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Debt Rattle June 8 2026

Jun 082026
 
 June 8, 2026  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Claude Monet Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute 1908


• Israel Bombs Iranian Regime After Terrorist Strikes (Catherine Salgado)
• Israel Strikes Military Targets Inside Iran, Ignoring Trump’s Pleas (ZH)
• More Evidence Iran Is Rapidly Restoring Its Missile Tunnels (ZH)
• Iran FM Blames US “Contradictions” On Stalled Peace Talks (ZH)
• ‘I Could’ve Kept It That Way’: Trump Admits The Inflation Is His Choice (ZH)
• Trump Storms Out of ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (Matt Margolis)
• President Trump Walks Out of Combative NBC Interview with Kirsten Welker (CTH)
• Britain Is Erasing White Heroes From Its Money (Margolis)
• A Serious Country Doesn’t Swap Its Greatest Leader For Little Animals (MN)
• Europe 2.0, Beyond Brussels: The End Of The European Union As We Know It (AmG)
• California US Attorney Office Feigns Ignorance of Voter Fraud (CTH)
• UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’ (MN)
• They Threw Everything at Him. He’s Still Standing. (Eric Florack)
• A Surprisingly Simple Way To Create Powerful Quantum States (SD)

 


 

 


 


Very pro-Bibi. Well, that’s a view…

• Israel Bombs Iranian Regime After Terrorist Strikes (Catherine Salgado)

Israeli forces will not allow terrorists to fire missiles at their civilians without a response. And God bless them for it — the Iranian regime and its proxies have terrorized the world too long. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, has been perpetually firing on Israelis, and an Arab terrorist murdered Master Sergeant (Res.) Haim Kalomiti and injured multiple others in a jihad attack Sunday in Tzur Natan, one of over a thousand attempted terror attacks on Israelis just since March.


Then Hezbollah’s Tehran paymasters began bombarding Israel. There has never been a ceasefire. Both Hezbollah and Iran’s regime never stopped shooting at civilians, not for a single day. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted late on June 7, “The Israeli Air Force struck military targets belonging to the Iranian terror regime in western and central Iran a short while ago.”

You can see below how many missiles Iran’s regime fired at civilian targets in Israel (note on the map: the “West Bank” is an inaccurate Palestinian propaganda term for Judea and Samaria):

Unfortunately, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi is getting cockier by the day. I wish to heaven Donald Trump would bomb him to hell instead of pretending we’ll get a deal with Tehran, which will never, ever, ever materialize:

Ambassador Yechiel Leiter released a statement to emphasize to Americans why the strikes on Iranian and Lebanese terrorists were necessary. “Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at Israel today. Each one of those missiles can level an entire neighborhood and kill hundreds. No self-respecting country in the world would tolerate such an attack, and neither will Israel,” Leiter said.

The ambassador continued, “Israel is now targeting Iranian surface-to-surface missile launch sites, as well as infrastructure facilities unrelated to the energy sector. The people of Lebanon have rejected Iran’s proxy, Hizballah, and have told Iran to get out of their country. If Hizballah fires at Israel, its command centers in the Dahiya will be hit hard.” That is the way to fight a war. Leiter truly observed: “Everyone has had enough of this maniacal Iranian regime.”

Read more …

Are they playing PR games?

• Israel Strikes Military Targets Inside Iran, Ignoring Trump’s Pleas (ZH)

President Trump said on Sunday he would tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike back after Iran fired a salvo of missiles at Israeli targets in retaliation for an attack on the outskirts of Beirut, news outlet Axios reported. Iran has long said any peace deal with the U.S. would depend on a ceasefire also holding in Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March in pursuit of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters who fired rockets and drones across the border in solidarity with Tehran. But Israel earlier on Sunday launched strikes in the Beirut area for the first time since the U.S. announced a truce plan for Lebanon last week.


The Israeli military later said it had identified missiles launched from Iran and that its defense systems had intercepted them. Details on whether Israel suffered any damage were not yet available. Trump, who was spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, had been briefed about the escalation between Iran and Israel, a U.S. official told Reuters. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” Trump told Fox News after the Iranian missile launches. “What I would suggest to Iran: You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough, get back to the table and make a deal.”

Asked about the earlier Israeli strike on Beirut, he said: “I’m not happy about it.” Trump ]also told Axios he would call Netanyahu and press him not to retaliate. Iran’s chief peace negotiator, parliamentary speaker Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, said U.S. bases and Israeli assets are legitimate targets because of hostile acts including the “violation of agreements over Lebanon.” “They showed that they only understand the language of power,” he wrote on X. Ebrahim Rezaei, an influential hardline lawmaker who serves as spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, posted on X that Iran would deliver a “decisive and painful response” to Sunday’s Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Iran has not targeted Israel directly since a ceasefire in the wider war in April, although Hezbollah has done so. In turn, an Israeli official, responding to the apparent threat, told Reuters that Israel would retaliate against any attacks on its territory from Iran, and consider it “an opportunity to renew the campaign”. Washington and Tehran have shown little progress in reaching a deal to end the war that Trump launched in February with a campaign of air strikes alongside Israel against Iran. Trump has repeatedly threatened to restart the strikes unless there is an agreement soon.

“We’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them,” Trump told NBC News in an interview, broadcast to mark 100 days of the conflict. The comments were recorded on Friday and broadcast on Sunday as Trump visited his New Jersey golf course. Trump has said a similar version of the same news for much of the past month.

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Just a small part, says Trump.

• More Evidence Iran Is Rapidly Restoring Its Missile Tunnels (ZH)

President Trump has newly estimated that Iran has 21%-22% of its missiles remaining. Trump said in an interview with NBC: “They have some missiles and drones, percentage-wise maybe 21%-22% of the missiles. That’s a lot, but it’s not what it was before the war.” He and top White House officials had previously mused that the Iranians are working hard to reconstitute their defenses after the opening US-Israeli heavy bombing campaign of Operation Epic Fury.


The fresh statement comes on the heels of a Washington Post story last month which cited CIA estimates saying Iran still holds about 70% of its missiles and 75% of missile launchers it had before the war. So there’s a likelihood that Iran still has significantly more than just 20% of its arsenal. There’s also some anecdotal evidence, and statements from the Iranians themselves, such as in the following… Watch:

The Iranians have been utilizing basic construction equipment to dig out several missile launchers and reopen subterranean tunnels tied to its missile program. = n “Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them,” CNN wrote last week. “Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.” Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the same outlet late last month that “There’s nothing to prevent the launchers from being armed with the ample stockpile of missiles that the Iranians still have.”

He sought to highlight the limits of American firepower, in terms of damage, and given that it hasn’t been sustained: “The US military is good at delivering tactical successes, and entombing and suppressing the Iranian missile force is a great example of that,” said Lair. “However, if that isn’t accompanied by a set of reasonable strategic war aims and an achievable theory of victory, it can end up being a strategic failure.” President Trump has been touting the near annihilation of Iran’s arsenal, and has lately said the rest of its launch sites could be taken out in a day if he gave the order.

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Does Iran get their $1.5 million to $2 million per vessel?

