National Review:

President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not “legally binding,” his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) obtained by National Review.

 “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document,” wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, in the November 19 letter.

Frifield wrote the letter in response to a letter Pompeo sent Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he observed that the deal the president had submitted to Congress was unsigned and wondered if the administration had given lawmakers the final agreement. Frifield’s response emphasizes that Congress did receive the final version of the deal. But by characterizing the JCPOA as a set of “political commitments” rather than a more formal agreement, it is sure to heighten congressional concerns that Iran might violate the deal’s terms.

“The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments,” Frifield wrote to Pompeo.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the regime. “If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Rouhani said in August. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

Pompeo cited that comment in his letter to Kerry, but Frifield did not explicitly address it in her reply. “This is not a mere formality,” Pompeo wrote in his September 19 letter. “Those signatures represent the commitment of the signatory and the country on whose behalf he or she is signing. A signature also serves to make clear precisely who the parties to the agreement are and the authority under which that nation entered into the agreement. In short, just as with any legal instrument, signing matters.”

From the Guardian:

A Pakistani Muslim cleric who celebrated the murder of a popular politician is in Britain on a speaking tour of mosques. The news has alarmed social cohesion experts who fear such tours are promoting divisions in the Muslim community.

Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri has been banned from preaching in Pakistan because his sermons are considered too incendiary. However, he is due to visit a number of English mosques, in heavily promoted events where he is given star billing.

Qadri publicly praises Mumtaz Qadri who in 2011 murdered his employer, Salman Taseer, a popular Pakistani politician who spoke out against the country’s blasphemy laws. Qadri was executed earlier this year but to his tens of thousands of supporters he remains a hero who defended their interpretation of Islam.

Mumtaz Qadri was a key influence on Tanveer Ahmed, the Bradford taxi driver who in March stabbed to death Asad Shah. Shah, a member of the Ahmadi Muslim community who ran a convenience shop in Glasgow, was targeted after messages he put out on social media including an Easter greeting to Christians.

His was one of several recent high profile murders in which a Muslim from one community was killed by a Muslim from another community for holding what they considered to be “blasphemous” views. In February, a former Sufi imam in Rochdale was murdered by two Islamic State supporters whom they claimed was practising “black magic”. In May, a Sufi Muslim leader was hacked to death near the north Bangladeshi town of Rajshahi in what police said was an attack by Islamic extremists.

Qadri, considered by many scholars to hold moderate views except on blasphemy, was due to speak at the Falkirk Central mosque in Scotland, but his invitation was withdrawn after a public outcry. However, the Observer has established that he is due to appear at several mosques in England.

The Sunday Post in Scotland reported that Qadri has been labelled a “firebrand” by the authorities in Karachi and barred from preaching his incendiary sermons. He was accused of acting in a manner “prejudicial to public safety and maintenance of public order”. He was banned from addressing crowds in October, according to a legal document seen by the Post.

Video footage on social media sites shows Qadri telling crowds that the killing of Taseer was lawful.

Irfan al-Alawi, international director at the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, a US thinktank, said Qadri received large sums of money for his UK tour and accused him of increasing tensions among different Muslim sects.

“Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri and the likes of him should not be allowed to enter the UK or Europe because he incites hatred and he claims to be a Sufi, but the message of Sufism is love all and hate none,” Alawi said.

“The Sunni Muslims do not need Pakistani or Indian imams to enter the UK and preach hatred. Just as Zakir Naik was banned, the government should be hard on these preachers of hate and also with the people and mosques which invite them.”

Naik was an extremist Islamist preacher barred from preaching in the UK by Theresa May, when she was the home secretary, in 2011.

Flyers promoting Qadri’s appearances in the UK, obtained by the Observer, confirm that he is due to preach on Sunday in Leicester, in Woking on Boxing Day and in Bolton on New Year’s Eve. It is believed he will also make appearances at other mosques.

None of the three mosques responded to requests for comment.

Haras Rafiq, chief executive of the Quilliam Foundation, said Qadri was the type of preacher who presented new challenges for promoting cohesion in Britain’s Muslim community.

“These are people who may not be extremist in the way that we know Isis or Boko Haram are extremist,” Rafiq said. “But when they apply the blasphemy law to justify the killing of other Muslims for not being the right Muslims then we have a huge challenge. Anybody who supports the murder of another person is dangerous.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We do not routinely comment on individual cases.”

From the FT:

David Davis’s wide-ranging hearing with MPs from the Brexit committee yesterday provided new indications of where government policy is heading. Theresa May insists she is not providing a running commentary on her negotiation but the Brexit secretary has provided a few valuable insights into government thinking.

