When California SB 901 was passed last September instituting a variety of wildfire-related measures, it was met with mixed reactions. The bill’s detractors saw it as a bailout for large utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), who are able to pass off some their liability in starting wildfires to ratepayers in the form
Over the last few months, we seem to have witnessed a strong connection between political actions and the stock market. Perhaps the most important major recent political event was the 2018 federal midterm elections. Following those elections was a major stock market decline. Was the stock market decline caused by the election results? Stock prices
Each quarter the Lowe Institute partners with Chapman University to produce consumer sentiment indices for three nearby metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire. The fourth quarter results—based on surveys conducted in mid-December—are in. You may recall it was a rather eventful quarter headlined by a precipitous stock market decline and a
The Department of Defense’s new policy to kick out non-deployable military members would seem to threaten California’s impressively low 4.1 percent unemployment rate which, according to the California Employment Development Department, reached a 42-year low in September. The DoD enacted their “deploy or get out” policy on October 1st, with the intention of creating a
When the FEC released campaign finance data from the third quarter of 2018, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com shifted his House predictions further in favor of the Democrats. Republicans were out-fundraised in the third quarter and that may cost them in key California elections and ballot measures. The national Republican Party began to pull money from
