Sep 122021
 
 September 12, 2021  Posted by at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Henry Bacon Fisherfolk returning with their nets, Étretat 1890

 

Joe Biden’s Vaccine Order May Lead America To Another Civil War (Bridge)
Vaccine Mandate is a “Work Around” the Constitutional Objections (Turley)
BioNTech ‘Preparing Production’ Of Covid-19 Vaccine For Children Under 12 (RT)
Covid: 54% Of Hospital Patients With Virus Are Fully Vaccinated (IT)
Nurse Destroys “Delta” Narrative, Vaccinated Patients Fill Hospital! (CTH)
Fauci Tells Biden To Go Further (DM)
Why Dr. Fauci is Going to Be the Happiest Dude on Earth (FLCCC)
I Hate Being Right (Denninger)
NY Hospital To Pause Baby Deliveries As Staffers Quit Over Vax Mandate (Kiro)
S.F. Schools Report No Covid Outbreaks (SFC)
Clinical Grade ACE2 As A Universal Agent To Block SARS-CoV-2 Variants (Bxiv)
QLD Police Raise Funds To Legally Challenge Covid-19 Vaccination Mandate (RT)
CoWIN KYC-VS API Introduced to Enable Vaccination Status Confirmation (NDTV)
The Medical Cartel Destroying Millions of Lives is Nothing New (Rappoport)

 

 

 

 

Portugal
https://twitter.com/i/status/1436765211076272134

 

 

 

 

“September 9 may go down in the history books as the day all hell broke out in earnest.”

Joe Biden’s Vaccine Order May Lead America To Another Civil War (Bridge)

[..] aside from the question of personal health, there is the question of politics – bad politics, to be more precise. First and foremost, Joe Biden blatantly lied to the American people when he promised to never force vaccines on the country. At the same time, he snubbed Congress and the states by empowering the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce the vaccine mandate – yet another example of Biden abusing the executive office. The Republicans, who have gone to great lengths to keep their cities and states open for business during the pandemic, are vowing to fight Biden’s “unconstitutional” mandate every step of the way, up to and including a likely battle in the Supreme Court.

Former VP Mike Pence even came out of political hibernation to weigh in on the news, saying that “scolding” the American public was “not the American way – and I expect the response they are going to get across the country will prove that.” Despite the Democratic Party’s incessant claims that Donald Trump was a “tyrant” and “dictator,” the raft of executive orders that Joe Biden has rammed through Washington, DC are enough to make a Caesar blush. Forcing Americans to submit to medical treatment is Biden’s personal ‘crossing the political Rubicon’ – another one of those “you’re either with us or against us” type of moments that colored the Bush-era “war on terror.”

In this latest chapter of American history, however, the unvaccinated are at risk of standing in for the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Indeed, given the level of liberal lunacy now infecting every square inch of the America cranium, the unvaccinated could become the targets of a virtue-signaling hate campaign that could easily get out of control, especially when it is considered that there are more guns in America than Americans. Whatever the case may be, when future historians sit down to write about the America of the early 21st century and its second civil war, September 9 may go down in the history books as the day all hell broke out in earnest.

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“The problem is that the thing being “worked around” is the Constitution.”

Vaccine Mandate is a “Work Around” the Constitutional Objections (Turley)

In the law, it is called an admission against interest or an out-of-court statement by a party that, when uttered, is against the party’s pecuniary, proprietary, or penal interests. In politics, it is called just dumb. White House chief of staff Ronald Klain offered a doozy this week when he admitted that the announced use of the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for a vaccine mandate was a mere “work around” of the constitutional limit imposed on the federal government. The problem is that the thing being “worked around” is the Constitution. Courts will now be asked to ignore the admission and uphold a self-admitted evasion of constitutional protections.

Notably, before inauguration, Klain publicly assured the public that Biden would that, on “his first day in office, I will issue a nationwide masking mandate, requiring that people wear masks where the federal authority extends and then urging governors and other local officials to impose mask mandates in their states.” That statement was then walked back due to the lack of legal authority to issue such a mandate. Klain retweeted MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, who posted, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” The “work around” was needed because, as some of us have previously during both the Trump and Biden Administration, the federal government does not have clear authority to impose public health mandates. Authority for such mandates has traditionally been recognized within state authority.

Make no mistake about it. This is a clever move to use the OSHA as the vehicle for the mandate to avoid the federalism issues of a direct mandate. President Joe Biden has been ping ponging on the issue for over a year in first suggesting that he could impose a national mandate and then admitting that he probably could not. Ironically, this move comes on the same day that Attorney General Merrick Garland denounced the “clever” use of the Texas abortion law to make it more difficult to challenge. Judging from the praise for Garland, it appears that such work arounds are noble when done for the right cause. The question is whether this clever work around will in fact work. It might, but there are ample grounds for challenge. Under this interpretation OSHA could impose a federal mandate for any measure that impacts workers, including public health measures not directly linked to a given workplace or job. That may be more of a sticker shock for some on the federal bench, including some justices.

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If it wasn’t criminal before, it sure is now.

BioNTech ‘Preparing Production’ Of Covid-19 Vaccine For Children Under 12 (RT)

German company BioNTech, which in partnership with Pfizer developed one of the most widely used anti-Covid shots, says it’s preparing for the worldwide launch of its jab for younger recipients and might get approval in October. An mRNA vaccine against coronavirus for children aged between five and 11 years old could be approved for use in Germany in a few weeks’ time, as early as by mid-October, Der Spiegel reported on Friday. “In the coming weeks we will present the results of our study on the five- to eleven-year-olds to the authorities worldwide and apply for approval of the vaccine for this age group, including here in Europe,” one of the founders of the BioNTech company and its chief medical officer, Ozlem Tureci, told the German media outlet, adding, “We are already preparing the production.”

Pfizer is also said to soon have enough data from clinical trials to seek emergency use authorization for the five to 11 age group, according to a report from Reuters. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could clear the vaccine for use in younger children by the end of October, unnamed top US health officials told the news agency on Friday. The vaccine to be used in younger children is the same as the one used for adults, but in smaller doses, Tureci explained. The company had already received trial results – which “look good” – and now only needs clearance from authorities, her husband, BioNTech chief executive Ugur Sahin, told Der Spiegel. By the end of the year, the company is expecting to receive data from studies of the vaccine in even younger recipients, aged just six months old and above, according to Sahin.

In the summer, Israel green-lighted vaccination for children aged five to 11 with the Pfizer-BioNTech shots, in cases where there are risks of serious health complications. In the UK, the government’s vaccine advisory body has recently refused to approve coronavirus jabs for healthy children between 12 and 15 years old, recommending that only patients with underlying health conditions should receive the shot. No anti-Covid vaccines have been so far cleared for use in children under 12 in the EU and the US.

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Hinton

Irish Times “Rising proportion of vaccinated people in hospital reflects greater numbers in population getting vaccines..”

Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile the “it protects against severe disease” mantra is DOA: Of 55 patients in ICU, 26 were fully vaccinated, two were partly vaccinated, and 26 had received no vaccinations

Covid: 54% Of Hospital Patients With Virus Are Fully Vaccinated (IT)

About half of all Covid-19 patients in hospital and in intensive care are fully vaccinated against the disease, new figures show. One-sixth of deaths of people with the virus since April have been categorised as breakthrough infections of fully vaccinated patients, according to Health Service Executive data. More than one-quarter of ICU admissions since July were also breakthrough infections of fully vaccinated people. The proportion of vaccinated people requiring treatment in hospital has been increasing over recent months, as the number of vaccinated people in the wider population has risen. Vaccination has drastically reduced the overall number of infections and reduced the severity of infections where they occur. However, the number of breakthrough infections has increased as the population of vaccinated people has grown.

At the end of August, 54 per cent of Covid-19 patients – or 168 patients – were fully vaccinated. Some 44 per cent were not fully vaccinated, and in 2 per cent of cases, the vaccination status was unknown. Data on vaccination was available for 311 of the 323 patients then in hospital. Of 55 patients in ICU, 26 were fully vaccinated, two were partly vaccinated, and 26 had received no vaccinations. Some 72 per cent of all patients in ICU since late June had an underlying condition. Between April and August, there were 193 Covid-19 deaths. Of the 178 patients whose vaccination status was known, 30 were at least 14 days after receiving the final dose of vaccine.

Health officials point out that although the majority of Covid-19 cases in hospital now involve vaccinated people, the overall number of hospitalisations is smaller due to the impact of vaccination. “The rise in vaccinated patients in hospital is not a surprise as more and more people have been vaccinated,” said HSE chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry. “Vaccines were never going to be 100 per cent effective against infection; their big contribution is in preventing serious illness.”

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“The majority of patients in your hospital are not Covid patients, they are vaccine-injured people.”

And Delta doesn’t exist, is not tested for.

Nurse Destroys “Delta” Narrative, Vaccinated Patients Fill Hospital! (CTH)

This is not random speculation or an anecdotal claim. To further support the real-world outline explained by the nurse, CTH has received some very specific details from inside the medical system where board certifications are determined. What follows below is not connected to the discussion above; however, specific leaked documents provided to CTH support what that nurse is saying. Doctors in general, and pediatric doctors specifically, are being told by licensing boards & regulatory agencies tied to the political systems of healthcare – that medical providers board certification and licensing could be in jeopardy if they are found to be discussing negative vaccine outcomes and/or contradictory issues about COVID-19 treatment in non private settings.

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https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1436902376389152768

‘Myself, I would make it just vaccinate or not – but he is trying to be moderate in what he was pronouncing.’

Fauci Tells Biden To Go Further (DM)

Dr Anthony Fauci has said he would have supported more extreme measures to force Americans to be vaccinated against COVID-19 – describing President Joe Biden’s plan as ‘moderate’. Biden on Thursday announced that all companies employing more than 100 people must insist on either proof of vaccination or regular COVID tests. His policy was greeted with anger by many Republicans, who described it as heavy-handed and an infringement on their personal freedoms. But Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor, said on Friday that he would have backed more intense options. ‘The president is being somewhat moderate in his demand, if you want to call it that,’ Fauci told CNN.


‘There are some people who really don’t want to get vaccinated but they don’t want to lose their job. ‘You’ve got to give them an off lane. And the off-lane is that if you get tested frequently enough and find out you’re positive you won’t come to work and you won’t infect other people. ‘It really is somewhat of a compromise there. ‘Myself, I would make it just vaccinate or not – but he is trying to be moderate in what he was pronouncing.’ Biden’s sweeping new vaccine requirements have Republican governors threatening lawsuits, but he has argued that it is essential to bring down stubbornly-high infection rates and get the country back on track.

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Ha.

Why Dr. Fauci is Going to Be the Happiest Dude on Earth (FLCCC)

In August, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked to describe what he would want in the perfect anti-viral COVID-19 therapeutic. What he described was ivermectin—a safe, cheap, globally available, highly effective Nobel Prize-winning drug that can end the pandemic with widespread use.

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No you don’t.

I Hate Being Right (Denninger)

I told you a few weeks ago I was seeing very disturbing data that strongly suggested the jabs were, in some form or fashion, destroying existing immunity or otherwise potentiating more-severe disease. I didn’t have the hard data to quantify it, but I’ve mentioned the drift in the data streams for some time now. It was clear and convincing, but not quantifiable. Until now. I didn’t then (and still don’t) know the mechanism; I don’t have billions of dollars of lab laying around I can play with. But on the data it was happening; it was not conclusive but the evidence shift was clear in the data pattern; what had been protection from being harmed if you were jabbed was trending toward neutral in the aggregate and anecdotes suggested harm. Well, now we have it, and yeah, it’s harm.