The timing of the government’s Brexit plan. Mr Davis said the proposals would not be published until February at the earliest. He said there are “quite a few decisions still to be made", noting that the government will be guided by 57 industry sector analyses that it has commissioned from civil servants. He did not indicate whether plan would be in the form of a white paper, a green paper or something lighter.

It is no surprise that Mr Davis is leaving publication as late as possible. If the Supreme Court upholds the demand for a Commons vote on the triggering of Article 50, ministers will want to curtail debate. The vote will certainly be passed but ministers do not want to see the bill amended by MPs.

Britain will not negotiate with the EU over immigration. This was the most striking revelation of the day. Many had assumed that, at the heart of the UK-EU talks, would be a simple bargain: the more the UK restricts migration controls on EU citizens, the less Britain could expect privileged access to the single market.

Mr Davis is taking a more ruthless approach. He said UK immigration levels would be set “in the national interest”, they would be subject to “clear control by this parliament” and the precise migration policy that Britain sets would not feature in the talks with the EU.

In some ways, this is no surprise. Mr Davis has long believed that EU states will not want to restrict Britain’s privileged access to the single market because their own manufacturers need to export to the UK. Immigration policy is also something that successive UK governments will want to fine tune regularly after Britain has left the bloc. Even so, the EU’s negotiating position is bound to be influenced by how restrictive Britain’s border controls look set to be.

A transitional deal is a possibility. Mr Davis’s position has shifted. Last month he told banking executives that he was “not really interested” in am interim pact. Now he is prepared to accept one “if necessary”.

Mr Davis’s stance remains more cautious than that of Philip Hammond. The chancellor said this week that all “thoughtful politicians” accept the need for an interim deal. Mr Davis will only back a transitional pact as a way of facilitating a free-trade agreement whose outlines are agreed in principle. “We need to know where we are going before we decide on the transition,” he said.

Even so, the politics regrading a transitional deal have shifted inside cabinet in a direction that will reassure many in the City.

The reversibility of Article 50. The British government has long insisted that Article 50, once triggered, cannot be reversed. It is easy to understand why ministers take this view. Any suggestion that it can be revoked will encourage the EU to play hardball in order to persuade the British to change their minds and reverse the referendum decision.

Mr Davis stuck to this line for the most part: “It’s very difficult seeing it being revoked,” he said. “We don’t intend to revoke it.” But then he added cryptically: “It may not be revocable. I don’t know.”

This may be a subtle indication that the government expects a legal judgment on this issue next year — and one it may not like.

A rather infamous Tory MP has been elected to the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament. He has caused a furore in the past by referring to some people as "feminist zealots". He has also focused heavily on men's issues, calling for parliamentary debates on issues facing men on International Men's Day (we have such debates for women's issues, on International Women's Day) and highlights things like the gender disparity in sentencing for crimes, and the crisis of young male suicide in this country.

Naturally, everybody loses their shit despite the fact this is a perfectly reasonable appointment, and Davies will bring a much-needed perspective to the Committee.

Fucking Reds are asking for a slap.

China has flown a nuclear-capable bomber outside its borders in a show of force for the first time since US President-elect Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan.

The 10-minute telephone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was the first by a US president-elect or president since President Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, acknowledging Taiwan as part of ‘One China’. It led to protests from Beijing.

The Xian H-6 bomber flew along the disputed 'nine-dash line' around the South China Sea on Thursday, US officials told Fox News, passing over a number of disputed islands. The officials said it was designed to send a message to the incoming administration.

The Pentagon found out about the flight on Friday and officials said it was the first long-range flight along the demarcation line in more than 18 months – though this sortie extended further than previous ones.

The H-6 is the Chinese version of the Russian Tupolev Tu-16 jet bomber and has been used by China to drop nuclear devices in tests.

Mr Trump has used Twitter to criticise Beijing's policies, including the build-up of “a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea”.

Fox reported that Admiral Harry Harris, the head of US Pacific Command, had warned repeatedly about Chinese military build-up in the area over the last year. Satellites have shown China preparing to ship advanced surface-to-air missiles to contested islands, it said.

The US first adopted the “One China” policy in 1972 after meetings between Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and it was later solidified by President Jimmy Carter.

Under the policy, the US retains unofficial ties to Taiwan while recognising Beijing as representing China. China considers Taiwan a renegade country.

White House officials said they spoke with the Chinese leadership following Mr Trump’s call with President Tsai.