• Iran FM Blames US “Contradictions” On Stalled Peace Talks (ZH)

The U.S. and Iran remain stuck in preliminary talks to end the war, with the main obstacle being Tehran’s demand for access to billions of dollars in frozen assets and the Trump administration’s refusal to provide upfront cash or broader sanctions relief. Tehran is seeking about $12 billion upfront and $24 billion during a proposed 60-day negotiation window. “Twenty-four billion dollars is not much for America if he wants to reach an agreement with Iran,” Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, a senior adviser to Iran’s top official, told CNN on Friday. “This is our own, not America’s money.”


For the Trump administration, releasing frozen funds for Tehran is optically displeasing because the president spent years blasting the Obama administration over the $1.7 billion Iran payment tied to the 2015 nuclear deal, and later criticized the Biden administration’s move to allow Iran access to $6 billion in assets during a prisoner swap. The U.S. government estimates that Tehran has $100 billion in inaccessible assets, mostly oil revenue trapped abroad, including funds in China, Qatar, Oman, and Iraq. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei spoke with CNN’s senior international correspondent Frederik Pleitgen about the ongoing negotiations with the U.S.

Baghaei stated, “The main problem of negotiating with this administration is that you have to face so many changing positions, moving the goal posts, different statements, contradictory remarks by different officials, so it makes the whole process very cumbersome.” He outlined one of the main problems is that “the Americans must understand that they have to recognize Iran’s rights,” including its right to peaceful nuclear enrichment under the international non-proliferation treaty. “At the same time, when they are talking about our blocked assets, they’re not going to give us any concession,” he said.

CNN reported earlier on Sunday that c, according to a source close to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Baghaei added that the US must “simply stop their sanctions” and “need to let Iranian assets be released and be available for the Iranians.” Beyond US-Iran talks, IRGC-linked Fars News reports that Iran has been collecting $1.5 million to $2 million per vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Fars said the payments are deposited into Iran’s treasury under the budget law and directed toward designated spending areas. Some payments are reportedly settled not in cash but in USDT/Tether or through barter arrangements.

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“”There’s no reason to raise interest rates … What they do is when they raise interest rates, they try and kill success. I don’t want to kill success. We should actually lower interest rates.”

• ‘I Could’ve Kept It That Way’: Trump Admits The Inflation Is His Choice (ZH)

In a wide-ranging interview in which he touted record stock prices and rebranded weapons-grade uranium as “nuclear dust” (and then stormed out), President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud: the prices Americans are paying at the pump are not an accident. This was all his decision. “I could’ve kept it that way,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview taped in a rain-battered Wisconsin barn before he was set to appear at a farming industry roundtable discussion – describing the cheap gasoline everyone enjoyed during his first few months back in office. “But I said, I have to take a little bit of a turn … We’re going to have higher gasoline. We’re going to have a little higher fertilizer, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m going to get rid of a nuclear weapon in the hands of very dangerous people.”


“The farmers love me”
Asked about farmers who can no longer afford fertilizer – seventy percent of them, by Welker’s count – Trump didn’t push back, but instead changed the subject to loyalty. “I had a choice to make. I could keep it going. The farmers were doing great. Fertilizer was very cheap. Everything was cheap. Gasoline was very low. Everything was very low. I could’ve kept it that way. But I said, I have to take a little bit of a turn. The farmers are going to understand it better than anybody.”v

Trump leaned on his heavy support in the heartland. “I love the farmers, and the farmers love me. The farmers trust me,” he said, pointing to the $28 billion in trade-war bailouts he cut growers in his first term. So – the economic cost of the US-Israeli war on Iran is something that Americans should be willing to eat for him. And again, promises of utopia: “And when we have a completion, you will see things like you’ve never seen. The oil will go down.” “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over,” he promised of gas and diesel. When Welker pressed for a timeline, he bristled – “No, but you keep talking about speed” – and reached again for Vietnam.

The public is less patient: an Economist/YouGov survey this week found sixty-eight percent of adults want a deal to end the war as fast as possible, including fifty-five percent of his own 2024 voters. They are being asked to finance a known cost today against a promised windfall on an unscheduled tomorrow, on the word of a president whose case rests on never having to name the day. That is not an economic argument. It is a leap of faith with a fuel surcharge.

Blame The Fed
And of course, it’s the Fed’s fault for not aligning with Trump’s agenda. Given whispers that the institution is actually considering hiking rates in response to a strong jobs report, Trump preemptively branded the move as a crime against prosperity. “There’s no reason to raise interest rates … What they do is when they raise interest rates, they try and kill success. I don’t want to kill success. We should actually lower interest rates.”

And then – in what should give any bondholder pause: “Growth is the greatest thing you can have, and growth does not cause inflation.” No, apparently it takes braking a core campaign promise to personally engineer higher prices. Meanwhile, new Fed chair Kevin Warsh gavels his first meeting later this month, and Trump was careful to say he would not “have a big influence on him” – except, he clearly spelled out his expectations. “I would like to see rates get lower,” he said, “because we could build this into the greatest machine that the world has ever seen, but you can’t do that when everybody immediately raises interest rates.”

Meanwhile, Trump insists Iran can be starved into surrender… “They tried a blockade, and now we blockaded them,” he said of Iran. “And, as you know, they’re losing $400-500 million a day. It’s not sustainable for them. They have an economy that’s shot, in addition to everything else.” The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil; and the valve Trump is twisting shut to strangle Tehran is the same valve lifting fuel costs in Des Moines. The blockade he is celebrating and the inflation he admitted choosing are directly linked. Asked what happens if the talks fail, Trump did not hedge: “Either way, we win.”

Asked about the highly enriched uranium still buried in Iran, he offered a branding note. “The official name is highly enriched uranium. And I call it nuclear dust because it seemed to be nice, and everyone understands it better, and it’s sort of cute, and people picked it up.”He assured Welker the sites are under constant watch from orbit: “If anybody walked there, if you walked over there, I would be able to read your first name on your lapel. And these are cameras up in space. It’s pretty amazing technology. Space Force.” He claimed, in passing and without elaboration, that the United States “took over Venezuela in a matter of minutes.” He put Iran’s surviving arsenal at “maybe 21-22% of their missiles … It’s a lot of missiles, but it’s not what it was when we first attacked.”

 

 

Doing The World A Service
At the end of the day, Trump had no choice: “I had to stop a country, very powerful, very dangerous country, from having a nuclear weapon because they’d use it. They’d blow up the world. They’d blow up the Middle East. They’d blow up Israel. They’d come here. They’d blow up Europe. They’re nuts, okay? They’re crazy people. I deal with them. And very high-strung people. Little crazy. And – I get along with them. I like them. But you don’t want to let them have a nuclear weapon. And I’m doing the world a service, but I’m doing our country a service. You know, it’s America first. I’m doing our country a service. Nice rain.”

Indeed…

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“A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

• Trump Storms Out of ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (Matt Margolis)

President Donald Trump sat down with NBC’s Kristen Welker for a Meet the Press interview, but things went sideways fast. The exchange started to unravel when the topic of election integrity came up. Trump made clear that he views the media’s handling of these stories as part of a larger systemic problem, one that the press has deliberately chosen to ignore. He told Welker that her network actively works against him and that he had the receipts to back it up. “You play right into their hands with this stuff,” Trump said.


“You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Do you know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.” Welker tried to redirect the conversation toward acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump wasn’t having it. Every time she jumped in, he pushed through it. He insisted the evidence of problems with election integrity runs deep: “You have more evidence, there’s more evidence than ever presented.” “Your elections in this country — we’re like a third world country,” he said. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked.”