Note the right two columns. They adjust for per-100,000, which is the only accurate way to do it — you must adjust raw rates for the population prevalence of the specific condition under test. This data shows conclusively that for anyone between 40 and 79 being vaccinated makes it more-likely for you to get Covid-19. That means what you think it does: If you took the jabs you are the plague rat; you are more-likely to get (and thus transmit) the disease than an unvaccinated person. Britain had studiously avoided publishing the ranged data like this in their updates until now. I don’t know why they did it this time but it doesn’t matter. Their data continues to claim that the jabs are effective in preventing hospitalization and death but the exact opposite is true when it comes to getting Covid-19 which means those who are vaccinated may acquire personal protection but in doing so become Angels of Death to others. If you have trouble with numerical tables here it is in bar charts:

In addition this is arguably one of the most-immune populations — or should I say allegedly immune — on the planet. “In this report, we present the results using a 4-weekly average, of testing samples up to 27 August 2021, which takes account of the age and geographical distribution of the English population. Overall, the proportion of the population with antibodies using the Roche N and Roche S assays respectively were 18.1% and 97.7% for the period 2 August to 27 August (weeks 31 to 34) (Figure 3). This compares with 18.2% Roche N seropositivity and 97.0% Roche S seropositivity for the period of 5 July to 30 July (weeks 27 to 30).”

In other words 97% of the population has either infection-acquired immunity or vaccination-acquired “alleged” immunity. That is so close to 100% it is indistinguishable and makes clear that Biden’s actions not only won’t work they can’t because even with effectively 100% coverage Delta continues to go straight through vaccinated individual’s immunity and, as the above data shows, the vaccinated are the ones spreading the virus. They are literal plague rats killing the unvaccinated who have not seroconverted. Let me be perfectly-clear: The vaccines are worthless in stopping the acquisition and transmission of disease. With nearly 100% antibody coverage if the jabs worked at all Britain would be a literal dead-end for anyone who got the virus and it would be gone there.

It isn’t which is hard, scientific proof that the jabs do not work to stop Covid-19 from circulating in the population and this data proves that in fact it makes infection and transmission more likely rather than less in very large swaths of the population as a whole. The seroconversion prevalence by prior infection is very close to the NEJM numbers for the United States. As such we can expect the same outcome here; if you are seroconverted you are safe and sterile immune but if you are vaccinated and between 40 and 79 you are not only getting Covid you are infecting and killing those who have not seroconverted via infection and in fact are driving both unvaccinated and vaccine-failure infections leading to serious disease and death.

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“We are not alone. There are thousands of positions that are open north of the Thruway..”

NY Hospital To Pause Baby Deliveries As Staffers Quit Over Vax Mandate (Kiro)

An upstate New York hospital said it will pause the delivery of babies in two weeks because of a spate of resignations by maternity unit workers who are objecting to COVID-19 vaccination mandates. Lewis County General Hospital, in Lowville, will temporarily stop delivering babies after Sept. 24, WWNY reported. During a news conference Friday afternoon, Lewis County Health System CEO Gerald Cayer said seven of the 30 hospital workers who resigned were from the hospital’s maternity ward. He added that another seven maternity unit staffers were undecided about getting the vaccine, the television station reported. The workers were objecting to a Sept. 27 deadline to receive a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Watertown Daily Times reported. Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued the state mandate on Aug. 23.

Twenty of the staff members who resigned worked in clinical positions like nurses, therapists and technicians, the newspaper reported. “If we can pause the service and now focus on recruiting nurses who are vaccinated, we will be able to reengage in delivering babies here in Lewis County,” Cayer told reporters. Cayer said 165 hospital employees, or 27% of the facility’s workforce, have yet to be vaccinated against COVID-19, WWNY reported. There have been 464 workers who have received the vaccine, Cayer said. “Our hope is as we get closer (to the deadline), the numbers will increase of individuals who are vaccinated, fewer individuals will leave and maybe, with a little luck, some of those who have resigned will reconsider,” Cayer told reporters. “We are not alone. There are thousands of positions that are open north of the Thruway and now we have a challenge to work through, you know, with the vaccination mandate.”

Cayer stressed that the hospital will not be “shutting down services,” the Daily Times reported. “It just is a crazy time,” Cayer told the newspaper. “It’s not just LCHS-centric. Rural hospitals everywhere are really trying to figure out how we’re going to make it work.”

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“..nearly a quarter of school district staff have not provided their vaccination status to the district.”

S.F. Schools Report No Covid Outbreaks (SFC)

No COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred in San Francisco schools since they reopened to in-person learning in mid-August, and case rates have remained steady among young children in recent months, even as the highly contagious delta variant has spread, according to data released Thursday by the Department of Public Health. Just 13 city children have been hospitalized because of the coronavirus since the pandemic started in early 2020, and none are currently, officials said. Of San Francisco’s 118,000 children, 5,543 have had the virus, and none have died from it, according to city data. The San Francisco numbers defy national trends that have shown large rises in cases and hospitalizations among school-age children overall during the delta surge. Nationally, communities with low vaccination rates — and no mask mandates in public spaces and schools — have seen skyrocketing pediatric cases.


Since the city’s public and private school classrooms reopened in recent weeks, there have been no coronavirus outbreaks and fewer than five cases because of in-school transmission, health officials announced Thursday. San Francisco Unified has had no confirmed cases of in-school transmission this fall, and none in the spring, Superintendent Vince Matthews said. “This data affirms that the health and safety measures we have in place — including universal masking, improving ventilation, providing (personal protective equipment) and requiring all staff to be vaccinated — are keeping our schools safe,” he said. The district requires staff to either be vaccinated or tested weekly, but nearly a quarter of school district staff have not provided their vaccination status to the district.

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If Delta is really just vaccine side effects, then what good would this do?

Clinical Grade ACE2 As A Universal Agent To Block SARS-CoV-2 Variants (Bxiv)

The recent emergence of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants has caused considerable concern due to reduced vaccine efficacy and escape from neutralizing antibody therapeutics. It is therefore paramount to develop therapeutic strategies that inhibit all known and future SARS-CoV-2 variants. Here we report that all SARS-CoV-2 variants analyzed, including variants of concern (VOC) Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, exhibit enhanced binding affinity to clinical grade and phase 2 tested recombinant human soluble ACE2 (APN01). Importantly, soluble ACE2 neutralized infection of VeroE6 cells and human lung epithelial cells by multiple VOC strains with markedly enhanced potency when compared to reference SARS-CoV-2 isolates. Effective inhibition of infections with SARS-CoV-2 variants was validated and confirmed in two independent laboratories. These data show that SARS-CoV-2 variants that have emerged around the world, including current VOC and several variants of interest, can be inhibited by soluble ACE2, providing proof of principle of a pan-SARS-CoV-2 therapeutic.

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“Australian authorities are breaking the law by creating a situation “in which the individual is left with no real choice but compliance.”

QLD Police Raise Funds To Legally Challenge Covid-19 Vaccination Mandate (RT)

Queensland police officers have set up a fundraising page, garnering money to hire a lawyer and challenge the mandating of vaccines for law enforcement employees. They say the new directive “infringes upon the right to freedom.” The initiative, coming from “a group of concerned Queensland police officers and their families,” had raised over $45,000 by Saturday – twice as much as their initial goal. Police officers, who claim the matter “is not pro- or anti- vaccine,” say they need the money to get legal help and work with a law practice to challenge a recently introduced measure to fight the spread of coronavirus. According to the newly implemented directive from the Queensland Police Service (QPS) Commissioner Katarina Carroll, “the entire workforce in all QPS workplaces within the next five months” must be subjected to vaccinations and be fully inoculated by January next year.


The disagreeing police officers said no employees in any private or public sector, not just within law enforcement, can be forced into medical interference. “It is a question of whether our employers on behalf of the government can authorize civil conscription and interfere with the relationship between a patient and their doctor by mandating a vaccine,” their statement said. “Mandatory vaccination policy…infringes upon our rights to freedom and informed consent to a medical procedure,” it added, suggesting that Australian authorities are breaking the law by creating a situation “in which the individual is left with no real choice but compliance.”

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India. ” It asserts that the API is both consent-based and privacy preserving.”

CoWIN KYC-VS API Introduced to Enable Vaccination Status Confirmation (NDTV)

The Indian government has introduced a new API called KYC-VS (Know Your Customer’s/Client’s Vaccination Status) to enable businesses make informed decisions. This API empowers businesses to check an individual’s vaccination status through the CoWIN platform. Status of an individual’s vaccination is important to know for ascertaining resumption of work, allowing travel, or confirming hotel reservations. This new API will enable businesses to know the status of vaccination of an individual through a simple OTP process. According to the details shared by the PIB, this check is only possible when a customer shares their CoWIN linked mobile number, and then gives an OTP, to preserve consent and privacy.

The new CoWIN KYC-VS API has been announced in a press note on the PIB website. This feature will enable an Aadhaar-like authentication service for the status of vaccination through the CoWIN platform. Once this API is integrated into a business’ system, it can ask for an individual’s vaccination status easily. The individual will need to enter their mobile number and name. Thereafter, they will receive an OTP, which they have to enter. Once this process is complete, CoWIN will send a response to the business on the individual’s status of vaccination. Responses will be offered in three ways – person not vaccination, person is partially vaccination, or person is fully vaccination. No other information will be shared with the business, the announcment says. It asserts that the API is both consent-based and privacy preserving.

According to the announcement, this new KYC-VS API from CoWIN will help as socio-economic activities are gradually being revived. The new platform will be useful to an enterprise that may need to know the vaccination status of its employees to resume functions in offices, workplaces etc. It will also be useful to the railways that may want to get the status of vaccination of the passengers who are getting their seats reserved in the trains.

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“Medical crimes. Medically caused deaths of friends, family members, loved ones, who are buried along with the truth. No criminal investigations, no prosecutions, no guilty verdicts, no prison sentences.”

The Medical Cartel Destroying Millions of Lives is Nothing New (Rappoport)

ONE: “The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs.” The author is Donald Light, who teaches at Rowan University, and was the 2013 recipient of ASA’s [American Sociological Association’s] Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. Light is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He is a Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Donald Light: “Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about 2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They [the drugs] cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations [6.6 million annually], as well as falls, road accidents, and [annually] about 80 million medically minor problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase these figures.” (ASA publication, “Footnotes,” November 2014)

TWO: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998: “Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients.” The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals, or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate: Every year, in the US, between 76,000 and 137,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs. Beyond that, every year 2.2 million hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.

The authors write: “…Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and administered.” So this study had nothing to do with doctor errors, nurse errors, or improper combining of drugs. And it only counted people killed or maimed who were admitted to hospitals. It didn’t begin to tally all the people taking pharmaceuticals who died as consequence of the drugs, at home.

THREE: July 26, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association; author, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; “Is US health really the best in the world?” Starfield reported that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans per year. 106,000 as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, and 119,000 as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. Extrapolate the numbers to a decade: that’s 2.25 million deaths. You might want to read that last number again. I interviewed Starfield in 2009. I asked her whether she was aware of any overall effort by the US government to eliminate this holocaust. She answered a resounding NO. She also said her estimate of medically caused deaths in America was on the conservative side.

FOUR: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer. Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It [the Institute] calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.’” The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.” The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.” Therefore, to say the FDA isn’t aware of this finding would be absurd. The FDA knows. The FDA knows and it isn’t saying anything about it, because the FDA certifies, as safe and effective, all the medical drugs that are routinely maiming and killing Americans. Every public health agency knows the truth.

FIVE: None of the above reports factor in death or injury by vaccine. Medical crimes. Medically caused deaths of friends, family members, loved ones, who are buried along with the truth. No criminal investigations, no prosecutions, no guilty verdicts, no prison sentences. But of course, you can believe everything leading lights of the US medical system tell you about COVID.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

France
https://twitter.com/i/status/1436808618268049409

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 112019
 
 September 11, 2019  Posted by at 1:26 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Max Ernst The Angel of the home or the Triumph of Surrealism 1937

 

A friend of mine here in Athens, Greece, named Wayne Hall, who’s of Australian descent but moved here at about the time Napoleon headed for St. Petersburg, and works as a translator and language teacher, sent me a mail a few days ago that I thought was interesting.