Federal officials called to reassure the country that the US still adheres to “One China”, which does not recognise Taiwan as its own sovereign nation.

it's too much



it doesnt make sense

What the fuck is going on

Populist anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has been convicted in a hate speech trial by a court in the Netherlands.

Wilders was found guilty of insulting a group and inciting discrimination after leading a chant against having Moroccans in the country.

But Judge Hendrik Steenhuis resisted prosecutors’ calls to fine him €5,000 and said the court would not impose a sentence on Wilders.

Instead, he said the conviction alone was punishment enough for a politician who has been democratically elected.

Guardian article on the leaks.

Relevant section:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

BBC:

The Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has warned that people will turn their backs on free and open markets unless something is done to help those left behind by the financial crisis.

In a speech, he said: "Globalisation is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities."

In many advanced economies there are "staggering wealth inequalities," he added.

Mr Carney was speaking in Liverpool.

He told his audience that politicians and central bankers must act to ensure people do not lose faith in the current system.

"Turning our backs on open markets would be a tragedy, but it is a possibility," he said.

"It can only be averted by confronting the underlying reasons for this risk upfront."

Ahmed: Carney says get real, there are losers from free trade

Mr Carney, giving the Roscoe Lecture at Liverpool John Moores University, spoke of the need for wealth distribution and putting individuals back in control.

He cited Prime Minister Theresa May's criticism of "stateless corporations" who paid little tax and had little responsibility to local communities.

The governor said: "Redistribution and fairness also mean turning back the tide of stateless corporations."

"As the prime minister recently stressed, companies must be rooted and pay tax somewhere.

"Businesses operating across borders have responsibilities," he added.

The lecture is only the second major public speech Mr Carney has given since the June Brexit referendum.

Since that vote, the governor has had to defend himself against criticism that he had made explicitly pro-Remain comments, and also against suggestions that the prime minister had been unhappy with the Bank's monetary policy because savers had lost out.

However, although Mr Carney acknowledged in his speech that there were losers from the policy of low interest rates, he said: "The thrifty saver and the rich asset holder are often one and the same."

"Just 2% of households have deposit holdings in excess of £5,000, [they have] few other financial assets, and don't own a home.

"So the vast majority of savers who might have lost some interest income from lower policy rates have stood to gain from increases in asset prices, particularly the recovery in house prices," he added.

The challenges to greater prosperity, he said, were far wider.

Mr Carney listed three priorities:

"Economists must clearly acknowledge the challenges we face, including the realities of uneven gains from trade and technology"

"We must grow our economy by rebalancing the mix of monetary policy, fiscal policy and structural reforms"

"We need to move towards more inclusive growth where everyone has a stake in globalisation."

Last week, the bank's chief economist, Andy Haldane, struck a similar note when he warned about Britain's widening inequality gap.

He was concerned not just with the gap between rich and poor, but also geographically - between north and south, east and west.

Mr Haldane said in a speech: "I think [the issue of regional inequality] is right up there as among the most important issues that we face today as a country."

"What's more, the variations are among the widest in Europe."

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dont try to be some sly yoot either

im some active don fam, im watchin you bruddah

Vox:

A group of distinguished trade economists have quietly released a paper estimating that if Chinese imports had grown half as quickly over the past 15 years, Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump would be preparing to move into the White House right now.

There’s reason to be skeptical about this specific result, since it focuses on regions harmed by trade with China and doesn’t factor in benefits enjoyed by people elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, it underscores just how big an impact trade with China has had on the American economy — and on our politics.

For decades, experts have argued that freer trade is good for the US economy and downplayed the economic harms that trade can cause. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump did the opposite, railing against trade with Mexico and China and promising to stop the decline of the manufacturing sector.

To the surprise of many experts, Trump won. And new research suggests that Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made trade a central theme of his campaign.

In recent years, a group of economists led by MIT’s David Autor have been studying the economic effects of Chinese imports on American communities. Their research demonstrated that Chinese imports have had significant and long-lasting economic impact in towns where local manufacturers have faced competition from Chinese imports.

“Manufacturing employment has been really important to non-college-educated workers,” Autor says. “And I do think its decline has had real effects on their earnings.”

More recently, they’ve found that Chinese imports have had significant political effects. In 2010, communities that were hard hit by Chinese competition tended to elect more extreme candidates to represent them in Congress.

And those same communities saw the strongest swing toward Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. Indeed, the economists estimate that if Chinese imports had grown half as quickly over the past 15 years, Hillary Clinton would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina — and hence the presidency.

“The foundation for this sharp division on the lines of trade was put in motion in the 2000s, long before the presidential election,” Autor says. “You really see this fracturing between areas that were trade-impacted and not impacted.”