He didn’t stop there. “And so is ABC and CBS and CNN,” Trump continued. “You’re a one-sided crooked network.” That’s when he made his move. “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” Trump said. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.” Welker scrambled to keep him in his seat, reminding him of the effort it took to set up the interview. “Mr. President, let’s — please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin,” she said. That didn’t move Trump at all. “I sat in the rain with you for an hour,” he told her. “On and off in the rain, and I’ve given you enough time.”

Then he turned it into something bigger. “You ought to straighten out your press,” he said, “because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press.” Welker kept pushing, repeating that she flew to Wisconsin specifically for the interview. Trump’s mind was made up, and he was done. I don’t doubt that the liberal media will frame this as Trump dodging tough questions or losing his composure. That’s the predictable take from a press corps that circles the wagons whenever one of its own gets called out. But watch the clip and form your own opinion.

Trump previously told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine that accountability for the 2020 election may still be coming, saying his administration has uncovered information that wasn’t previously available and now knows “who rigged the election.” He argued that evidence gathered since returning to office has only reinforced his belief that the election was stolen. Trump maintains that Joe Biden did not legitimately win in 2020 and claimed Biden actually lost “in a landslide.”

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Do watch part of it.

• President Trump Walks Out of Combative NBC Interview with Kirsten Welker (CTH)

President Trump abruptly ended and walked out of a combative interview with NBC’s Kirsten Welker, who will now receive the praise and adulation that Margaret Brennan so emphatically wanted. Kirsten Welker is now the leading Democrat Presidential Candidate for 2028. During an NBC interview, Welker continually interrupted President Trump and challenged his assertion of government weaponization against J6 protest attendees and voter fraud. President Trump was making the case that the current California vote counting of mail-in ballots, still taking place 5-days after election day, was representative of voter fraud within the U.S. election system.


Welker demanded President Trump provide the evidence. President Trump emphasized the evidence is in the process that is taking place in front of your eyes. Welker again demanded President Trump provide the evidence. Eventually Trump gave up in frustration. The Video and Transcript is Below:

[TRANSCRIPT] – KRISTEN WELKER: This $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that’s going to compensate people who say the federal government weaponized the legal system against them. It’s been blocked by the courts, met with opposition from Republicans .

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: And Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: – in Congress, and Democrats.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Most, excuse me, mostly Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: Mostly Democrats and some Republicans.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Some. Very few Republicans.

KRISTEN WELKER: Just to be very clear, are you backing off the fund completely as your acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said, or are you looking for another avenue to revive the fund?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: So let — let me explain what the fund is. People have been hurt so badly by radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe. They’re vicious. They’re violent, what they did to people. And of course they went after me more than anybody else. They raided Mar-a-Lago and all the other things. But people have been badly hurt. They’ve committed suicide. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re lost their families. They’ve lost their wives. They’ve lost everything. They’ve lost everything over a fake weaponization of government. Now, let me just tell you –

KRISTEN WELKER: So are you looking for a way to revive it?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well, look. If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve. People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. Many suicides, think of it. People have committed suicide because a bunch of thugs went after them.

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Duck! 😉

• Britain Is Erasing White Heroes From Its Money (Margolis)

The Bank of England has decided that Winston Churchill, Alan Turing, and Jane Austen are too controversial to appear on British banknotes. So they’re replacing them with frogs. I’m not kidding. Frogs. And foxes. And dolphins. And puffins. The Bank announced it would phase out portraits of historical figures in favor of native wildlife imagery on its next banknote series. The official explanation was “security,” but we all know better than to believe that. Writing in The Telegraph earlier this week, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, said: “The Bank’s foremost objective is the security of our banknotes, which includes tackling the threat from counterfeiting.”


However, the Savanta research, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, will raise questions about whether the decision was also motivated by concerns that featuring Britain’s former wartime prime minister and other national heroes would upset some sections of the public. The researchers concluded that Churchill, Turing, and Austen were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.” Officials received advice to scrap historical figures entirely because they represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

Translation: too many white people on the money. One hundred nineteen focus group participants called the existing banknote figures “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences.” One participant actually described Alan Turing, the man who helped crack the Nazi Enigma code and helped bring an end to World War II, as “imperialistic,” complaining about a “‘we’re the ones who won the Second World War and saved the world’ feeling” to the notes. I guess they missed the memo that Turing was a gay man persecuted by his own government. Apparently, none of that matters if the woke mob has decided he’s problematic.

It gets worse. Savanta advised against depicting Georgian and Victorian architecture, flagging those buildings as high risk “due to potential links to colonialism/slavery.” The researchers also warned against showing the White Cliffs of Dover because of their “association with the UK border.” One focus group participant from Northern Ireland said some British buildings were “erected on the back of slave trade money.” Another said the White Cliffs “could be seen by some people to be a political statement, particularly at the moment around immigration and small boats. “Is there anything these woke focus group members aren’t offended by? Seriously, iconic landmarks are out. Celebrated intellectuals are out. War heroes are out. The puffin, however, made the cut.

The Bank claims the Savanta report had nothing to do with its final decision. They point to a public consultation in which 44,000 people participated, with 60% choosing nature imagery and 38% preferring historical figures. Don’t buy it. The Bank commissioned focus groups specifically to assess whether historical figures were too divisive, so it was likely rigged from the start to justify what they wanted to do in the first place. “Without great and courageous figures like Churchill and Turing, we may have swastikas on our banknotes today,” Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp said. “We owe them so much and it is right that we should be reminded of our debt to them daily on our banknotes.”

Kemp added, “The woke desire to erase Britain’s proud and remarkable culture has now even infiltrated the Bank of England. This decision is shameful and should be reversed.” Robert Jenrick of Reform UK added, “If it wasn’t for the likes of Churchill and Turing, we’d be living under a government that really was divisive and imperialistic. The Bank of England should stop wasting time and money on this and focus instead on keeping prices down.”

Why should this matter to those of us in the United States? Well, this same nonsense is coming here, and you all know it. The movement to scrub historical figures from public life has already targeted building names and statues, and there have been efforts to update American currency with more diverse figures as well. I’ve long believed that it is inevitable that Democrats will one day push to put Barack Obama on our money. Give it time, and the demand will be that American money features only figures the far left approves of. Dead white men need not apply.

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Q: Since when was Alan Turing on the money? Banned forever because he was gay.

Wasn’t putting him there a great victory? For gay rights?

Who wins that one now? Gays lose again, right?

• A Serious Country Doesn’t Swap Its Greatest Leader For Little Animals (MN)

The Bank of England has now admitted the quiet part out loud. Historical figures including Winston Churchill were removed from future banknotes after researchers told officials they were “elitist and divisive.”


The move replaces British legends with wildlife in a calculated step to sideline national heroes and accelerate cultural replacement. This is not a neutral design update. It is institutional capture in action, where the man who rallied Britain against Nazi tyranny gets sidelined because focus groups and consultants found him too problematic for modern sensitivities and would prefer to look at a Fox or a hedgehog instead.

The revelation aligns precisely with plans first laid out months earlier. Back in March, the Bank announced it would phase out portraits of Churchill on the £5 note, Jane Austen on the £10, JMW Turner on the £20, and Alan Turing on the £50. In their place would come native British wildlife, plants, and landscapes. King Charles III would remain on the front of the notes. Officials claimed the shift followed a public consultation with over 44,000 responses, where around 60 percent supposedly favored nature themes for security reasons and to celebrate the environment.