In particular, Wayne referred to a video I didn’t know existed, of Julian Assange hosting a get-together in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the night of the Brexit referendum, June 23, 2016, that includes a video (sound) link to Yanis Varoufakis who was in Rome at the time.

Julian was receiving visitors and broadcasting! How times have deteriorated, it’s heart-rendering, and it’s so painfully good to see him here in better days…. That video is below. The sound quality of Varoufakis speaking is really bad, and I don’t have the equipment here to work on that, but Wayne was kind enough to transcribe it. See also below.

What I found especially intriguing is the difference in view between the two: Varoufakis wanted (wants) the UK to stay in the EU, in order to reform it from within. And he thinks (thought) that his cross-European party, DiEM 25, can play a role in that. Even though it has no seats in the EU parliament, not then, and not now.

Assange, on the other hand, was pretty much pro-Brexit. He was quite clear about this (a few hours before the referendum results were in):

[..] if there is a Leave or even if the vote is very close, which it surely is, it is something that calls into question the political legitimacy of the European Union in the way it has been conducted so far. And really it’s quite incredible that it came to this.

That the European Union as a political structure was so unadaptable to the political calls upon it that it was not able to hand out the appropriate concessions to show that it had political legitimacy by doing what people wanted. And regardless of what that structure is, any structure which manages a nation state or collection of nation states has to be able to keep political legitimacy.

So I think that there is a very strong argument that the structure is a failure. Regardless of what side of politics you are on. A structure that cannot dynamically adapt to the political expediencies around it to regain political legitimacy when it is eroding is a failed structure.

Once again, testimony to Julian’s profound insight if not intelligence. And testimony to how much he is missed, withering away in solitary confinement in a prison for terrorists while he should be explaining our world to us.

Still, Varoufakis has some good points as well I find:

The British people are disenchanted. They’ve had a gutful of the policies that have come from Brussels, as well as the austerian authoritarianism from the British establishment, even those who are voting for Brexit, like Boris Johnson and the rest of the Tories. The only quarrel that they have with the practice is that they want to be able to rule over the British people without any impediments from Brussels.

Wayne has some more well-argued thoughts on the difference in thinking between Assange and Varoufakis. Here he is:

 

 

Wayne Hall: I am Wayne Hall and I’m speaking from Athens. I have a message for the Unity 4j network in defence of Julian Assange and first and foremost for the Greek group. Many if not most of Julian’s defenders in Europe are on the Left. In the US the situation is different but here we are talking about Europe. Some of Julian’s Leftist defenders even criticize him for not being Left himself. If he is not a Leftist what is he?

I think he would say that the question of truth and falsehood should take priority over political identity and that this is particularly urgent because at this moment the world is approaching a situation of near total domination of either falsehood in public discussion or else of censorship. At the moment a hot issue in Europe is Britain’s relations with the European Union. It is certainly more discussed than Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning or Wikileaks.

I have proposed the idea of opening a discussion under the title “From Wikileaks to Brexit” and I have been confronted with this question “what is the connection between Wikileaks and Brexit?” The first point I would like to make in response to this is to remind people, or inform people, because most probably they will not know, that on the day of the Brexit referendum (23rd June 2016) that has led to the current situation in relations between Britain and the EU, Julian Assange organized a comprehensive debate on Brexit with a wide range of activists, scholars and other citizens, and made it available through live streaming.

At that time Julian was still in the Ecuadorian Embassy and was able to receive visitors, have access to the internet and speak to the public. This was changed on 28th March 2018 and on 11th April 2019 Assange was expelled from the Embassy, tried and imprisoned. At the moment he is being held incommunicado and also prevented from preparing for the hearing on extradition to the United States, to be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. The hearing in England is programmed for 25th February 2020.

The discussion on Brexit hosted by Julian Assange has characteristics that are not present in the Brexit debate as it is being conducted today. The Assange discussion strives for impartiality and a plurality of viewpoints, mostly sincere, unscripted viewpoints of a kind that seem today, unfortunately, to be disappearing from public discussion.

Hopefully this offers the beginning of an answer to the question “What is the connection between Wikileaks and Brexit”? The participant in the discussion that is featured in the following video is Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister in the first six months of the 2015 to 2019 SYRIZA government headed by Alexis Tsipras. Varoufakis resigned from this government in protest at its surrendering to pressures from the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Assange’s and Varoufakis’ stance on the Brexit issues are not the same. Assange is more or less favourable to Brexit. Varoufakis and the citizens’ movement he founded, DiEM25, campaigned against it, saying that the issue was not that Britain should withdraw from the EU but that the EU should become an entity with which British people and people in other EU member countries would wish to be associated.

Assange asked Varoufakis an important question just before the result of the referendum became known. He said, if the Remains side wins, will there be any pressure at all for the kinds of changes in the EU that DiEM25 seeks to promote? Varoufakis replied that DiEM will see to it that the pressure continues. But is this what has happened, even though it is the Leave side, not the Remain side, that won the referendum? There has been a separation between the Assange question and the Brexit question.

A defence campaign for Julian Assange is under way but it faces a mainstream media blackout. A recent concert by Pink Floyd member Roger Waters was totally ignored by the channels that the majority of people watch. Was DiEM25 able to help get this concert into the mainstream media? And in any case, was Roger Waters’ message the same as what Julian’s message would have been if he had been able to speak for himself? Has the campaign against Brexit, against Trump and against Boris Johnson displaced the campaign for democracy? And is democracy favoured when a British Prime Minister is prevented from being able to call an election?

All because of a change in the electoral law voted on the initiative of the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg in 2011 to make it more difficult for his coalition partner the Tory David Cameron to bring down the fragile Tory-Lib Dem coalition government that was in power at that time. How much is the media talking about this factor? How much is it being mentioned by DiEM25? Doubtless it would be mentioned by Julian Assange but he is no longer a participant in public discussion. If disinformation and censorship is becoming universalized and control over it almost total, the question of right wing versus left wing politics becomes a secondary issue.

Not to be ignored but not given priority over accuracy and availability of correct information. This is a basic component of Julian Assange’s world view. On 8th September 2019 Labour members of the House of Commons sang “The Red Flag” as they supported the moves against Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to call an election. Is the symbolism of this enough to open minds?

 

 

Transcript for the video


Introduction:

The Brexit referendum took place on 23rd June 2016 to ask if the United Kingdom should remain a member of, or leave the European Union. Julian Assange, at that time being given political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy but also free from the restrictions later imposed by the successor Ecuadorian government of Lenin Moreno, was still able to receive visitors, organize meetings and use the internet. He held a marathon videorecorded discussion of Brexit with a variety of activists, journalists, public figures and supportive citizens. The referendum resulted in 51.89% of votes being in favour of leaving the EU. One of the people Assange interviewed was Yanis Varoufakis.

 

Julian Assange: This is Brexit club, live streaming at Brexitclub.eu throughout the evening as we count the Brexit vote from here inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. I’m Julian Assange. This embassy, some of you probably know, has been under a police siege for the last four years, incredibly. Here at the centre of the siege we have Yanis Varoufakis calling in from Rome. He is the immediately former Finance Minister of Greece, who famously negotiated with Schaeuble and the European Central Bank in relation to the Greek bailout. Naomi Colvin, the London director of the Courage Foundation. She represents a number of people who are being extradited from the UK. Craig Murray,former ambassador to Usbekistan. A Scot, so he’ll have some social perspective. He’s come down…. Where in Scotland, Craig?

Craig Murray: Edinburgh.

Julian Assange: To join us. And Srecko Horvat, a Croatian philosopher, who perhaps can give us an Eastern European perspective. He’s also involved in something that Yanis Varoufakis founded, which is the DiEM25 movement, which is the movement from the Left, essentially, to create ideas and structure a unity for a new and better Europe, not the Europe we have now, which I think most people concede has an enormous democratic deficit.

Yanis, your thoughts from Rome, where you are now. (He’s not from Rome. He’s Greek).

Yanis Varoufakis: Well you know we’re all pigs after all, you know. Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, even Spain. We’re all the swine of Europe. Well, Julian, you say that from where I’m standing it seems that the “remain” may have a small lead. It’s not clear yet. As we know DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe movement that you were so kind as to refer to a moment ago – and which of course you have signed the Manifesto of.

Julian Assange: That’s right, which I have signed the Manifesto of I must confess and which I helped, with some words……

Yanis Varoufakis: Unlike you, as a movement, we have campaigned vigorously in favour of a radical “in” vote, not the kind of “in” votes or “remains” that Cameron has been campaigning for, which together with Hillary Clinton, Francois Hollande, Wolfgang Schaueble, Tony Blair, Jean-Claude Juncker, Barack Obama and all the other contributors to the loss of the European Union legitimately, technically and so on. We’ve been campaigning for a radical “in” and “against” the European Union approach, to struggle within the European Union institutions in order to usurp them, in a sense.

A standard dialectical position about how to enter a particular set of institutions and try to change them from within through confrontation, not just mere reform. One way or the other, my view – and I think it’s where we differ is that the British people have clearly given the ambivalence that they are displaying on the runup to the referendum and I’m sure that that ambivalence will be demonstrated today….

And we’re saying that the establishment, both in London and in Brussels, has spectacularly failed with Brexit. The British people are disenchanted. They’ve had a gutful of the policies that have come from Brussels, as well as the austerian authoritarianism from the British establishment, even those who are voting for Brexit, like Boris Johnson and the rest of the Tories. The only quarrel that they have with the practice is that they want to be able to rule over the British people without any impediments from Brussels. And it is clear to us in DiEM25 that if “remain” wins, even though we campaigned for “remain”, we are not in any mood for celebration.

We rejected the logic of the European Union, the creation of the Brexit. But we also reject the logic of “business as usual”, which is the establishment view in Brussels and in London. And as of today, whatever the result might be we are going to promote, continue promoting a radical agenda for confronting the Establishment in London and Brussels and Paris everywhere and to put in practice the ideas that can be linked to. . Bring together European democrats in a fight to democratize Europe. And therefore we see 24th June as the beginning of a very long campaign. We certainly don’t see it as the beginning of “business as usual” or the end of some process.

Julian Assange: Do you think there are opportunities, Yanis, in the case of a “remain” result, of course, you know the Junckers of this world, the Camerons, respectively I suppose, European federalists and Transatlanticists will be celebrating, trying to suggest that it was a landslide, for example. I think that is highly unlikely. It seems like it is going to be a very close vote, whichever way it is. Do you think that there is an opportunity to take hold. Is there an opportunity at all if there is a “remain” outcome?

Yanis Varoufakis: Oh there is always an opportunity and we are going to make sure there is one. We will carve one out of the Establishment’s hopes for “business as usual”. We’re not going to allow them to celebrate. We’re going to make sure that the scare that they got from this referendum, and they did get a major scare, is going to be magnified. And we are going to try to utilize that fear that the popular will has instilled into their souls by coalescing around a democratic campaign from Ireland to Greece, from the Baltics all the way to Portugal. We’re not going to allow them to even imagine that they can continue doing what they have been doing all those years.

And in any case the European crisis, including immigration, even though it has a gigantic human cost in terms of actual lives that are being diminished as a result of this crisis, nevertheless this crisis is going to make sure that they cannot be allowed to celebrate. They know that they are clueless. They have no idea as to stabilize this undemocratic, antidemocratic, European Union, and it is the peoples of Europe that have an opportunity to seize upon the democratic process that culminates in this referendum in order to create the space we need for an integrating democracy in Europe and for making sure that they have sleepless night after sleepless night.