This does not, of course, prove that expanding trade with China was a bad idea. Lots of Americans in other parts of the country benefited from lower prices as well as from jobs created by exports to China. But it does pose a challenge to the complacency of many economists on the issue. In theory, the government can compensate the losers so that everyone winds up better off. But Autor’s work — and the populist backlash that helped put Trump in the White House — suggests the US hasn’t done enough to help trade’s losers.

Autor worked with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hanson on a 2013 study that looked at how rising Chinese imports during the 2000s affected specific regions of the United States.

The US economy is complex, so nailing down cause and effect isn’t easy. Autor and his co-authors developed a clever strategy to try to isolate the effect of rising Chinese imports. They assembled data on the growth of Chinese imports in a bunch of different industries — narrow categories like “luggage,” “rubber and plastic footwear,” and “die-cut paperboard.” They also collected data on where competing US manufacturers in each category were located.

By cross-referencing these two data sets, the researchers were able to compare towns where the local industry faced strong competition from Chinese imports with other manufacturing towns where Chinese imports were not a major threat. The results were striking. Not only did Chinese trade create big job losses in towns most affected by Chinese competition, but the effects lasted a lot longer than many economists expected.

In other words, economists had overestimated the flexibility of the US labor market. Workers who lose their jobs don’t necessarily bounce back and find new work in other industries as conventional economic theories predicted. A lot of them become persistently unemployed, eventually retiring early or going on disability.

And because these manufacturing job losses are heavily concentrated in specific towns, they have larger social effects. “When a city loses manufacturing jobs, it doesn't just lose manufacturing jobs,” says economist Enrico Moretti. “There are additional job losses outside of manufacturing because the factory jobs provided the wealth for local services. If you look numerically, the biggest losses are outside manufacturing.”

People who run stores, restaurants, and other local businesses suffer as their customers have less money to spend. The town needs fewer teachers, doctors, and construction workers. A declining tax base strains the budget of the local government.

And these changes can also have profound personal consequences. A recent study by economists Justin Pierce and Peter Schott found that counties whose local industries were more exposed to Chinese competition saw modestly higher mortality rates. The authors speculate that losing jobs and health care coverage led to deteriorating health for some affected workers.

How seriously should you take these findings? Economics isn’t an exact science, but a lot of economists find the methodology used in these studies to be compelling. Lots of factors have contributed to the general decline in manufacturing employment across the US economy in general. But the industry-by-industry and town-by-town correlation between imports and job losses suggests that trade with China really has played a causal role.

In a follow-up study published this year, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi found that trade with China has also had a big impact on US politics. They compared voting patterns in congressional races between 2002 and 2010. And as in their earlier research, they compared areas where local industry was hard hit by Chinese competitors against areas facing less Chinese competition.

The result: Congressional districts that were more exposed to Chinese imports were more likely to elect ideological extremists to office than districts that were less affected by Chinese imports. Voter anger about the economic effects of trade helped drive the Tea Party wave that put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives after the 2010 election.

Congressional districts that were represented by a moderate Republican in 2002 were more likely to be elected by a conservative Republican by 2010 if the district was heavily exposed to Chinese imports. (Legislators were classified as liberal, moderate, or conservative using a standard metric based on members’ roll call votes.)

Congressional districts that were initially represented by a moderate Democrat were more likely to be represented by either a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican eight years later if they were heavily impacted by Chinese imports. Among these trade-affected, initially Democratic districts, majority-white districts were more likely to elect conservative Republicans, while majority-minority districts tended to elect Democrats who were further to the left.

This wasn’t primarily because formerly moderate members of Congress shifted to the right over the course of the 2000s. Rather, a lot of moderate legislators from 2002 were out of Congress by 2010 — replaced by more conservative (or more liberal) members.

And often this was the result of political instability within these districts: a moderate Republican would lose his seat to a Democrat in 2006 or 2008, and the Democrat, in turn, would lose her seat to a different Republican in 2010. And because the Republican Party is becoming more conservative overall, the new members of Congress tended to be more conservative than the old ones.

“Growing import competition from China has contributed to the disappearance of moderate legislators in Congress, a shift in congressional voting toward ideological extremes, and net gains in the number of conservative Republican representatives, including those affiliated with the Tea Party movement,” Autor and his co-authors write.

The researchers say that between 2002 and 2010, the fraction of moderates in Congress — Democrat as well as Republican — declined from 57 percent to 37 percent.