Critics at the time called the idea absurd and bonkers. They warned it represented a war on history and showed the Bank had been captured by progressive ideology. One former business minister said notes should honor the historical giants who shaped the nation rather than fuzzy animals. Another asked what came next – squirrels running the economy. Observers noted it fit a wider pattern of erasing or downplaying Britain’s past under the banner of progress and diversity.

That pattern includes London museums draping portraits to “reclaim Caribbean history,” the removal of Shakespeare, Thatcher, and Churchill artworks from 10 Downing Street in favor of pieces by artists with Caribbean ties, Cambridge panels labeling Churchill a white supremacist whose empire was supposedly worse than the Nazis, and a London primary school renaming “Churchill House” after Marcus Rashford to promote diversity. Statues of Churchill have faced vandalism and calls for removal, including during pro-Palestine protests earlier this year. Each step chips away at the symbols that once unified national memory.

Now the June reporting makes the motive unmistakable. Research commissioned by the Bank concluded that figures such as Churchill, Alan Turing, and Jane Austen were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.” Officials received advice to replace the portraits with nature images because historical figures represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

The Bank has insisted the decision was not driven by that specific research but by an earlier poll showing public preference for nature. Yet the Freedom of Information details tell a different story about how the process unfolded behind closed doors A public consultation is currently running on the wildlife shortlist. Proposed replacements include an owl, hedgehog, badger, or common frog. One commentator summed up the national mood: “We are not a serious country anymore.”

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/2062610790683984267?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2062610790683984267%7Ctwgr%5Ea67b9ad8e4437d980d63a6c9204f63f3cf1e7678%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fserious-country-does-not-swap-its-greatest-leader-banknotes-little-animals

Some of the animals under consideration are not even native to Britain. That detail alone exposes the move as more than harmless environmental appreciation. It functions as a psyop to further erode British culture – stripping away recognizable national symbols and replacing them with generic or imported imagery that weakens any sense of rooted identity.

This fits the same ideological framework that has infected other institutions. DEI priorities and critical race theory obsessions treat any strong assertion of British heritage as inherently suspect. The man who helped defeat fascism is recast as “divisive” while the focus shifts to animals that supposedly better reflect “cultural and natural diversity.” The result is a currency that no longer celebrates the people who built and defended the country. It celebrates detachment instead.

The broader assault continues without pause. Schools, museums, government buildings, and now the Bank of England itself participate in softening, diluting, and apologizing for the past. Historical giants are judged not by their achievements but by whether they pass modern committee tests on representation. When they fail, they are quietly retired in favor of whatever the latest advisory group deems safe and inclusive.

Britain’s wartime leader did not save the nation so that unelected researchers and captured bureaucracies could later declare him unfit for the money supply. Yet that is exactly what has happened. The same institutions that owe their continued existence to Churchill’s stand now treat his image as a liability.

A country that systematically removes its heroes from public view is not evolving. It is forgetting how to value itself. The Bank of England’s choice to prioritize “non-divisive” wildlife over the figures who actually shaped the United Kingdom sends a clear message: national pride is now considered too risky for everyday transactions.

Britons who still believe their history is worth defending have every reason to push back. This is not about banknote design. It is about whether the nation retains the confidence to honour the people and events that made it possible. Replacing Churchill with a hedgehog is not progress. It is surrender dressed up as sensitivity.

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EU wants far too much. They want French soldiers obeying German commanders.

• Europe 2.0, Beyond Brussels: The End Of The European Union As We Know It (AmG)

Europe has reached the end of an era. Not the end of its history, but the end of its false form. For decades, the European Union served as the great substitute project of a continent that no longer dared to think politically. It promised peace without power, order without a people, unity without roots, and prosperity without cost. That was its founding lie, and it was a lie from the very beginning.


Political order does not grow out of procedural routines, commission papers, or moral self-incantation. It grows out of peoples, interests, borders, loyalties, and the willingness to defend what is one’s own. Legitimate authority rests on a people and its consent, not on an apparatus and its expertise. That older idea—that government draws its life from the governed rather than from the competence of its administrators—is precisely what Brussels has spent two generations trying to administer away.

That is why today’s EU is not the high point of European history but its bureaucratic state of exhaustion. It is too centralized to be free and too artificial to be binding. It commands an immense body of rules and possesses no sustaining political soul. It has institutions, but not the kind of historically grown legitimacy that holds a community together across generations. And so it answers every crisis with the same reflex: more centralization, more redistribution, more standardization, more discipline. What is sold as the solution is only the problem enlarged.

Europe is not failing because there is too little Brussels. Europe is failing because there is too much Brussels. It is failing because of a political class that no longer sees the continent as a historical space but as an object of administration. It is failing because of an ideology that treats every organically grown difference as a defect and therefore regards peoples, traditions, and national particularities as raw material to be processed. And it is failing because of a functional elite that has learned to disguise power as morality and to pass off its own interests as universal values.

There is a name for this kind of governance: the administrative state—the permanent, unelected layer that survives every election, answers to no voter, and grows whether the public wants it to or not. Brussels is that layer raised to the continental power and freed from even the inconvenience of a national electorate. There is no European demos to vote the managers out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The real scandal of Europe today is not even its material mismanagement but its intellectual arrogance. The Union behaves as though it could suspend history—as though cultures could be harmonized like technical standards, as though political loyalty could be decreed the way one issues a packaging regulation. As though a continent of radically different historical experiences, economic structures, demographic trajectories, and security realities could be pressed into one standardized form without damage. Yet the damage is already visible. The EU is not unifying Europe. It is wearing it down.

To see why, it helps to return to a text that saw the whole thing coming. In 2011, long before today’s disruptions, the German social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn published an essay whose title I have borrowed and broadened here: “Europa 2.0: Neuzuschnitt der Alten Welt” (Europe 2.0: Recutting the Old World). It was written in the first panic of the euro rescues, and it has aged with uncomfortable precision.

Heinsohn’s argument was not, in the first place, a complaint about Brussels. It was an argument about arithmetic. He began with the chain of liabilities that the productive European middle class—the net taxpayers, the people who put in more than they take out—had quietly been made to guarantee. First, the bank rescues of 2008. Then the Greek bailout and the great euro backstops of 2010, which shielded bondholders and the comfortable classes of the periphery at the expense of taxpayers who were never asked. Then the implicit guarantees extended to the aging, shrinking states of the European East. And beneath all of it, an ever-growing domestic population to be supported for life. The decisive point was simple and merciless: when all these promises—upward, downward, and outward—come due at once, no one will be left to bail out the people who were made to do the bailing.

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Tricks.

• California US Attorney Office Feigns Ignorance of Voter Fraud (CTH)

California ballot counting will continue until the key republicans in each race are pushed into 3rd place. That’s when ballot counting will conclude. At a certain point, the pretending gets ridiculous. This X message from the First Asst U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of California is a case study in pretending not to know things.


Former Attorney General Eric Holder was hired by California govt to advise on the election changes created by linking DMV database to Secretary of State database. The tech team that wrote the code to link the DMV and SOS were given specific instructions. The affirmative flag, the checkbox in the DMV system that says the applicant is legally eligible to vote, was neutralized. Meaning, if the checkbox is left blank, the computer system accepts the application from the DMV as affirmative. The DL applicant data is transferred to the SoS office, and the applicant is registered to vote.