Julian Assange: Tomorrow, Yanis, when the result is known and I guess the work must start, tomorrow, across the weekend, on Monday, if it’s a leave, what is the call by DiEM to heed the lessons of a Leave vote?

Yanis Varoufakis: I’d like to speak personally for a moment and then on behalf of DiEM. I can do that too but I think it is more honest and straightforward to speak personally. I happen to be a politician who last year was crushed by Brussels, crushed by Berlin, crushed by Frankfurt, where the European Central Bank is domiciled. and vilified by the scandal press, throughout Europe, in Greece, the world over. And yet in this campaign I campaigned for remaining in the EU.

Not because of any love lost between me and the European Union but because of the particular judgements that we need an internationalist agenda, we need a narrative of binding people together, within the European Union against the European Union. I believe in being honest to people like Wolfgang Schaeuble, Jean-Claude Juncker, my own comrades who remain now in the European Union completely surrendered to its ways and means and the idea that there is no alternative logic, and I say to them: We radicals who opposed Brussels argue for Remain.

We went, I went, personally, to Birmingham, to Ireland, to Wales, to Ireland, to London, to Scotland, and campaigning for the British people to stay in. And the British people turned it down. And they turned it down not because they didn’t want to listen to me. They turned it down because you, the Establishment of the European Union has made such a deep mess of the European Union that it was impossible to convince them to continue to accept you as the established order of Europe. So we tried to save the European Union from you, and you who are supposed to be the custodians of the European Union have failed so badly.

Julian Assange: I mean, to my mind, if there is a successful Leave vote, and I mean we have some vote counts here, but they’re very early. 146,000 England-wide Leave votes 136,000 Remain votes. I don’t think you can say very much on that. Actually, here we have some slightly updated but still very early. Remain on 49.5%. Brexit on 50.5%. The vote counts are only 150,000 so it doesn’t really mean anything statistically. But, what was I saying? So yes, if there is a Leave or even if the vote is very close, which it surely is, it is something that calls into question the political legitimacy of the European Union in the way it has been conducted so far.

And really it’s quite incredible that it came to this. That the European Union as a political structure was so unadaptable to the political calls upon it that it was not able to hand out the appropriate concessions to show that it had political legitimacy by doing what people wanted.

And regardless of what that structure is, any structure which manages a nation state or collection of nation states has to be able to keep political legitimacy. So I think that there is a very strong argument that the structure is a failure. Regardless of what side of politics you are on. A structure that cannot dynamically adapt to the political expediencies around it to regain political legitimacy when it is eroding is a failed structure.

Yanis Varoufakis: It is very much so. Indeed I dedicated a whole book recently on precisely that. And I’ve described the European Union as a postwar cartel of heavy industry which was pretty adept at creating consensus around it throughout Europe. Think of the period of growth when it was distributing monopoly profits throughout Europe and in a way which was very unequal but nevertheless it created alliances between different social groups for instance there was a Greek monopoly that gave the profits to farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy.

Cartels that could be good at distributing the goodies during the good times but they are pretty appalling and inefficient when it comes to distributing burdens in periods of crisis and particularly when it comes to arresting the crisis through macroeconomic adjustment policies which recycle surpluses and deficits in a way that is macroeconomically sustainable. And Europe has really failed in this task especially since 2008. And you don’t have to wait for today’s result, or tonight’s result to be given. Just look at the Eurobarometers. The Eurobarometer is an official European Union opinion poll which is controlling over time. …..

Julian Assange: And what is it? It’s a port for the EU.

Yanis Varoufakis: The vast majority of Europeans declared that they have confidence in the institutions of the European Union. Percentages above 65-70%. In some countries more than 80%. If you look at the same data today on the same questions. “Do you trust the institutions of the European Union?” in most countries you get below 50%. In some countries you get below 35%. So there is no doubt about it.

 

 

NOTE: the video continues after the conversation with Varoufakis, and I didn’t want to cut it off.

 

 

 

 

Jun 232016
 
 June 23, 2016  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Harris&Ewing Horse and Motor Oil, Washington, DC 1918

World’s Central Bankers Will Be Holed Up In Basel For Brexit Fallout (BBG)
Who Is The “European Movement”? (Werner)
Vancouver Proposes Tax on Empty Homes If Province Fails to Act (BBG)
IMF Warns The US Over High Poverty (BBC)
China’s Xi Lauds New Silk Road (R.)
Tesla: Incessant Cash Burn, Looming Competition No Trillion-Dollar Formula (WSJ)
Tesla Bid For Solarcity ‘Shameful’: Jim Chanos (BBC)
ECB Restores Bond Waiver, Lets Greek Banks Tap Cheap Credit (AP)
European Commission To Freeze Payments To Greece (NE)
Erdogan Says Referendum Might Be Held On Turkey’s Negotiations With EU (TM)
EU Approves Common Border Agency (WSJ)

Won’t be sleeping peacefully.

World’s Central Bankers Will Be Holed Up In Basel For Brexit Fallout (BBG)

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will be in Switzerland as the results are announced of the U.K.’s June 23 vote on whether to remain in the European Union. Kuroda will be traveling from June 23 to June 28 to attend meetings of the Bank for International Settlements, where other central bankers also will gather, the BOJ said Wednesday. Given the travel time between Europe and Japan, Kuroda would be unable to chair an emergency meeting if the central bank decides to hold one Friday Tokyo time in the event the U.K. votes to leave the EU. “This raises the likelihood of the BOJ not taking drastic measures right after the results come out,” said Daiju Aoki, an economist at UBS in Tokyo.

“Kuroda probably sees the benefit of being with other central bankers where they could talk about coordinated action.” In a press conference June 16, Kuroda declined to comment about whether he’d convene an emergency meeting after the Brexit vote and said the central bank was in touch with counterparts including the Bank of England amid Brexit concerns he said had had an impact in the bond market. The BOJ can hold an emergency meeting without the governor, according to the bank’s rules. In May 2010, then-Deputy Governor Hirohide Yamaguchi led an emergency gathering in the absence of Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, who was traveling in Europe.

Read more …

A comprehensive overview of things EU for those who can still stomach more.

Who Is The “European Movement”? (Werner)

Prime Minister David Cameron, together with the heads of the IMF, the OECD and various EU agencies have given dire warnings that economic growth will drop, the fiscal position will deteriorate, the currency will weaken and UK exports will decline precipitously. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer has threatened to cut pensions if pensioners dare to vote for exit. But what are the facts? I have been trained in international and monetary economics at the London School of Economics and have a doctorate from the University of Oxford in economics. I have studied such issues for several decades. I have also recently tested, using advanced quantitative techniques, the question of the size of impact on GDP from entry to or exit from the EU or the eurozone.

The conclusion is that this makes no difference to economic growth, and everyone who claims the opposite is not guided by the facts. The reason is that economic growth and national income are almost entirely determined by a factor that is decided at home, namely the amount of bank credit created for productive purposes. This has sadly been very small in the UK in recent decades, thus much greater economic growth is possible as soon as steps are taken to boost bank credit for productive purposes – irrespective of whether the UK stays in the EU or not (although Brexit will make it much easier to take such policy steps).

We should also remember that a much smaller economy like Norway – thought more dependent on international trade – fared extremely well after its people rejected EU membership in a referendum in 1995 (which happened against the dire warnings and threats from its cross-party elites, most of its media and the united chorus of the heads of international organisations). Besides, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China never needed EU membership to move from developing economy status to top industrialised nations within about half a century. The argument of dire economic consequences of Brexit is bogus.

Read more …

10 years late. We called it Hongcouver by then.

Vancouver Proposes Tax on Empty Homes If Province Fails to Act (BBG)

Vancouver, home of Canada’s priciest housing market, is proposing a tax on empty homes to help address an “unprecedented” low vacancy rate as residents struggle to find affordable housing. Vancouver’s preferred option is to have the provincial government of British Columbia create a new tax for empty or under-occupied residential homes, Mayor Gregor Robertson said in a statement Wednesday. Failing that, the city plans to impose a business tax on empty homes held as investment properties. The city wants a response from the province by Aug. 1.

“Vancouver housing is first and foremost for homes, not a commodity to make money with,” Robertson said. “We need a tax on empty homes to encourage the best use of all our housing, and help boost our rental supply at a time when there’s almost no vacancy.” Prices in Vancouver are the highest in Canada, topping C$1.5 million ($1.2 million) for a detached home in May, a 37% rise over the prior year, according to that city’s real estate board. At 0.6%, the current vacancy rate means there are only 330 purpose-built rental apartments available at a given time, Robertson said. That’s in a municipal region of about 2.5 million people.

Read more …

Lagarde’s just a lot of emptiness.

IMF Warns The US Over High Poverty (BBC)

The US has been warned about its high poverty rate in the International Monetary Fund’s annual assessment of the economy. The fund said about one in seven people were living in poverty and that it needed to be tackled urgently. It recommended raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to women to encourage them to work. The report also cut the country’s growth forecast for 2016 to 2.2% from a previous prediction of 2.4%. Slower global growth and weaker consumer spending were blamed. US economic growth slowed to an annual pace of 0.5% during the first three months of the year, down sharply from 1.4% in the last three months of 2015.

But the stronger labour market meant that overall “the US economy is in good shape”, said the IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde. May’s unemployment figures showed the rate at an eight-year low of 4.7%. However Ms Lagarde warned that “not only does poverty create significant social strains, it also eats into labour force participation, and undermines the ability to invest in education and improve health outcomes”. “Our assessment is that, if left unchecked, these four forces – participation, productivity, polarisation and poverty – will corrode the underpinnings of growth and hold back gains in US living standards,” she added.

Read more …

All the things monopoly money can buy.

China’s Xi Lauds New Silk Road (R.)

Chinese companies invested nearly $15 billion in countries participating in Beijing’s new Silk Road initiative last year, up one-fifth from 2014, President Xi Jinping said in Uzbekistan, lauding a scheme that is one of his key foreign policy. Under the program, announced by Xi in 2013, and also known as the “One Belt, One Road” program, China aims to invest in infrastructure projects including railways and power grids in central, west and southern Asia, as well as Africa and Europe. China has dedicated $40 billion to a Silk Road Fund and the idea was the driving force behind the establishment of the $50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In comments carried by state media late on Wednesday, Xi said China’s trade with countries participating in the new Silk Road exceeded $1 trillion in 2015, accounting for a quarter of its total foreign trade. “The Belt and Road Initiative’s primary planning and deployment has been completed and is now stepping onto the stage of taking root and intensive cultivation for sustained development,” Xi told the Uzbek parliament. Regions like the Balkans and Central Asia are key to the project, the government has said. Xi’s trip to Uzbekistan followed trips to Serbia and Poland. The initiative envisages the revival of the ancient Silk Road routes from China to Europe to open new trade markets for its firms as the domestic market slows.

Read more …

Musk has easy access to the green bubble.

Tesla: Incessant Cash Burn, Looming Competition No Trillion-Dollar Formula (WSJ)

Visions of a future dominated by electric cars have long powered Tesla Motors’ stock price. Sooner or later, the reality of corporate finance is likely to intervene. Tesla’s offer to acquire solar-energy company SolarCity brings this issue to the forefront. Though details on the financial benefits of the proposed tie-up are scant, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was his usual bold self on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. He said the proposed deal could help Tesla become the world’s first company with a trillion-dollar market capitalization. That would require a more than 30-fold increase from today’s value. Yet that boast may not be the most jarring one Mr. Musk has offered of late.

Powered by the new Model 3 mass-market sedan, Tesla aims to deliver 500,000 vehicles in 2018, Mr. Musk said last month. That target is two years ahead of the previous goal. Tesla forecasts 80,000 to 90,000 deliveries this year. In a world of slow growth and cautious corporate management teams, bold ambition is a central part of Tesla’s appeal to investors. But reaching for the stars has proven expensive. Tesla’s core business has burned more than $3 billion in cash over the past six quarters. Capital needs are expected to further intensify over the coming years. No surprise there; automobile manufacturing is a low-return, capital-intensive business.