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that trade with China is the cause of growing ideological polarization in Congress. This trend has been underway since the 1970s. But trade with China seems to have accelerated the process.

Earlier this month, Autor and his collaborators crunched the numbers and found a similar pattern in the 2016 presidential race. They compared voting results between 2000 and 2016, examining how much better (or worse) Donald Trump did in various parts of the country than George W. Bush had done 16 years earlier. They found that Trump enjoyed the biggest gains — relative to Bush’s 2000 results — in areas that were most strongly affected by Chinese imports. And the effect appears to be large enough to have tipped the election to Trump.

They estimate that in an alternative universe where Chinese import gains between 2002 and 2014 were 25 percent smaller — and Rust Belt job losses had been correspondingly less severe — Donald Trump would have lost Wisconsin by 1.7 percent instead of winning it by 0.8 percent. He would have lost Michigan by 1.7 percent instead of winning it by 0.3 percent.

They further estimate that if Chinese imports gains had been 50 percent smaller, Trump would have lost North Carolina and Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin and Michigan. And flipping those four states would have been enough to throw the Electoral College to Hillary Clinton.

In short, China’s rising economic might provides a powerful explanation for the surprising shift of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — states that had previously gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992 — into Donald Trump’s column. Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric and his general attitude of economic pessimism seem to have resonated particularly strongly with voters in these states. And it especially resonated in parts of those states where local manufacturers had faced strong competition from Chinese imports.

As the authors themselves acknowledge, it’s a mistake to put too much stock in the specific figures here. Many things would be different in a hypothetical world where Chinese imports grew half as fast. Most obviously, people in other parts of the country would not be enjoying lower prices or jobs producing goods for export to China, and those benefits are not factored into the analysis. So if Chinese trade had been smaller, Clinton might have done better in the Rust Belt — but worse in states that have thrived in the era of globalization.

What the research does make clear, however, is that Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric was tapping into widespread voter sentiments that had been largely ignored by conventional politicians. Chinese imports had negatively affected the economic circumstances of a lot of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, creating a fertile environment for Trump’s brand of economic populism.

If Chinese imports devastated certain communities in the United States, an obvious response would be to reverse the policies that allowed Chinese imports into the country in the first place. Donald Trump has proposed as much, calling for a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports.

But economists say this isn’t a good solution — for two big reasons.

One is that trade really has been good for the United States as a whole, even if it’s been bad for certain communities. Consumers across the US have benefited from lower prices and greater product variety. US companies have benefited from exporting their goods to the Chinese market.

And the US and Chinese economies have become increasingly interconnected, so disrupting trade between the two countries could cause a lot of economic damage. Some American manufacturers rely on components or raw materials from China, and China is a big export market for many US companies. A trade war with China would harm a lot of US businesses — and the employees that work for them — as well as Chinese firms.

The larger issue, though, is that even if we were willing to accept that economic pain, reintroducing trade barriers wouldn’t necessarily reverse the damage to communities that have lost jobs over the past 15 years. Higher trade barriers might generate some new manufacturing jobs, but it probably wouldn’t create those jobs in the same Rust Belt towns that have lost jobs over the past 15 years. They’d be more likely to locate in Sunbelt towns with nice weather, growing populations, and business-friendly labor laws.

And many of those jobs wouldn’t come back at all.

“A lot of the jobs that we lost to China were somewhat vestigial,” Autor says. He argues that without Chinese imports, “we wouldn't have lost them so quickly, but we would have lost them over the next 15 to 20 years. I don't think we're going to get them back.”

In short, if companies were forced to shift production back to the US, they’d likely build factories with more robots and fewer human workers.

The conventional solution to the disruptive effects of trade is to offer trade assistance — government programs that offer laid-off workers job training, relocation benefits, and other services to help them get back on their feet.

However, says economist Enrico Moretti, “it's not always completely feasible to help the affected workers. If you are 50, and you've been working at a factory all your life, it's really hard to retrain you.”

One thing that probably would have helped — and might still help — would be for the Federal Reserve to do more to support demand across the economy in general. Over the past 15 years, Chinese have imports sharply reduced demand for goods manufactured in certain US towns, but since 2008 that has been combined with a persistent demand shortfall across the US economy as a whole.

Weak domestic demand has made it hard for towns hit by Chinese competition to nurture new businesses in other industries that are less exposed to trade. And it has also made it harder for workers who lose their jobs in Rust Belt towns to find work in nearby cities. Having your town’s biggest factory shut down is going to be a grim situation regardless of the broader macroeconomic context, but it’s much worse for it to happen when the broader economy is suffering from a sluggish recovery.