Illegal Aliens, unlawful migrants, were allowed to get California Driver’s Licenses and State IDs. The Motor-Voter process now registers those drivers and ID recipients as legal voters and ballots are created. Those illegal ballots form the core of the voter fraud in California and were first used in the November 2018 midterm election as the beta test for national rollout.Not a single person in Sacramento politics doesn’t know this. They are all aware. All the USAO has to do is go check and they will see. The fraud is impossible to prosecute. The fraud is built into the system. Go look. Everyone knows.

We originally outlined this activity a decade ago. Nothing has been done to stop it. JAN 2017 – California officials have instructed DMV data programmers to remove the internal coding flags for the drivers’ licenses of illegal aliens in California. As you might be aware, California passed a law known as AB60 authorizing illegal aliens to receive drivers’ licenses throughout the state. Within the administrative functions of the state DMV database a designation code known as “AB60 code” was created to flag those specific licenses as containing “Federal Limits Apply”.

We have confirmation from a top-level IT source, state officials instructed programmers to immediately remove AB60 administrative coding. The removed code in question is an administrative function for identifying the registered DL holder as an “undocumented person” or illegal alien holder within the DMV database. The established computer flag allows an administrator or DMV or State official to filter the massive database of California Driver’s License holders and identify just those who are ‘undocumented’. The removal of the “flag” via deletion of the program code, means the database cannot be easily filtered to show only illegals who received those Drivers licenses, and/or generate a list of those license recipients.


According to the IT source the motive for the code/flag removal appears to be an effort hide data and curtail any tool useful in any voter fraud investigation. Several additional aspects lead to this conclusion including California hiring former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to lead the fight against the Trump administration. Additionally, the State Driver’s License process via the State DMV has an on-line link to the Secretary of State office in order for California residents to register to vote. As a specific function of the programming code within the SoS system, and as a direct outcome of previous instructions, all voter registrations proceed through the registration process, even if the user “forgets” to check the box that says they are a citizen.

The internal database coding established by the Secretary of State IT department which synergizes with the State Department of Motor Vehicles, allows and approves voter registration when the designation box “U.S. Citizen” is left blank. It is the combination of this specific programming structure, the events and instructions of the past 48 hours, in combination with the outcome of the U.S. election and new Trump administration saying they will launch a voter fraud investigation, which leads the IT source to the conclusion there is an effort underway within California to hide the evidence of “Illegal Voting” via the use of “State Issued Drivers Licenses” and the willful blindness from the Secretary of State.

No alternate explanation from within the California DMV Headquarters has been offered for why they are instructing IT data programmers to remove the AB60 coding from the Driver’s License system.

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Englan’ is a bitch.

• UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’ (MN)

A Christian police community support officer lost his career after asking a Muslim colleague about jihad and Hamas atrocities during a diversity session that promised open discussion. At the same time, training drilled “white privilege” into police ranks. Luke Salmons, a 46-year-old Christian father of two and respected PCSO with North Yorkshire Police, relates how he attended a mandatory training day on race, religion and culture. Trainers spent several minutes marching up and down the room chanting “Islam is a religion of peace” repeatedly.


A Muslim sergeant then spoke about his faith and invited questions in what was presented as a “safe space” where “there was no such thing as a bad question.” Salmons asked what the sergeant, as a peaceful Muslim, thought about the situation in Gaza and atrocities carried out by Hamas and other groups in the name of Islam. He also asked what jihad meant to him. The discussion was civil. The sergeant later invited Salmons for coffee to continue the conversation privately.

Salmons brought a book on the topic to work. Colleagues photographed it in his locker and reported him as a risk. An inspector then suspended him, declaring “I don’t like your beliefs.” Salmons noted the obvious double standard: no inspector would ever say that to a Muslim officer.He was suspended on full pay for months, resigned under pressure in April 2025, and faced gross misconduct proceedings. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, he appealed. Chief Constable Tim Forber overturned the dismissal before Salmons had even finished presenting his case. There was no apology and the episode devastated his family.

“I loved my job and I was good at it. I was well respected as a PCSO and my colleagues said they loved working with me and couldn’t understand what was happening. But an overzealous inspector took against me and that was the end of my career, even though I had done nothing wrong,” he related. “It devastated me and my family. For months we lived in total uncertainty, with my reputation being shredded in secret. I resigned not because I had done anything wrong, but because the silence, the delay and the pressure became unbearable for my wife and daughters,” Salmons added.

This is the new reality inside parts of British policing: open discussion of uncomfortable facts about Islamist ideology is treated as career-ending wrongthink, while entire days are devoted to chanting slogans and centring one faith above others. The same ideological pressures are visible in operational failures. In the Henry Nowak case, an 18-year-old white British student was stabbed five times. He told responding officers he had been stabbed and could not breathe. Instead of treating him as a medical emergency, officers handcuffed him after his attacker falsely claimed racism. The attacker was allowed to walk away. An inquest is examining whether the handcuffing contributed to Nowak’s death.

The police watchdog investigated itself and declared no wrongdoing. Serving and former Hampshire officers later admitted the mandatory DEI training played a role. They told former Home Secretary Suella Braverman they had “it drummed into us about our white privilege and unconscious bias.” One described the outsourced trainer as “deeply hateful of white people and our culture.”v

Meanwhile, shocking street interviews and bodycam footage show officers across forces admitting they will arrest people for speech that causes offence if an allegation is made – including phrases such as “send them all home.” In one Birmingham incident, officers restrained a light-skinned suspect while a crowd of young men from ethnic minority backgrounds kicked and struck him; the police did not intervene to protect the suspect.

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Good to reiterate from time to time.

• They Threw Everything at Him. He’s Still Standing. (Eric Florack)

We’re getting pretty close to the midterm elections. I’d like you to consider, as you contemplate your vote, what we’ve been seeing for a solid decade now. The full weight of the media establishment, the Democrat Party, and the socialist left — all of whom drain your tax dollars to fund their operations — has waged the most expensive, coordinated, and (thanks be to Heaven) catastrophically unsuccessful demolition project in recorded history. The target? One man. I’ll let you guess who.


Think on that for a moment: four criminal indictments, 91 charges (and I may have missed a few). Investigations that went nowhere, like a compass in a magnet factory. They spent billions. They squeezed hundreds of journalists shoulder-to-shoulder into the same putrid trough, all filing the same bogus story, all reaching the same pre-approved conclusions without evidence, all somehow surprised when nothing stuck to the man. Every major network. Every newspaper of record. Every drive-time radio voice with a thesaurus and a grudge.

The late-night TV hosts — propped up on expensive, ratings-free life support, their audience consisting exclusively of insomniacs and the unfortunate souls stranded at airport gate C-17 — dutifully swung away, night after night, year after year. When the losses mounted too high and those late-night “stars” collected their pink slips, the establishment — the very people who’d been attacking this man — turned around and blamed him for their firing. Never mind the millions they cost the networks. The word “unsustainable” leaps to mind, unbidden.

Hollywood crawled out of its gated compounds to weigh in. Every blue-checkmark, every celebrity whose last project you cannot name, every platform with a “trust and safety” team — all of it, fully deployed. All for naught. Meanwhile, medical research watches from the parking lot, never seeing anything approaching that kind of coordinated effort. Even after all that, it didn’t work. Let’s be honest about what this was, and is. This wasn’t political opposition. Opposition, per se, is normal. Opposition is healthy. That’s democracy (small d).