The SolarCity transaction could further pressure Tesla’s financial profile. Mr. Musk said Wednesday that Tesla would be willing to provide a bridge loan to SolarCity before the deal closes if needed, although he thought such a scenario to be unlikely. Still, even the possibility of such a loan should raise eyebrows. Mr. Musk said he expects SolarCity to be cash-flow positive within three to six months. That could be the case in a given quarter, but analysts at Barclays forecast 2016 free cash flow at negative-$1.8 billion. As for Tesla, Barclays expects the auto maker to burn $2.1 billion without much improvement over the coming two years. The combined company could burn as much as $3.4 billion in 2018, before factoring in the financial impact of the merger.

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Always funny how close shameful and shameless are in the English language.

Tesla Bid For Solarcity ‘Shameful’: Jim Chanos (BBC)

Tesla’s bid to buy struggling solar energy firm SolarCity has been called “shameful” by financier Jim Chanos. Mr Chanos, who is betting against the shares of both firms, described the bid as a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst”. Tesla made a $2.8bn (1.9bn) offer for SolarCity on Tuesday. Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk said the deal, which will be paid for in Telsa shares, was a “no brainer”. The two firms have close ties. Mr Musk owns 22% of SolarCity and sits on the company’s board. SolarCity’s chief executive Lyndon Rive and Mr Musk are cousins. “As a combined automotive and power storage and power generation company, the potential is there for Tesla to be a trillion-dollar market cap company,” Mr Musk said.

Mr Chanos has taken short positions in both Tesla and SolarCity. When investors take short positions they borrow shares of a company, sell those shares and try to buy them back at a lower price. Mr Chanos said SolarCity was “headed toward financial distress,” and neither company could handle the burden of a tie-up. “[SolarCity] is burning hundreds of millions in cash every quarter, a burden that now Tesla shareholders will have to bear, at a total cost of over $8bn,” he said.

Read more …

Why now?

ECB Restores Bond Waiver, Lets Greek Banks Tap Cheap Credit (AP)

The ECB has restored a key waiver that will let Greek banks tap emergency central bank credit, one step toward putting the country’s financial institutions back on their feet. The decision announced Wednesday permits Greek government bonds to be used by banks as collateral to get cheap money from the ECB — even though those bonds are rated too low under the usual rules. Greek banks were shattered by the country’s financial and debt crisis which has led to three bailouts since 2010. They have been relying on more expensive financing from the Greek national central bank to do business. The ECB restored the waiver after the Greek government got a €7.5 billion installment on its latest bailout, ensuring the government can pay its bills for now.

Read more …

Still a very corrupt country. And not given the time to do something about it; ‘reform’ has eaten that away.

European Commission To Freeze Payments To Greece (NE)

The European Commission will stop all payments of the European Regional Development Fund/Cohesion fund to Greece for the 2014-2020 programmes. This is confirmed by an internal letter obtained by New Europe signed by Walter Deffaa, Director-General for Regional Development. The reason for the Commission’s pause is an investigation of the Greek competition authority, which concerns possible manipulation of tendering procedures for major infrastructure projects. While the letter was circulated internally on June 17, it is expected that the decision will not be announced until after the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, has concluded his trip to the Greek capital, but possibly before the competition authority will examine the case on July 21.

The European Commission did not immediately respond to New Europe on whether the President had discussed the issue with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, or as to the amount of money that would be affected by this decision. According to the letter, the Greek authorities working on the case have “already identified companies participating in the cartel as all major constructions companies and large foreign companies present in Greece.” The cartel was allegedly active for over 27 years from 1989, to this year, in the domain of road construction, railroads, metro, and concession projects. The Director-General confirms that some of these projects “will certainly have been co-financed by EU funds”.

Read more …

We’ll file this under entertainment…

Erdogan Says Referendum Might Be Held On Turkey’s Negotiations With EU (TM)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey might hold a referendum on whether to end or continue negotiations with European Union (EU). Erdogan commented on Turkey’s EU accession negotiations during a graduation ceremony of Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation University on Wednesday. “Just like United Kingdom, we could also ask our people whether to continue or end negotiations with EU”, Erdogan said.

“Turkey is not after visa-free travel or the shipping back [to Turkish territory of migrants who arrive in Greece]. However, you are after Turkey right now. You are thinking about what would happen if Turkey was to open the gates and let the refugees pass. You are losing your temper because Erdoan throws off your mask and reveals your true, ugly face. That’s why you are thinking of ways to get rid of Erdogan. Europe, you do not want us only because the majority of our people are Muslims”, Erdogan added.

Erdogan’s remarks came after European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the only person standing in the way of Turkey’s visa-free travel to EU was Erdogan. “If Turks cannot travel to EU without a visa right now, that is because they have not fulfilled the necessary criteria. If Erdogan breaks the deal, he has to explain his people why they can’t travel to EU [without a visa]”, Juncker said.

Read more …

Foreign armed ‘soldiers’ operating in another country’s sovereign territory. Is that what people want?

EU Approves Common Border Agency (WSJ)

The European Union on Wednesday agreed on setting up a common external border agency and coast guard to be deployed in countries struggling with a massive influx of migrants. The plan was originally put forward in December and has been pushed by Germany and France in response to the migration crisis that saw over one million asylum seekers arrive via Greece last year, and the threat from Islamic State terrorists mingling with the stream of refugees. Sovereignty concerns raised by some EU governments have been addressed in a compromise whereby a majority of governments would have to approve any deployment of EU border guards, including the country where the external border is deemed too porous and an intervention needed.

If an EU country which belongs to the Schengen border-free area refuses to accept such a deployment, and its failure to protect the common border is considered to endanger the border-free area, other countries can erect borders to isolate themselves from it. The U.K. and Ireland won’t be part of the new agency, as they are not part of the Schengen area. The compromise deal, approved Wednesday by the bloc’s 28 ambassadors, still requires the formal adoption by EU governments and the European Parliament, but EU officials say this is a formality that will likely happen in the coming weeks. The European Border and Coast Guard will build on an existing EU agency—Frontex—which is based in Warsaw and currently only has limited powers when it comes to patrolling land and sea borders—a national prerogative.

The new agency will also comprise a network of national authorities responsible for border management and will have a reserve pool of 1,500 border guards to be deployed in emergency cases within a week. But setting up the pool of 1,500 will take time and resources, as EU countries aren’t equally motivated to see this project come to life, EU officials say. In previous years, EU countries were slow in dispatching border guards to Greece and Italy, whose governments requested EU assistance for search and rescue missions at sea or for patrolling the land border between Greece and Turkey. This is partly because some EU countries need the guards back home and also because polyglot border guards are rare.

Read more …

Dec 312014
 
 December 31, 2014  Posted by at 11:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


NPC “Poli’s Theater, Washington, DC. Now playing: Edith Taliaferro in “Keep to the Right” Jul 1920

US Opening Door to More Oil Exports Seen Foiling OPEC Strategy (Bloomberg)
The Market Chart Of The Year: Nope, It’s Not Oil (CNBC)
Commodities Head for Record Losing Run on Oil to Dollar (Bloomberg)
As Oil Prices Fall, Alaska Governor Halts Project Spending (AP)
Falling Energy Costs And Economic Impacts (STA)
Chart Shows How US Drillers Respond To Oil Price Drop (MarketWatch)
Chinese Stocks, Dollar And Debt The Stars Of 2014 (Reuters)
We’re Not Communists, Greek Opposition Insists (CNBC)
‘Snap Elections Will Be Decisive For Greece’s Eurozone Future’ (Guardian)
Europe Deflation Fears Back After Weak Spain, Greece Data (CNBC)
Will the Real Angela Merkel Please Stand Up? (Bloomberg)
Obama Suggests Putin ‘Not So Smart’ (BBC)
China Factory Activity Shrinks (BBC)
Japan Is Writing History As A Prime Boom And Bust Case (Grass)
The Rigging Triangle Exposed: The JPMorgan-BP-BOE Cartel (Zero Hedge)
BP Probes In-House Foreign Exchange Traders (FT)
The Prison State of America (Chris Hedges)
Recolonizing Africa: A Modern Chinese Story? (CNBC)
Ebola Wrecks Years Of Aid Work In Worst-Hit Countries (Reuters)
Protecting Money or People? (James K. Boyce)
Goodbye To One Of The Best Years In History (Telegraph)

Hilarious. Flood the markets even more, bring down the price further, and then find you can’t make any money with your exports. And stop talking about OPEC ‘strategy’ already. Start thinking about US strategy.

US Opening Door to More Oil Exports Seen Foiling OPEC Strategy (Bloomberg)

The Obama administration’s move to allow exports of ultralight crude without government approval may encourage shale drilling and thwart Saudi Arabia’s strategy to curb U.S. output, further weakening oil markets, according to Citigroup Inc. A type of crude known as condensate can be exported if it is run through a distillation tower, which separates the hydrocarbons that make up the oil, according to U.S. government guidelines published yesterday. That may boost supplies ready to be sold overseas to as much as 1 million barrels a day by the end of 2015, Citigroup analysts led by Ed Morse in New York said in an e-mailed report. Saudi Arabia led the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain its production quota at a meeting last month even as a shale boom boosted U.S. output to the highest in more than three decades. That prompted speculation OPEC was willing to let prices fall to force some companies with higher drilling costs to stop pumping.

“U.S. producers are under the gun to reduce capital expenditures given lower prices,” Citigroup said in the report. “Now an export route provides a new lease on life that can further weaken crude oil markets and throw a monkey wrench into recent Saudi plans to cripple U.S. production.” Current U.S. export capacity is at about 200,000 barrels a day, which could be expanded to 500,000 a day by the middle of 2015, according to the bank. While the guidelines on the website of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security are the first public explanation of steps companies can take to avoid violating export laws, they don’t mean an end to the ban on most crude exports, which Congress adopted in 1975 in response to the Arab oil embargo. “While government officials have gone out of their way to indicate there is no change in policy, in practice this long-awaited move can open up the floodgates to substantial increases in exports by end-2015,” Citigroup said.

The U.S. produces about 3.81 million barrels a day of light and ultralight crude, according to the bank. West Texas Intermediate in New York dropped as much as 1.4% today to $53.38 a barrel, down 46% this year. Brent, the global marker crude, slid 1.8% to $56.87 in London, bringing losses in 2014 to 48%. Both benchmark grades are headed for the biggest annual slump since 2008. Oil producers have been testing the prohibition on crude exports as U.S. output surged amid technological advances that have opened up shale rock formations to development in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere. The government earlier this year signaled a new way to export oil by approving permits for Pioneer and Enterprise to sell processed condensate. The guidelines seek to clarify how the Commerce Department will implement export rules and follow a “review of technological and policy issues,” Eric Hirschhorn, the under secretary for industry and security, said in a statement.

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“This time though it’s not about a flight to safety. Investors are flocking to the dollar because they like it. The U.S. economy has outperformed and American assets are in vogue.”

The Market Chart Of The Year: Nope, It’s Not Oil (CNBC)

There are many strong contenders to be the chart of the year. Some point to oil prices, which shockingly plunged 50% in a matter of months. Others would look to the S&P 500, which exploded higher for a third year in row and has closed at a record high 53 times (so far), more than 20% of 2014’s trading days. They’re each compelling stories, but neither is as impactful nor as important as the breakout of the U.S. dollar. Presenting the chart of 2014: the broad trade-weighted dollar. The trade-weighted dollar tracks the U.S. greenback’s value against a basket of other currencies, representing both developing and emerging markets. It’s a broader measure than the regularly cited dollar index and the best indication of how a strong dollar hurts American companies that do business overseas.

