| New York City is a DANGEROUS place to live!! It's what my grandma is always telling me. And maybe she's … right? Wait a second. I thought this place was safe?? That's what Justin Fox has insisted — in print and video — time and time again. And he's not wrong, at least when it comes to cold-blooded killings. Murders and non-negligent manslaughter are down 28.7% this year so far. If that statistic holds, the city's murder rate will be the lowest since 1944: "Coupled with its minuscule rate of traffic fatalities, this makes New York City in a sense one of the safest places in the US," Justin writes. "But the risk in New York of being a victim of violent crime, chiefly robbery or aggravated assault, is not especially low by big-city US standards." I guess it's time to pull that self-defense kitty keychain out of my sock drawer. Why are there still so many robberies and assaults? "The most honest answer is a shrug," he says. "Researchers are sometimes able to ascertain whether a particular policy or event increased or decreased crime, but definitive answers as to what caused a crime wave are awfully hard to find — and as a guy wielding line charts rather than sophisticated causal inference methods, I'm not going to offer one here." Still, someone's gotta be at least partly to blame. Is it Mayor Eric Adams, who lately appears to be too preoccupied with crypto and campaign finance to address the issue? Could it be Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose name Justin says "comes up a lot in conjunction with New York's crime problems"? Or is it former Governor Andrew Cuomo who ended cash bail in 2019 for most felons? Although Justin says it's "striking how little success" the city's cop-turned-mayor has had in taming the criminals, the increase appears to have predated Adams. And Bragg is clearly not the culprit since crime is up more in the four boroughs not under his jurisdiction. That leaves us with Cuomo. "After the 2019 bail reform, judges in New York had limited leeway to jail repeat offenders they thought were likely to commit more crimes. By contrast, a 2017 bail reform in New Jersey was accompanied by a system of pretrial risk assessment aimed at keeping high-risk offenders behind bars while decreasing incarceration overall." Here's the result:  Hmmmm! "Bail reform flaws seem as if they could explain at least some of New York City's stubborn crime problem," writes Justin, but it doesn't tell the whole story. As Steve, one of Justin's readers,put it in the comments: "I imagine the amount of Instagram-scrolling done by NYPD in and around subways does not exactly result in crime reduction." True that! Read the whole thing for free (not while you're on the clock, please). Never underestimate Wall Street's ability to coin an incredible term: John Authers says people are doing the "TACO trade," which stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out." In sum: "Traders have noted the president's propensity to make threats, scare the market, and then pull back. Now they are skipping the selloff and assuming that Trump always caves," John writes. The president, unsurprisingly, is not happy about being called a chicken. But this acronym can be applied far beyond the market. Take Trump's ongoing effort to tame Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. First, there was name-calling: "He has gone absolutely CRAZY!" Trump wrote on Truth Social the other day. And then came the threat: "If it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He's playing with fire!" But in the context of TACO, "CRAZY" and "REALLY BAD" mean nothing at all. Even Russia's state-run media knows as much. "I am skeptical Trump will reverse himself to the extent required," writes Marc Champion. "That would include not just imposing new sanctions on Russia — and his escalating threats on social media suggest he could be preparing to back a bill on its way through Congress — but also resuming arms flows to Ukraine at levels sufficient to persuade Putin that time is no longer on his side." James Gibney sees the Senate's bipartisan sanctions bill — which would impose a 500% tariff on imports from countries that buy Russian oil, gas and uranium — as an imperative: "Without continued US backing, Ukraine's odds of emerging from this war as a viable sovereign state are grim," he writes. The editorial board agrees, saying that sanctions of that caliber could blow a hole through Putin's bottom line: "Every $10 drop in the oil price shaves an estimated half a percentage point off Russian gross domestic product, depriving the Kremlin of billions of dollars in budget revenues," they write. At the same time, "Europe can do more on its own as well to keep Ukraine in the fight" by ramping up existing sanctions and following Germany's lead in expanding military support. Now is no time for chickening out. | 