This was anything but democracy. This was a systematic campaign to destroy a man’s family, dismantle his businesses, strip away his freedom, and physically erase his name from ballots. The goal was never to beat him. It was to eliminate him. Consider the parallel: Eric Swalwell got caught cozying up to a Chinese intelligence operative, and the story disappeared in 48 hours. This man absorbed a decade-long siege with unlimited ammunition — and he’s still standing. The reason? There was nothing to what they threw at Trump. In all this time, not a bit of it has stuck. Don’t you think if they actually had anything, it would have tipped the scales by now?

When all those efforts failed, they even tried to kill him — what, ten times now, going back to 2016? I’ve lost count. Butler, of course. West Palm. Mar-a-Lago. The Correspondents’ Dinner. And those are just the attempts that made the headlines because they got close enough to finish the job. That asymmetry should tell you everything you need to know. And a quick look at what’s happening in California right now offers another indicator of how desperate these people have become. That story may give us a hint — if we’re honest — about how “Creepy Uncle Joe” claimed 81 million votes after campaigning from his basement.

Here’s the thing about coordinated fury at that scale and duration: it is never about the target. It’s about what the target represents — and what his continued existence threatens. Seventy million Americans heard something from this man they hadn’t heard in a long time: the truth. That the system has been deliberately rigged against them. That someone is outright stealing their tax dollars and laundering still more into causes explicitly hostile to their interests. That the credentialed experts and the legacy press have been lying — casually, continuously — and expected nobody to notice. That Americans — as Americans — do not require permission from Davos, from party establishments, from media gatekeepers, or from anyone else to trust what their own eyes are showing them.

That is not a Republican message. That is not a Democrat message. That is a freedom message. And seventy million people didn’t just hear it — they recognized it, voted accordingly, and to this day continue to support him, much to the chagrin of the destroyers who clearly still don’t understand what they’re up against. That’s what the machine is actually fighting: not a man, but a message. Because if that message spreads — if people fully internalize that the managers have been manipulating them, manufacturing confusion, and deliberately stoking fear — those managers lose everything.

The fury isn’t evidence that he’s dangerous. It’s evidence of exactly what he told you: that they are.

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Does it work only on a quantum scale?

• A Surprisingly Simple Way To Create Powerful Quantum States (SD)

Many of the most promising quantum technologies, including advanced sensors and future quantum computers, depend on a phenomenon known as entanglement, where particles become deeply connected and influence one another in ways that cannot be explained by classical physics. Creating the complex entangled states needed for these technologies has traditionally required sophisticated equipment and carefully designed experimental systems.


Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have now proposed a much simpler approach. Their new theoretical method can generate and control a wide range of entangled quantum states using tools that are already common in many quantum physics laboratories. The work, published in Physical Review X, could help advance ultra precise quantum sensing and open new opportunities for exploring fundamental physics.

“We wanted to take simple ingredients that you find in a lot of physical platforms and put these together in a minimal way to get something interesting, complex and powerful,” said Aashish Clerk, professor of molecular engineering at UChicago PME and senior author of the new study. The research was supported by Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Rethinking Cavity QED Systems
The team’s approach is based on cavity quantum electrodynamics, commonly known as cavity QED. In these experiments, atoms or other particles are placed inside an optical cavity, which consists of two mirrors that trap light between them. The particles then interact with the confined light inside the cavity. A limitation of many cavity QED systems is that all of the atoms interact with the light in exactly the same way. Because the atoms are effectively indistinguishable, the range of quantum states that can be produced is restricted.

“The challenge has always been that these systems have too much symmetry. All the atoms are talking to light in the same way,” Clerk said. “That really restricts what kind of entangled states you get.” In a typical cavity QED setup, each atom has a ground state and an excited state separated by a specific energy difference. The researchers found a straightforward way to reduce the system’s symmetry. While all atoms continue to be driven by the same laser, additional lasers or magnetic fields are used to shift the excited state energies of different groups of atoms. The atoms are arranged so that each one is paired with another atom that has an equal but opposite energy offset.

This simple modification allows atoms to behave differently from one another while preserving enough structure for the system to remain controllable and predictable. By changing which atoms receive particular energy shifts, scientists can tune the system to produce a variety of entangled states without altering the physical hardware. “You turn these lasers on and wait, and at some point the system stabilizes into an interesting, highly entangled quantum state,” said Anjun Chu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Clerk group and first author of the new work. “By simply adjusting the lasers, we can access kinds of entangled states that no one had thought about before.”

Building Better Quantum Sensors
One of the most promising uses for the new approach is quantum sensing. In theory, entangled quantum states can detect extremely small differences in magnetic fields or gravitational fields between separate locations. However, developing states that are both highly sensitive and resistant to noise has remained a major challenge. The researchers demonstrated that a version of their proposed system containing two groups of atoms could be used to measure field gradients. When the two atomic ensembles are placed in different locations, the resulting quantum state reflects the difference between the local magnetic or gravitational fields. At the same time, it naturally rejects background noise that affects both locations equally.

“You’re able to do two things that are normally not compatible with one another: Use entanglement to build an exquisitely sensitive sensor but also have robustness to arbitrarily large amounts of noise,” Clerk said. “Normally, entanglement is very fragile. This approach has some amazing resilience.” Another advantage is that the information stored in these quantum states can be extracted using standard Ramsey measurement techniques, eliminating the need for specialized or exotic measurement methods.

Applications Beyond Sensing
The researchers also showed that the same platform can generate unusual quantum states that have long attracted interest from physicists. One example is the AKLT state, a well known many body entangled state first introduced in the 1980s to describe unusual magnetic materials. The team found that their relatively simple setup can stabilize this state. In addition to helping scientists study complex magnetic systems, the AKLT state may also have applications in quantum computing.

Next Steps For The Research
The work remains theoretical for now, but the researchers are already discussing possible experimental tests with other groups. They are also investigating more sophisticated ways to arrange atoms within the system and exploring the full range of quantum states that their method may be capable of producing.

“The fact that such simple ingredients can generate such complex and useful quantum states gives us hope that even before we reach the dream of a general all-purpose quantum computer, we can already generate quantum states that let us do things we couldn’t do in a purely classical world,” Clerk said. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers as part of the Q-NEXT center.