The broad trade-weighted dollar is up 9% this year, now at the highest point since March 2009, when financial crisis fears had risk-averse investors pouring into the U.S. currency. It’s well above its average historical price over the last 15 years and now just 3.6% away from reaching those crisis highs. This time though it’s not about a flight to safety. Investors are flocking to the dollar because they like it. The U.S. economy has outperformed and American assets are in vogue. The move has been absolutely stunning. Break apart the trade-weighted dollar into individual pairs – the currency has strengthened nearly 12% against the euro this year, 13% against the yen and 18 to 19% against the Norwegian and Swedish currencies. The move is more dramatic when weighed against the trouble spots of 2014. The dollar has gained 44% versus the Russian ruble and 24% versus the Argentine peso. In fact, the U.S. greenback has strengthened against all developed and emerging currencies in the past 12 months.

“The rise of the U.S. dollar in 2014 is remarkable both by its intensity and weak support from expectations of Fed tightening,” according to Sebastien Galy, FX strategist at Societe Generale. “It tells us much about the intensity with which other central banks have tried to weaken their currencies,” he said. In other words, it’s not just a story of U.S. economic strength in the face of global weakness, but also the contrast to major central banks seeking to weaken their own currencies in the name of growth and export competitiveness. That trend should continue in the new year and ultimately fuel more worrisome trade tensions.

“The odds are that the U.S. dollar strength can go much further than currently expected, similarly the odds of … trade barriers are steadily rising,” Galy warned. As if that wasn’t enough, expectations that the Fed will begin to raise interest rates in the second half of 2015 have many believing the dollar has plenty of room to run. “The strength of the U.S. labor market and U.S. economy are making the Fed more confident that it can begin to raise rates next year,” wrote Lee Hardman, currency strategist at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in a note after the last Fed meeting in mid-December. “The market is still not convinced that the Fed will tighten even at that more modest pace … leaving scope for U.S. short rates to continue to increase in the year ahead, supporting a stronger U.S. dollar.” Beyond the stunning breakout of the buck, the move is significant because the dollar is the backbone of the global financial system. It influences prices of all major commodities, the largest and most liquid debt and equity markets, and the world’s largest economy.

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Much more to come.

Commodities Head for Record Losing Run on Oil to Dollar (Bloomberg)

Commodities headed for the biggest annual loss since the global financial crisis in 2008, retreating for a record fourth year, as a global glut spurred a rout in oil prices and a stronger dollar cut the allure of raw materials. The Bloomberg Commodity Index dropped to the lowest level since March 2009 earlier today. It’s lost 16% this year, with crude, gasoline and heating oil the biggest decliners. A fourth year of losses would be the longest since at least 1991. Energy prices retreated in 2014 as a jump in U.S. drilling sparked a surge in output and price war with OPEC, which chose to maintain supplies to try to retain market share. The dollar climbed to the highest level in more than five years as a U.S. recovery spurred speculation that the Federal Reserve will start to raise borrowing costs next year. Commodities are set for a volatile year in 2015, with crude oil poised to extend its slump, according to Australia and New Zealand Bank.

“What we’re seeing is that supplies from North America have really outpaced worldwide demand growth and as a result, we have a supply glut,” Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil, said by phone. “And that of course has put pressure on prices over the last several months. And as a result, it’s dragging down commodities indexes as well.” Brent for February settlement traded at $57.01 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, with rice 49% lower this year. West Texas Intermediate dropped 1.1% to $53.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gasoline sank 49% this year. A slowdown in China also hurt demand for raw materials as policy makers grappled with a property slowdown, and data today showed a factory gauge at a seven-month low in December. The world’s biggest user of metals is headed for its slowest full-year economic expansion since 1990. China’s central bank cut interest rates last month for the first time since 2012.

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Bring back Sarah!

As Oil Prices Fall, Alaska Governor Halts Project Spending (AP)

With oil prices dropping, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker has halted new spending on six high-profile projects, pending further review. Walker issued an order Friday putting the new spending on hold. He cited the state’s $3.5 billion budget deficit, which has increased as oil prices have dropped sharply. With oil prices now around a five-year low, officials in Alaska and about a half-dozen other states already have begun paring back projections for a continued gusher of revenues. Spending cuts have started in some places, and more could be necessary if oil prices stay at lower levels. How well the oil-rich states survive the downturn may hinge on how much they saved during the good times, and how much they depend on oil revenues.

Some states, such as Texas, have diversified their economies since oil prices crashed in the mid-1980s. Others, such as Alaska, remain heavily dependent on oil and will have to tap into sizeable savings to get by. The projects Walker halted spending on include a small-diameter gas pipeline from the North Slope, the Alaska Dispatch News reported. The other projects are the Kodiak rocket launch complex, the Knik Arm bridge, the Susitna-Watana hydroelectric dam, Juneau access road and the Ambler road. “The state’s fiscal situation demands a critical look and people should be prepared for several of these projects to be delayed and/or stopped,” Walker’s budget director Pat Pitney said in an email.

According to Walker’s order, the hold on spending is pending further review. The administration intends to decide on project priorities near the start of Alaska’s legislative session Jan. 20, and no later than a Feb. 18 legal budgeting deadline, Pitney said. State lawmakers have final authority to decide whether the projects should continue to be funded, Pitney said. Contractually required spending and employee salaries will continue. Walker’s order asks each agency working on the projects to stop hiring new employees, signing new contracts and committing any new funding from other sources, including the federal government. The action follows a letter sent Tuesday by the state Legislature’s Republican leadership, who urged the governor to immediately cut spending levels in light of the budget crunch.

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Why is this so hard to understand?

Falling Energy Costs And Economic Impacts (STA)

“If you repeat a falsehood long enough, it will eventually be accepted as fact.” In the financial markets and economics it is a common occurrence that the media and commentators will latch on to a statement that supports a cognitive bias and then repeat that statement until it is a universally accepted truth. When such a statement becomes universally accepted and unquestioned, well, that is when I begin to question it. One of those statements has been in regards to plunging oil prices. The majority of analysts and economists have been ratcheting up expectations for the economy and the markets on the back of lower energy costs. The argument is that lower oil prices lead to lower gasoline prices that give consumers more money to spend. The argument seems to be entirely logical since we know that roughly 80% of households in America effectively live paycheck-to-paycheck meaning they will spend, rather than save, any extra disposable income. As an example, Steve LeVine recently wrote:

“US gasoline prices have dropped for more than 90 straight days. They now average $2.28 a gallon, which is remarkable considering that just a few months ago, some of us were routinely paying $4 and sometimes close to $5. Not so coincidentally, the US economy surged by 5% last quarter, and does not appear to be slowing down. “

If you read the statement, how could one possibly disagree with such a premise? If I spend less money at the gas pump, I obviously have more money to spend elsewhere. Right? The problem is that the economy is a ZERO-SUM game and gasoline prices are an excellent example of the mainstream fallacy of lower oil prices.

Example:
• Gasoline Prices Fall By $1.00 Per Gallon
• Consumer Fills Up A 16 Gallon Tank Saving $16 (+16)
• Gas Station Revenue Falls By $16 For The Transaction (-16)
• End Economic Result = $0

Now, the argument is that the $16 saved by the consumer will be spent elsewhere. This is the equivalent of “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Increased consumer spending is a function of increases in INCOME, not SAVINGS. Consumers only have a finite amount of money to spend.

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If you ask me, if there’s one thing this chart shows, it’s how much further the rig count has to fall.

Chart Shows How US Drillers Respond To Oil Price Drop (MarketWatch)

It’s no surprise that the number of U.S. oil rigs moves up and down with the price of oil, but the chart above offers an interesting glance at the relationship. Baker Hughes on Monday said the total number of U.S. rotary rigs fell by 35 to 1,840 in the week ended Dec. 26, the fifth consecutive weekly decline, bringing the total to its lowest level since April. “If OPEC’s goal is to slow U.S. oil production by dumping cheap oil into our market, they are having some success,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst Price Futures in Chicago. OPEC in November accelerated oil’s free fall when it refrained from cutting crude production. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said earlier this month that a plunge to as low as $20 wouldn’t be enough to prompt a production cut.

The move has been described as a price war aimed primarily at North American shale producers, who had responded to high oil prices by ramping up production in recent years at a breakneck clip. Oil’s slide, which has seen Nymex futures, the U.S. benchmark, fall 50% from their June high above $107 to trade at five-and-a-half year lows below $54 a barrel, has been the fastest since 2008. That means rig counts will continue to decline, but the impact on supply will likely take “weeks if not months” to be reflected in hard production figures, said analysts at Commerzbank.

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“Europe’s government bond markets all closed on Tuesday after another stellar year that has seen Italian and Spanish borrowing costs hit record lows and unglamorous but ultra-safe German debt enjoy its strongest year in six.”

Chinese Stocks, Dollar And Debt The Stars Of 2014 (Reuters)

Chinese and U.S. stocks headed the list of 2014 top performers while markets elsewhere ended the year on Wednesday on a cautionary note as worries about Greece’s future served as an excuse to take profits. The U.S. dollar lost a little of the recent gains that have made it the year’s star major currency, but European bonds yields scored all-time lows following a shockingly sharp fall in Spanish inflation on Tuesday. European stocks had a steady start as they wrapped up a year that has seen a 3.5% rise for the region as a whole but also sharp divergence, with near 30% losses for debt-strained Greece and Portugal. The stand-out global equity performer has been China, where the CSI300 index looked set to end 2014 with gains of nearly 50%.

Almost all of China’s rise came in the last couple of months, as hopes for more aggressive policy stimulus to counter its economic slowdown boosted banks and brokerages. Featuring on Wednesday were hefty gains for China’s biggest train makers, China CNR and CSR Corp, after they confirmed a $26 billion merger. “China stocks have done really well this year and the dollar move has also been very interesting,” said Alvin Tan, an FX strategist at Societe Generale in London. “It barely moved against the other major currencies in the first of the year and all the big gains came in the second half.” Trade elsewhere was thinned by holidays in Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines, while many markets in Europe were either shut or finishing early.

Europe’s government bond markets all closed on Tuesday after another stellar year that has seen Italian and Spanish borrowing costs hit record lows and unglamorous but ultra-safe German debt enjoy its strongest year in six. Among the scraps of news in Europe, two polls in Greece published late on Tuesday showed the anti-bailout party Syriza’s lead over the ruling conservatives had narrowed. The dollar was on track to end 2014 with a gain of 12% against a basket of major currencies, its best performance since 2005, and anticipated U.S. interest rate hikes may strengthen its appeal in the new year. It eased against the safe haven yen to stand at 119.64 from Tuesday’s peak of 120.69, as futures prices pointed to small gains for Wall Street when trading resumes following its 13% jump to an all-time high this year. The euro was undermined by sliding European yields amid intense speculation the European Central Bank will have to start buying government bonds to avert deflation. The single currency was stuck at $1.2154 having touched a 29-month trough of $1.2123.

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But it’s how they’ll be portrayed.

We’re Not Communists, Greek Opposition Insists (CNBC)

Accusations that Greece’s far-left opposition party Syriza is “worse than communism” are propaganda, its head of economic policy insisted on Tuesday, arguing instead that the party would solve Greece’s “humanitarian crisis” if it came to power in January. Speaking to CNBC on Tuesday, John Milios said Syriza planned to stabilize Greece’s society and boost the economy. “We have to combat first the humanitarian crisis, people who don’t have the necessities — houses, food or the money for transportation,” he said. “We are confident that if we do this the economy will start to stabilize and the present turmoil will be past.” Greece’s political establishment was thrown into chaos on Monday, when its parliament’s failure to elect a president triggered an early general election – something that credit ratings agency Fitch warned on Tuesday would increase the risks to the country’s credit worthiness.

