but I don't even know why we stopped that practice I don't know when we stopped like counting the people that went through because it was just like why are we doing this like walking with their sisters isn't funded by any granting source or funding source there's no government involvement and so it's like yeah it doesn't even none of that even matters so yeah we don't measure the success I guess again I'll I'll ask you what your perspective on indigenous education is like maybe in terms of walking with their sisters I think walking with their sisters is like what it's taught me and my like my personal observations being a part of it is that it's um for me what makes it so powerful is that like you hear these teachings about about our culture and being humble and kind and respectful and ceremony but when you live in a city and you work in institutions and organizations and stuff like like we forget from sometimes day to day like what that actually means and I feel like with walking with their sisters it's actually for those people who don't participate in ceremony regularly walking with their sisters is ceremony and they've provided um I don't want to call it a model but I don't know what else to call it but they've essentially have shown people uh some fundamental values that carry our culture and they've shown people how to connect how to honor to be in ceremony collectively in a really kind way and I feel like the way that they've done that is that there's constant consultation with the older people and with the ceremonial people there's constant communication with one another and every person has a role every single person has something to contribute whether it's teeny tiny or tons none of that even matters none of that even gets judged or evaluated it's just accepted that whatever you can contribute you contribute um and so when I see it move across like I've I think I've been to 10 or more communities with walking with their sisters and so you can really see consistently in every community that it's doing it's doing exactly what it needs to do it's bringing people together in a really loving way it's it's creating a physical space for people to come and to to grieve but it's also showing people that in that grief in our collective grief in our individual grief there's life and and people are able to come to a different understanding about what that means for them and it's you know and that's their own story in terms of how walking other sisters has like how how that's impacted people but it's that model of the grandmothers it's those values those four values can change the world and it's changing the world the values of love treating people in a loving kind way treating people in a gentle manner humility no hierarchy there's no hierarchy it's when you're in a circle everyone is considered to come with to have their gifts and there's no one that has any authority or power and I think there's that like when you kind of deconstruct it and decolonize it in your own head you can really understand like the power in that and how much that has impacted indigenous people and how we are and in institutions right like we're so conditioned to think in this hierarchical way but when you look at it and in a ceremonial way when you look at people as just people there's something really beautiful about that it's beautiful that I can look at you as a woman and as a person not as your history or the job that you represent or how much money you have in your bank account because none of that doesn't really doesn't that doesn't mean anything to me but what it's meaningful is my connection you as a person and if we're all and so when you when you do that with walking other sisters in that space you feel that you feel that you feel that connection with people and then the third principle is ceremony so everything is done in ceremony everything so there's constantly prayers happening tobacco being laid down offerings that are happening giveaways all this behind the scenes stuff from a spiritual perspective is happening to make sure that the people entering into that space are going to be okay but also that the spirits and the women who have passed that they're also okay and that they're going to be traveling in a good way and that ceremonial piece is key to all of it that's the foundation of everything see that automatically is going to connect you to our lands all that automatically going to connect you to the water to the sky to everything everything to the medicines everything and then the last principle is is volunteerism imagine that working to do something just for the love of it because you care not because you're thinking what is the paycheck going to be but working because you want to be able to support families and people who may not have the strength to do that and to ensure that that because as soon as you put money into the equation it changes the energy it changes the dynamic of everything and so right at the get go was like no no one's getting no one's getting paid we don't want this to be about money because this is actually about it's not going to do with money has everything to do with the women who passed and who are who are missing and so when you take the money out of the equation people come to the surface that becomes a total point so those four principles man if we could all practice this every day we'd have a very different world and so that's how i see like walking with their sisters like that's in terms of education in terms of how to educate people through an indigenous lens walking with her sisters has many many teachings to offer in terms of what you're saying and i guess in terms of working with their sisters what do you see indigenous education looking like over the next 10 years i think in relation to walking with their sisters i see more people coming into spaces and coming together and so the grassroots the grassroots movements that are happening right now across not just north america and canada but like i think globally that's taking precedent because there's power in the people and i think more people are waking up to that waking up really and so i think in 10 years from now like what walking with her sisters has provided is a way this is possible this is how you can do it and this is how you