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Debt Rattle August 17 2015

Aug 172015
 
 August 17, 2015  Posted by at 9:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle August 17 2015


NPC Balloon at Shriners convention, Washington DC 1923

• Fears Of Financial Instability Keep Demand For Banknotes Strong (FT)
• Doomsday Clock For Global Markets Strikes One Minute To Midnight (Telegraph)
• Japan Economy Shrinks 1.6% In Q2 In Setback For ‘Abenomics’ (Reuters)
• Summer Crisis Tests Europe’s New Nationalisms (Alastair Macdonald)
• US Department Store Results Imploding (Jim Quinn)
• Problems For China’s Economy Extend Far Beyond Currency (FT)
• And Now For China’s Great Foreign-Capital Unwind (MarketWatch)
• China Devaluation Makes Debt Burden Heavier for Others (Bloomberg)
• Volatility Reveals Beijing’s Market Anxiety (WSJ)
• China’s Woes Echo in US Earnings (WSJ)
• Austerity – Elite Terrorism Against Ordinary People (Brian Davey)
• Greece’s Third MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) Annotated (Yanis Varoufakis)
• Varoufakis And Lamont Interviewed On Their Peculiar Political Friendship (YV)
• Still Vulnerable: The Euro Area’s Small And Medium-Sized Banks (Mody, Wolff)
• This Latest Greek Deal Is Nothing to Celebrate (Bloomberg ed.)
• Greek Opposition Party Refuses To Back Tsipras In Any Confidence Vote (Reuters)
• Merkel Fights To Contain Greece Rebellion (FT)
• Angela Merkel Expects IMF Involvement In Greek Debt Deal (Guardian)
• Merkel Says Migrants Bigger Challenge For EU Than Debt Crisis (AFP)
• The Exploitation Of Migrants Has Become Our Way Of Life (Felicity Lawrence)
• Volunteers Fill Aid Void In Greece’s Migrant Crisis (Reuters)
• How Humans Cause Mass Extinctions (Paul and Anne Ehrlich)

Cash is the king of the world.

• Fears Of Financial Instability Keep Demand For Banknotes Strong (FT)

Money doesn’t grow on trees, but in the middle of a forest deep in the Bavarian countryside it comes pretty close. An hour’s drive south of Munich hidden by spruces is Louisenthal, the mill and printing presses that help produce banknotes for about 100 currency zones. Giesecke & Devrient, owner of Louisenthal, is one of a few companies competing to make the 160bn banknotes printed each year. While the world’s central banks usually hold monopoly licences on printing local currencies, up to 70bn banknotes are printed on material produced in the private sector. Although people are becoming comfortable with paying for goods and services electronically, banknote production is thriving. One reason for the enduring appeal of cold, hard cash is the global economic downturn.

Giesecke & Devrient expects banknote production to rise by 5% a year for the “foreseeable future”, despite projections of double digit increases in the use of cards and other forms of electronic payments. “Cash is 100% reliable in times of crisis. It’s in periods of panic where a solid financial system has to prove itself,” said Ralf Wintergerst, a Giesecke & Devrient board member. “In a crisis situation, the demand for cash typically rises sharply. The reason for this is trust in real currency.” The turmoil in Greece, which not only sparked speculation of a return to the drachma but also led to a surge in demand for cash, is a case in point. The number of banknotes in circulation in Greece was €45.2bn at the end of May: a level last seen in June 2012, the last time fears of a Grexit sparked a bank run.

In 2012, the ECB had to fly additional supplies of banknotes to Athens from around the region. The €45.2bn amounts to a little over €4,000 for every Greek. ECB data also show leaps in the demand for banknotes following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, in 2008. Most of this increased demand was for higher denomination notes such as the €200 and €500 bills: a clear sign the leaps were down to hoarding by anxious savers. The enduring appeal of banknotes is not just down to the financial crisis. More than half of payments in stable, advanced economies such as Germany’s are still made in cash, while globally the figure is about 80%. Notes also need to be replaced frequently, with low value bills such as the €5 bill taken out of circulation as often as once every six months.

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Full title: “Doomsday Clock For Global Market Crash Strikes One Minute To Midnight As Central Banks Lose Control”. Quite something for the Telegraph.

• Doomsday Clock For Global Markets Strikes One Minute To Midnight (Telegraph)

When the banking crisis crippled global markets seven years ago, central bankers stepped in as lenders of last resort. Profligate private-sector loans were moved on to the public-sector balance sheet and vast money-printing gave the global economy room to heal. Time is now rapidly running out. From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same time the global economy is grinding to a halt. It is only a matter of time before stock markets collapse under the weight of their lofty expectations and record valuations. The FTSE 100 has now erased its gains for the year, but there are signs things could get a whole lot worse.

1 – China slowdown China was the great saviour of the world economy in 2008. The launching of an unprecedented stimulus package sparked an infrastructure investment boom. The voracious demand for commodities to fuel its construction boom dragged along oil- and resource-rich emerging markets. The Chinese economy has now hit a brick wall. Economic growth has dipped below 7pc for the first time in a quarter of a century, according to official data. That probably means the real economy is far weaker. The People’s Bank of China has pursued several measures to boost the flagging economy.

The rate of borrowing has been slashed during the past 12 months from 6pc to 4.85pc. Opting to devalue the currency was a last resort and signalled the great era of Chinese growth is rapidly approaching its endgame. Data for exports showed an 8.9pc slump in July from the same period a year before. Analysts expected exports to fall only 0.3pc, so this was a huge miss. The Chinese housing market is also in a perilous state. House prices have fallen sharply after decades of steady growth. For the millions who stored their wealth in property, it makes for unsettling times.

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” Japan’s economy grew just 2% since Abe took office in December 2012, even as he deployed fiscal stimulus roughly equal to 3% of GDP.”

• Japan Economy Shrinks 1.6% In Q2 In Setback For ‘Abenomics’ (Reuters)

Japan’s economy shrank at an annualized pace of 1.6% in April-June as exports slumped and consumers cut back spending, adding pressure on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to step up his policy drive to lift the economy out of decades of deflation. China’s economic slowdown and its impact on its Asian neighbors has also heightened the chance that any rebound in growth in July-September will be modest, analysts say. The gloomy data adds to signs that Japan’s economy is at a standstill and heightens pressure on policymakers to offer additional monetary or fiscal stimulus later this year. The contraction in GDP compared with a median market forecast of a 1.9% fall and followed a revised expansion of 4.5% in the first quarter, Cabinet Office data showed on Monday.

“If weak private consumption persists, that would be a further blow to Abe’s administration, which is facing falling support rates ahead of next year’s Upper House election,” said Hiromichi Shirakawa, chief Japan economist at Credit Suisse. “This could raise chances of additional fiscal stimulus.” Private consumption, which makes up roughly 60% of economic activity, fell 0.8% from the previous quarter, double the pace expected by analysts. It was the first decline since April-June 2014, when a sales tax hike hit consumption, as households spent less on air conditioners, clothing and personal computers. Overseas demand shaved 0.3 percentage point off growth as exports to Asia and the United States slumped.

The data looks likely to force the BOJ to cut its forecast of a 1.5% economic expansion for the current fiscal year when it reviews its long-term projections in October. But the weak consumption underscores a dilemma the central bank faces that may discourage it to expand stimulus. Economics Minister Akira Amari acknowledged that consumption may have been hit by rising food prices, as the BOJ’s easing weakened the yen and pushed up import costs. Aides close to Abe have signaled that additional monetary easing is unwelcome as further yen falls will push up food costs further and hurt consumption. That puts the onus of the government to underpin growth despite diminishing returns. Japan’s economy grew just 2% since Abe took office in December 2012, even as he deployed fiscal stimulus roughly equal to 3% of GDP.

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Term of the day: “beach-towel Lebensraum”.

• Summer Crisis Tests Europe’s New Nationalisms (Alastair Macdonald)

High summer and life, for many in Europe, is a beach. This year again the Mediterranean is the stage for two seasonal dramas: the one, the annual vacations that give many their main chance to meet fellow Europeans from other countries; the other, the washing ashore of desperate refugees from wars and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, some already dead. The first is a chance for pleasure, discovery and to enjoy the peace and open borders that most cite as the main benefits of the European Union, 70 years after the end of World War Two – even if accompanied by national stereotype grumbles about beach-towel Lebensraum, noisy joie de vivre and importunate seaside Romeos.