Anti-austerity Syriza appears confident that it can win the forthcoming election in January, however. Opinion polls released late on Monday showed Syriza had a 3% lead over Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ party, although the lead has narrowed of late. But although attractive to voters, the party does not appear to be popular within the investment community. In November, an email written by Joerg Sponer, an investment analyst at Capital Group, was leaked in which he said Syriza’s policies were “worse than communism.” Sponer reportedly wrote the email after attending a conference in London in which Milios presented the party’s economic manifesto. But Milios was quick to defend his policies, saying that such comments were “government propaganda.” “This saying that we are worse than communists was not something that represented the whole climate of discussions in London. I think this… had to do with the present government and to do with propaganda,” he told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday.

Investors are particularly concerned that a Syriza-led government could result in the undoing of the austerity policies implemented under Samaras’ present government. The party has always said it would “tear up” the tough conditions of Greece’s bailout, which were required by the troika of international creditors, the EU, IMF and ECB. The Athens stock exchange fell up to 10% on Monday, before paring some losses, and was trading 0.3% lower on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Greece’s borrowing costs remained above 9.5%. With a public debt to GDP ratio of 175.5%, the country has the highest debt in the euro zone, but Greece’s politicians are keen to calm European lenders that Greece isn’t about to default – or leave the single currency union.

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Start the horror campaign.

‘Snap Elections Will Be Decisive For Greece’s Eurozone Future’ (Guardian)

Next month’s snap elections in Greece will be decisive for the country’s future in the eurozone, the prime minister, Antonis Samaras, said on Tuesday after requesting parliament’s dissolution. “People don’t want these elections and they aren’t necessary,” the beleaguered leader told the nation’s outgoing head of state Karolos Papoulias. “They are happening because of party self-interest … and this struggle will determine whether Greece stays in Europe.” Signalling market concerns, credit rating agency Fitch said prolonged political uncertainty could “increase the risks to Greece’s creditworthiness”. The country was forced into holding early elections after parliament failed on Monday to endorse Stavros Dimas, the government’s candidate for president.

With the debt-burdened country dependent on international rescue funds, officials said the radical left main opposition Syriza party would “pay a heavy price” for triggering the elections after joining forces with the far-right Golden Dawn to block Dimas from becoming president. Late on Monday the IMF said it would suspend aid instalments until after the 25 January poll. “People will punish those who have triggered this unnecessary turmoil, because it is obvious that Syriza has no solution [to economic problems]. It neither says where it will find the money, nor will it find the money,” said government spokeswoman Sophia Voultepsi, referring to the party’s pledge of wide-ranging social benefits if it wins power.

On the back of popular discontent over gruelling austerity, the price of €240bn (£188bn) in aid, Syriza has led polls since European elections in May. But the gap has narrowed since Samaras gambled by bringing forward the presidential election. An opinion poll on Tuesday showed a 3% lead for Syriza over Samaras’ New Democracy party. This followed the Greek finance minister Gikas Hardouvelis’ warning of economic sanctions by the European Central Bank if the anti-austerity Syriza won. Analysts predicted that Samaras, who has better personal ratings than Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, could win the elections yet.

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Deflation is a fact, not a fear.

Europe Deflation Fears Back After Weak Spain, Greece Data (CNBC)

Fears of deflation in the euro zone were heightened once again on Tuesday, after both Spain and Greece reported worse-than-expected price declines. A flash reading for consumer price index (CPI) inflation in Spain showed that prices fell by 1.1% year-on-year in December. This was below forecasts of a 0.7% drop, and followed November’s decline of 0.5%. Analysts said this month’s fall was mainly driven by weakening oil prices which could mean that other large euro zone members fall victim to deflation soon. “With a Spanish reading this low, euro area inflation might well turn negative as early as December,” said Robert Kuenzel, director of euro area economic research at Daiwa Capital Markets, in a research note on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, data out from Greece showed that producer prices declined 2.3% year-on-year in November way below October’s 0.9% fall. Consumer prices in the country fell by 1.2% in the same period. Kuenzel told CNBC that the producer price drop in Greece was worse than he expected, and was “one of the largest fall we have seen for years.” “As producer prices are more energy price-sensitive, this is still not out of line with today’s downside Spanish CPI surprise, even though that was numerically smaller,” he said via email. Brent crude oil prices fell to a 5-1/2-year low under $57 per barrel on Tuesday, extending losses into a fourth trading session. Oxford Economics has warned that a multitude of European countries face deflation next year if oil prices remain below $60, including the U.K., France, Switzerland and Italy.

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Bloomberg has it all upside down.

Will the Real Angela Merkel Please Stand Up? (Bloomberg)

If anything is certain about the new year, it is that much of the world’s stability and economic health will depend on what is done, or not done, in Europe. And what happens in Europe will depend, in large part, on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel’s leadership in 2014 was a curious mixture of boldness and timidity. It fell to her, more than any other European leader, to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin. And her efforts are what secured the unanimity among the European Union’s 28 fractious nations that was needed to impose meaningful economic sanctions to deter further Russian aggression in Ukraine. Regardless of whether those sanctions ultimately succeed, they have already served an important purpose by helping to hold the EU – with its Russophile Italians and Austrians, its Russophobe Poles and Balts – together.

As helpful as Merkel has been with Russia, however, she has so far only harmed efforts to address the faltering European economy. In 2015, as new elections in Greece bring fresh turmoil, she will need to apply some of the clarity and decisiveness she has showed in dealing with Putin to the euro zone. On both fronts, next year will be harder. Europe’s Russia challenge will get tougher, because the pressure to repeal sanctions will rise. The current measures against Russia begin to expire in March, and many European leaders will be looking for reasons not to renew them as long as something resembling a cease-fire is in place; the reduction in lending, investment and sales to Russia has hurt the European economy as well as the Russian one. Yet until there is a more meaningful settlement that ensures Putin can’t continue his semi-covert war in Ukraine, sanctions need to stay.

As for the EU, new forces for disunion will emerge. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will be pushing for changes in the way the bloc works that help him persuade Britons to vote against leaving it. Merkel will need to simultaneously rein Cameron in and convince other EU leaders that it would be in their interests, too, to return some powers to national governments. At the same time, the euro crisis threatens to heat up again. The favorite to win early elections in Greece next month, the neo-Marxist Syriza party, says it will refuse to carry out the further austerity measures required for the country’s remaining bailout funds. Syriza also promises to roll back economic reforms that were put in place under the terms of the country’s 240 billion euro loan program, as well as to demand a restructuring of the country’s enormous public debt. Europe’s banking system may not be as vulnerable to a Greek default as it once was, but markets have been jittery at the revived possibility of a Greek exit from the euro.

So far, Merkel has resisted relenting on austerity policies for Greece. She has been unwilling to stimulate demand in the euro area, either by boosting investment in Germany’s own low-growth economy or by letting the European Central Bank engage in large-scale quantitative easing. She should not wait for the dawn of a new government in Greece to change course on all fronts. Otherwise, Merkel may end next year not as the German leader who held Europe together, but as the one who put such strain on Europe’s currency and democracies that they began to break apart.

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Sure, Barry …

Obama Suggests Putin ‘Not So Smart’ (BBC)

President Barack Obama has said Vladimir Putin made a “strategic mistake” when he annexed Crimea, in a move that was “not so smart”. Those thinking his Russian counterpart was a “genius” had been proven wrong by Russia’s economic crisis, he said. International sanctions had made Russia’s economy particularly vulnerable to changes in oil price, Mr Obama said. He also refused to rule out opening a US embassy in Iran soon. “I never say never but I think these things have to go in steps” he told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in the Oval Office. Mr Obama was giving a wide-ranging interview with NPR shortly before leaving for Hawaii for his annual holiday. He criticised his political opponents who claimed he had been outdone by Russia’s president.

“You’ll recall that three or four months ago, everybody in Washington was convinced that President Putin was a genius and he had outmanoeuvred all of us and he had bullied and strategised his way into expanding Russian power,” he said. “Today, I’d sense that at least outside of Russia, maybe some people are thinking what Putin did wasn’t so smart.” Mr Obama argued that sanctions had made the Russian economy vulnerable to “inevitable” disruptions in oil price which, when they came, led to “enormous difficulties”. “The big advantage we have with Russia is we’ve got a dynamic, vital economy, and they don’t,” he said. “They rely on oil. We rely on oil and iPads and movies and you name it.”

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“There’s still bit of way to go before we see the Chinese economy reviving ..”

China Factory Activity Shrinks (BBC)

China’s manufacturing activity shrank for the first time in seven months in December, a private survey showed on Wednesday. The final HSBC/Markit Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) was at 49.6, just below the 50 level that separates growth from contraction in the sector. The reading was slightly higher than an initial “flash” number of 49.5 released earlier this month. But, the result was still down from a final reading of 50 in November. The most recent data paints an even weaker picture of the slowing Chinese economy, which has been heralded as the “factory of the world”. New factory orders contracted for the first time since April. The economic data also backs the series of surprising moves by its government to boost growth in the past two months.

In November, the country’s central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates to 2.75% for first time since 2012 in an attempt to revive the economy. Whether the world’s second biggest economy will be able to reach its growth target of 7.5% after not missing the mark for 15 years has economists questioning if more needs to be done by policymakers. While the downbeat data is not a surprise considering the preliminary reading released earlier this month, Ryan Huang, market strategist at broker IG Asia said it just adds more pressure on Beijing to introduce more measures. “There’s still bit of way to go before we see the Chinese economy reviving,” he told the BBC. “They [the central bank] have been doing [banks’] reserve requirement ratio cuts, loan to deposit ratios have been lowered to help lending conditions – we’ll probably see more of this happening.”

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Boom and bust and basket.

Japan Is Writing History As A Prime Boom And Bust Case (Grass)

Recently, we wrote a paper about the dynamics behind the boom and bust cycles, based on the view of the Austrian School (the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, or ABCT). The key takeaway was that central banks don’t help in smoothing the amplitude of the cycles, but rather are the cause of cycles. Business cycles are a direct result of excessive credit flow into the market, facilitated by an intentionally low interest rate set by the government. The problem with ongoing monetary policies is that the excessive money supply sends the wrong signals to the market, which ultimately leads to misallocation of investments or ‘malinvestments’.

On the one hand, entrepreneurs invest more and increase the depth of the production process. On the other hand, consumers spend more as saving becomes unattractive. When the excess products created through the cheap money-induced investments reach the market, consumers are unable to buy them due to the lack of prior savings. At this point the bust occurs. It is key to understand that by manipulating interest rates (particularly by lowering them), central banks create bubbles that end in busts. Japan is an excellent case study depicting the scenario discussed by the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). In this article, we will examine the course of the economic and monetary situation in Japan from the ABCT’s point of view.

The latest quarterly GDP release in Japan was a real disaster. Economists had forecast a GDP growth between 2.2% and 2.5% but the result was a contraction of 1.6% on an annualized basis (i.e., -0.5% on a quarterly basis). That comes after a quarter in which GDP had already fallen 7.3% on an annualized basis (i.e., -1.9% on a quarterly basis). The money printing frenzy has taken gigantic proportions, and the (lack of) effectiveness of the excessive money creation is visible in the charts. The first chart below shows the annual monetary base expansion (the black line) since 1990. The GDP year-on-year growth is shown in the green line. Notice how the monetary base had exploded in 2013 but the steepness of the rise was slightly reduced in 2014. Even with this slight pull back in monetary growth, the GDP growth is truly collapsing.

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The Bloomberg piece is in yesterday’s Debt Rattle. Zero Hedge has a go at digging deeper.

The Rigging Triangle Exposed: The JPMorgan-BP-BOE Cartel (Zero Hedge)

The name Dick Usher is familiar to regular readers: he was the head of spot foreign exchange for JPMorgan, and the bank’s alleged chief FX market manipulator, who was promptly fired after it was revealed that JPM was the bank coordinating the biggest FX rigging scheme in history, as initially revealed in “Another JPMorganite Busted For “Bandits’ Club” Market Manipulation.” Subsequent revelations – which would have been impossible without the tremendous reporting of Bloomberg’s Liam Vaughan – showed that JPM was not alone: as recent legal actions confirmed, virtually every single bank was also a keen FX rigging participant. However, the undisputed ringleader was always America’s largest bank, which would make sense: having a virtually unlimited balance sheet, JPM could outlast practically any margin call, and make money while its far smaller peers were closed out of trades… and existence.