can do it in a good way and do it well um so i think in 10 years like there'll be more gatherings and commemorations and but i feel like it's even more than that like i feel like i don't know yet but i feel like there's going to be different things different ways of being together that doesn't include institutions necessarily that we're going to be gathering together in ways that are more intentional that are more about what's what's coming and how to be in a good way like as as people you know yeah i'm not sure like when i think of walking with her sisters i know when when that closing ceremony is conducted i honestly feel like a whole nother layer of something is going to reveal itself and something else is going to happen um and i'm not sure what that's going to be and not i'm not talking about to me personally like i'm talking like you know nationally and globally there's going to be something else that that's going to be bringing people together


When I was younger, I learned about Dungeons & Dragons in the weirdest way. At a very young age, I watched Tom Hanks' classic film, Maze's and Monsters. I have spells. I'm going to fly. You don't have enough points. I am the maze controller. Yes, the movie that involved Hanks playing a deadly knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons, which, by the way, inspired the third season of Riverdale. Millions of fans have their own D&D origin story, the game having been around since 1974 in multiple iterations, and now includes an annual event, which I covered earlier this summer. It draws actors, authors, game developers, super fans, all of them. It's the single greatest gift in my life. It's better than any poker game or any football game or watching football or going to a football... I mean, whatever guys do to socialize or people do to socialize, for me, getting together, gaming, telling a group story for that many years, creates not only a bond with the men or the people you're playing with, but there's this bond with this imaginary world and this creativity that electrifies your own joy. Every Sunday night, the whole world is crammed in front of a television set watching dragons. You know, people fight on top of dragons and then Monday morning, getting on Twitter and letting everyone know what they think about the episodes. You know, and I think that we're a culture that's much more open to this type of fantasy entertainment. There's podcasts, there are live shows, there's burlesque now. Like, there's, right? Like, it's gotten to a point where it's everywhere. And so I think that my theory is that not only is it sexy, but once it becomes ubiquitous enough, people kind of feel like maybe this is okay. And so, like, things have been getting easier and better, you know, on a, on a straight progression. D&D isn't just this. Yeah, the monster manual. Stunches and dragons head book. Do you play? It has become this. A mass of black fur. Just leap out of the woods in your direction. Roland would turn to you and say there are three such creatures stationed at this bridge. Now in his fifth edition, it continues to be an area of growth a parent company has, bro. One of our goals in designing fifth edition D&D, upfront, we told people this, we want to make the version of D&D that will appeal to everyone who has loved D&D in the past and might love it in the future. And also, I think the rules are redesigned in a way to make it accessible to people.  But fifth edition really opens up to a lot of people. I think people are definitely more open to the idea of jocks playing Dungeons and Dragons. Of everybody playing Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I think that the stories that we're trying to tell resonate with a lot of us just as human beings.  There's lots to play with. The game has moved far beyond your friend's basement to the Global Streaming Service, Twitch, where 7,500 unique streams were watched four more than 25 million minutes in 2018. Talking about an era where hundreds of thousands of people watch Twitch all the time. And Dungeons and Dragons is one of the biggest channels, the biggest games that you can watch on Twitch. And the representation is key. We like to make sure that in all the streams that we're doing that we have a really wide net cast for whoever's going to be playing and showing on camera. It's really important in the creative process that we reach into different, not only communities, but types of people from different backgrounds so that we're getting different representation. I had two communities that I was a part of. And then when they started to merge together, I was like, yes, wait, yes, yes, yes, it's perfect. And, you know, people talk about experiencing, discovering that they were trans because they were able to play a character of a different gender or exploring different relationships romantically. And it's a safe space with your friends that you can explore that that you maybe couldn't before. Similarly to the entertainment business and all this is that the more stories we can tell with the more backgrounds, more personal stories that people can bring, the more all of us are going to learn.  The game has long been a source of companionship as strangers with endless imagination and common interest and fantasy become lifelong friends. I'm about to get real and a little dark. So, three weeks ago, a guy from our stream, very close friend of mine, and we've been playing for three years, took his life. Oh, yeah, really close friend. And so you don't realize how much the people in your D&D circle have an effect on you. And he literally didn't show up to our game one night and then that's when the ball started rolling, we found out that he took his life. So it was tough. But that said, it just really helped the rest of us around the table to kind of literally grow hug and say, we don't, we play D&D every week, but we need to also see how each other is doing. Right, yeah. This is also a brotherhood as a word. There's just a lot of the brand, it's been around for 46 years now, Nathan, are we on 46 or 45? Almost, we're in our 45. Yeah. And people grew, people from my generation grew up with it. And now we're starting to both rediscover it and share it with our kids.


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