But while the past year revealed that FX rigging was a just as pervasive, if not even more profitable industry for banks than the great Libor-fixing scandal, the conventional wisdom was that it involved almost exclusively bankers at the largest global banks including JPM, Goldman, Deutsche, Barclays, RBS, HSBC, and UBS. Now, courtesy of some more brilliant reporting by Vaughan, we can finally link banks with the other two facets of what has emerged to be an unprecedented FX-rigging “triangle” cartel: private sector companies that have no direct banking operations yet who have intimate prop trading exposure, as well as central banks themselves. By “banks” we, of course, refer to the ringleader itself: JP Morgan, and its former head of spot forex trading in London, Dick Usher. As for the company that benefited from its heretofore secret participation in the biggest FX rigging scandal in history, it is none other than British Petroleum.

We learn about all this thanks to a story that begins with, of all thing, a story about freshwater fishing at a lake in Essex called “Wharf Pool.” As Bloomberg reports, “an hour away by train, in London’s financial district, the lake’s owners ply their trade. Wharf Pool was purchased for about 250,000 pounds ($388,000) in 2012 by Richard Usher, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader at the center of a global investigation into corruption in the foreign-exchange market, and Andrew White, a currency trader at oil company BP Plc. ” The plot thickens: was there more than a passing connection between the head FX trader at JPM and White “who’s known in the market as Tubby, is one of half a dozen spot currency traders working for British Petroleum (BP) in London. He and his colleagues, most of them ex-bankers, decide which firms will carry out their foreign-exchange transactions. That makes them prized clients for banks seeking a slice of the business and a glimpse into potentially market-moving trades. Passing on information was a way to curry favor.”

In short, a typical Over The Counter relationship between a banker and a buyside client, one which is largely unregulated and where the bank hopes to be able to frontrun the client’s orders by providing the client with confidential market moving information, thus generating more business with the client in the future. In this case, however, the buyside client was not a typical hedge fund, but the FX trading group at one of the world’s largest energy companies: a group which trades enormous amounts of FX every single day, both with intent to hedge, and to generate a profit.

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Because BP had no idea!

BP Probes In-House Foreign Exchange Traders (FT)

BP is investigating whether in-house financial traders at the oil and gas group were involved in a foreign exchange manipulation scandal that has led regulators to levy $4.3 billion in fines on six banks. The UK group launched an internal review of its currency trading operations in London last year when regulators first started probing banks over their foreign exchange activities. A person familiar with the situation said the inquiry was “ongoing”. Additional questions about the potential involvement of BP’s traders in alleged attempts to rig the world’s $5.3 trillionn-a-day forex markets have been prompted by a Bloomberg report that bank employees tipped off the oil and gas group ahead of some big currency trades.

Bloomberg cited three undated messages sent to BP’s traders by the powerful network of senior foreign-exchange traders calling themselves “The Cartel” at four banks — JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Citigroup. It said BP was given “valuable information” about planned currency trades “sometimes hours before they happened”. But it could not be determined whether any BP employees acted on any information received. BP is not being investigated by financial regulators, said people familiar with the situation. But the report raises uncomfortable questions for the group at a time when it is being scrutinised as part of the European Commission probe into potential price fixing in oil markets.

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Familiar topic, good story.

The Prison State of America (Chris Hedges)

Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.

States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. Prisons are company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was once paid to coal miners, and it could be used only at the company store. Prisoners are in a similar condition. When they go broke—and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison.

States impose an array of fees on prisoners. For example, there is a 10% charge imposed by New Jersey on every commissary purchase. Stamps have a 10% surcharge. Prisoners must pay the state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member or a 15-minute visit to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states, forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother.

Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are 22 fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCB), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT) and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of prison pay to pay down the fines, a process that can take decades. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely solely on a prison salary he or she will owe about $4,000 after making payments for 25 years. Prisoners can leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design.

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The gift that never stops giving.

Recolonizing Africa: A Modern Chinese Story? (CNBC)

China, one of the world’s largest ’emerging’ investors, is ramping up investment in Sub Saharan Africa as it searches for natural resources, but whether the benefits are mutually beneficial is questionable. China’s economic growth has been a key narrative in the story of economic miracle over the past two decades. (Its foreign direct investment) FDI in particular has played a prominent role in economic interactions with many developing countries. Once a major recipient of FDI, it’s now one of the largest ’emerging’ investors, especially in Sub Saharan Africa countries, it has investments being in Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa and Angola among others.

The Asian economic super power is in pursuit of oil, gas, precious metals and mining to diversify its energy resource import’s pool; it requires other resources to sustain its manufacturing capabilities. Africa can offer all of these things to the world’s second largest economy: about 40% of global reserves of natural resources, 60% of uncultivated agricultural land, a billion people with rising purchasing power and a potential army of low-wage workers. Like many emerging markets, African countries are one of the fastest growing markets and profitable outlets for exported manufactured goods. In the past, the U.K. and France were the prime trade partners for Africa, however, today, China is Africa’s top bi-lateral trading partner with trade volume exceeding $166 billion. Between years 2003 and 2011, its FDI in the continent has increased thirty fold from $491 million to $14.7 billion.

This is more than just a trend. Not a long time ago, China eyed areas in Africa where resources were abundant and easy to extract. It focused on resource-rich countries such as Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan and Zambia. Today, Sino-African investment focus has become broader. China is branching out into non-resource-rich investments, focusing on countries such as Ethiopia and Congo. Higher margins have attracted many state-owned enterprises and private companies to compete on gaining dominion in the vast continent. Oil, gas, metals and minerals constitute three-quarters of African-exports to China. Chinese Imports to Africa are more diverse, mostly comprised of manufactured goods.

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The impact of Ebola will take us completely back to it being a basket case ..”

Ebola Wrecks Years Of Aid Work In Worst-Hit Countries (Reuters)

Ebola is wrecking years of health and education work in Sierra Leone and Liberia following their civil wars, forcing many charity groups to suspend operations or re-direct them to fighting the epidemic. More than a decade of peace and quickening economic growth had raised hopes that the nations could finally reduce their dependency on foreign aid and budgetary support; now Ebola has undermined those achievements, charity workers and officials say. “The impact of Ebola will take us completely back to it being a basket case,” said Rocco Falconer, CEO of educational charity Planting Promise in Sierra Leone. “The impact on some activities have been simply catastrophic.”

The two countries worst hit by Ebola have struggled to recover from the wars that raged through the 1990s until early in the 21st century, killing and maiming tens of thousands, and devastating already poor infrastructure. In Sierra Leone, aid made up one-fifth of economic output in 2010, according to officials, though this had been shrinking as growth accelerated thanks to a boom in the country’s commodities exports. Britain and the European Union are the main donors with funds directed to health, education and social assistance. But Planting Promise’s experience typifies the problems of non-government organisations (NGOs) since Ebola hit West Africa, infecting more than 20,000 people and killing nearly 8,000.

It had spent six years in Sierra Leone developing farms and using the profits to fund local schools. The project had just become self-financing for the first time when the outbreak was detected in March. After that, things fell apart. Planting Promise was forced to withdraw its expatriate staff in June and the following month it closed its five primary schools where nearly 1,000 pupils had studied. It has also shut down its food processing factory. Though sales have dived, it continues to pay about 120 staff, eating into its reserves. This has forced the group to return “cap in hand” to donors to ask for more money, Falconer said.

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MUST. READ.

Protecting Money or People? (James K. Boyce)

The latest round of international climate talks this month in Lima, Peru, melting glaciers in the Andes and recent droughts provided a fitting backdrop for the negotiators’ recognition that it is too late to prevent climate change, no matter how fast we ultimately act to limit it. They now confront an issue that many had hoped to avoid: adaptation. Adapting to climate change will carry a high price tag. Sea walls are needed to protect coastal areas against floods, such as those in the New York area when Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012. We need early-warning and evacuation systems to protect against human tragedies, such as those caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Cooling centers and emergency services must be created to cope with heat waves, such as the one that killed 70,000 in Europe in 2003. Water projects are needed to protect farmers and herders from extreme droughts, such as the one that gripped the Horn of Africa in 2011. Large-scale replanting of forests with new species will be needed to keep pace as temperature gradients shift toward the poles. Because adaptation won’t come cheap, we must decide which investments are worth the cost. A thought experiment illustrates the choices we face. Imagine that without major new investments in adaptation, climate change will cause world incomes to fall in the next two decades by 25% across the board, with everyone’s income going down, from the poorest farmworker in Bangladesh to the wealthiest real estate baron in Manhattan. Adaptation can cushion some but not all of these losses.

What should be our priority: reduce losses for the farmworker or the baron? For the farmworker, and a billion others in the world who live on about $1 a day, this 25% income loss will be a disaster, perhaps the difference between life and death. Yet in dollars, the loss is just 25 cents a day. For the land baron and other “one-percenters” in the U.S. with average incomes of about $2,000 a day, the 25% income loss would be a matter of regret, not survival. He’ll find a way to get by on $1,500 a day. In human terms, the baron’s loss pales compared with that of the farmworker. But in dollar terms, it’s 2,000 times larger.

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Here’s what increasing debt can give you – until it no longer can.

Goodbye To One Of The Best Years In History (Telegraph)

Newspapers can seem like a rude intrusion into the Christmas holidays. We celebrate peace, goodwill and family – and then along come the headlines, telling us what’s going wrong in the world. Simon and Garfunkel made this point in 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, a song juxtaposing a carol with a newsreader bringing bad tidings. But this is the nature of news. Whether it’s pub gossip or television bulletins, we’re more interested in what’s going wrong than with what’s going right. Judging the world through headlines is like judging a city by spending a night in A&E – you only see the worst problems. This may have felt like the year of Ebola and Isil but in fact, objectively, 2014 has probably been the best year in history.

Take war, for example – our lives now are more peaceful than at any time known to the human species. Archaeologists believe that 15% of early mankind met a violent death, a ratio not even matched by the last two world wars. Since they ended, wars have become rarer and less deadly. More British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than in every post-1945 conflict put together. The Isil barbarity in the Middle East is so shocking, perhaps, because it comes against a backdrop of unprecedented world peace. We have recently been celebrating a quarter-century since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which kicked off a period of global calm.

The Canadian academic Steven Pinker has called this era the “New Peace”, noting that conflicts of all kinds – genocide, autocracy and even terrorism – went on to decline sharply the world over. Pinker came up with the phrase four years ago, but only now can we see the full extent of its dividends. With peace comes trade and, ergo, prosperity. Global capitalism has transferred wealth faster than foreign aid ever could. A study in the current issue of The Lancet shows what all of this means. Global life expectancy now stands at a new high of 71.5 years, up six years since 1990. In India, life expectancy is up seven years for men, and 10 for women. It’s rising faster in the impoverished east of Africa than anywhere else on the planet. In Rwanda and Ethiopia, life expectancy has risen by 15 years.

This helps explain why Bob Geldof’s latest Band Aid single now sounds so cringingly out-of-date. Africans certainly do know it’s Christmas – a Nigerian child is almost twice as likely to mark the occasion by attending church than a British one. The Ebola crisis has led to 7,000 deaths, each one a tragedy. But far more lives have been saved by the progress against malaria, HIV and diarrhoea. The World Bank’s rate of extreme poverty (those living on less than $1.25 a day) has more than halved since 1990, mainly thanks to China – where economic growth and the assault on poverty are being unwittingly supported by any parent who put a plastic toy under the tree yesterday.

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