The second has triggered a poisonous round of every-man-for-himself bickering among the EU’s 28 governments and the Union institutions in Brussels over how to deal with record numbers of migrants arriving by sea and land and heading across Europe. More even than that other Mediterranean summer theater that has been the Greek volte-face on German-prescribed austerity to stay in the euro zone, EU divisions on the migration crisis have brought on dire warnings that populist nationalism could propel Europe back toward its nightmarish divisions of last century. Amid confrontation with Russia in the east, and with Britain soon to vote on breaking away in the west, this summer sees a bout of soul-searching over whether the bloc can ever subsume national rivalries to a common good.

Can half a billion citizens ever feel “European” more than Austrian, Belgian or Croatian? “If this is your idea of Europe, you can keep it,” a furious Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was quoted telling fellow EU leaders as traditionally Europhile Italy lost patience with a lack of help. Hungary, which tore the first rent in the Iron Curtain in the daring summer of 1989 before the Berlin Wall fell, is building a fence on its border with Serbia; Britain is adding fencing too, round its Channel Tunnel beachhead at Calais. Even founder members France and Italy have feuded on their frontier.

At the eye of the storm is Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, the bloc’s Brussels executive. Claiming – despite scepticism from national capitals – a democratic mandate due to being the lead center-right candidate in last summer’s elections to the European Parliament, Juncker has become a vocal critic of governments for lacking solidarity. “Je m’en fous!” he snapped – “I don’t give a damn” – in singularly undiplomatic French during a June summit, as equally irritated leaders rejected his demand for mandatory quotas on member states to take in asylum seekers from Italy and Greece.

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“These people are either perpetually renting their vehicles or just driving them until the repo man shows up.”

• US Department Store Results Imploding (Jim Quinn)

The government issued their monthly retail sales this past week and four of the biggest department store chains in the country announced their quarterly results. The year over year retail sales increase of 2.4% is pitifully low in an economy that is supposedly in its sixth year of economic growth with a reported unemployment rate of only 5.3%. If all of these jobs have been created, why aren’t retail sales booming? The year to date numbers are even worse than the year over year numbers. With consumer spending accounting for 70% of our GDP and real inflation running north of 5%, it’s pretty clear most Americans are experiencing a recession, despite the propaganda data circulated by the government and Fed.

The only people not experiencing a recession are corporate executives enriching themselves through stock buybacks, Wall Street bankers using free Fed Bucks while rigging the the markets in their favor, politicians and government bureaucrats reaping their bribes from billionaire oligarchs, and the media toadies who dispense the Deep State approved propaganda to keep the ignorant masses dazed, confused, and endlessly distracted by Cecil the Lion, Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, Ferguson, and blood coming out of whatever. You won’t hear CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or any corporate mainstream media outlet reference the fact retail sales growth is at the exact same levels as when recession hit in 2008 and 2001. Their job is to regurgitate the message of economic recovery and confidence in the future, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Retail sales are actually far worse than the 2.4% reported number. Excluding the subprime debt fueled auto sales, retail sales only grew by 1.3% in the last year. The automakers are practically giving vehicles away as their lots are stuffed with inventory. The length of auto loans and the average amount of auto loans are now at all-time highs. The percentage of subprime auto loans is surging to record levels, as defaults begin to rise. The percentage of vehicles being leased is also at an all-time high. To call these “auto sales” strains credibility. These people are either perpetually renting their vehicles or just driving them until the repo man shows up.

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CHina’s main problem: leveraged investments made with a far too positive view of the future. Beijing has an ocean liner on its hands that needs to be turned on a dime.

• Problems For China’s Economy Extend Far Beyond Currency (FT)

The sudden fall in China’s currency last week spurred a lively debate about whether the move was a victory for market reform or a competitive devaluation designed to shore up flagging exports. But even those who believe the 3% drop was aimed at exporters acknowledge that a weaker renminbi by itself is radically insufficient to cope with the challenges facing China’s economy. “Currency depreciation to stimulate export growth is neither useful nor necessary,” said Qu Hongbin, HSBC chief China economist. He notes that while China’s exports have fallen this year, “exporters across Asia faced the same challenge, suggesting that the underlying problem is sluggish demand in developed markets”.

China’s economy officially grew at an annual rate of 7% during the first half of this year, neatly in line with the government’s full-year target. However, some doubt that figure — Capital Economics, for example, reckons it is 5-6% — and there are widespread suggestions that further stimulus will be needed to prevent a slowdown. Yet an export revival would boost growth only marginally. Contrary to received wisdom, China has not pursued so-called “export-led growth” for the past decade. Net exports subtracted 3% from annual growth in Chinese gross domestic product on average from 2004 to 2014. Meanwhile, investment contributed an average of 52% of growth each year.

The importance of investment explains why data released last week will keep Premier Li Keqiang awake at night. Fixed-asset investment grew at its slowest pace since 2000 in the first seven months of 2015, led by a collapse in property investment. Factory output in July was also barely above the four-year low touched in March. “China economic data for July may have lacked the lethal explosive force of last night’s detonation in the industrial city of Tianjin, but it laid bare the wider deterioration of domestic macroeconomic conditions,” Chen Long at Gavekal Dragonomics wrote last week.

Though property sales have begun to inch up following 13 consecutive months of decline, the market remains saddled with a huge overhang of unsold flats. That has caused developers to pull back on new construction, hitting demand for basic materials such as steel and cement. Faced with this slowdown, factories that produce these commodities are cutting back both on current output and investment in new capacity.

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“By shattering a 10-year consensus held by everyone from deposit holders in Hong Kong to high-yield-bond investors in Europe, the unwind in capital flows could be of seismic proportions.”

• And Now For China’s Great Foreign-Capital Unwind (MarketWatch)

Among the many unknowns in China is just how much of its prodigious credit boom has been built on foreign capital. After last week’s high-stakes gamble to devalue the yuan, we may soon find out. So much investment and hot money had bought into Beijing’s flagship policy of a strong yuan pegged to the U.S. dollar — which has appreciated about 30% since 2005 — that this reversal moves into almost uncharted territory. By shattering a 10-year consensus held by everyone from deposit holders in Hong Kong to high-yield-bond investors in Europe, the unwind in capital flows could be of seismic proportions.

While some explain last week’s surprise yuan devaluation as little move than an overdue step toward a market-determined exchange rate, a more plausible interpretation is that the People’s Bank of China jettisoned its exchange rate policy as a last resort; a culmination of events after which the pain of attempting to hold its currency peg to the U.S. dollar finally became unbearable. This scenario would be supported by data released last Friday for July, showing the biggest monthly surge in money outflows since 1998 as foreign-exchange funds held at Chinese banks fell by 249.1 billion yuan ($39 billion). Meanwhile, another sign of stress is that short-term borrowing costs in the interbank markets in China and Hong Kong spiked last week, suggesting again that investors were pulling out of the yuan.

The overnight Shanghai interbank offered rate (or Shibor) leapt 1,380 basis points to 1.667% over the past week, reaching a near 4-month high, and the one-month Shibor jumped to 2.495%, a one-week high. For some time Beijing has been under pressure to hold together the “impossible trinity” of a closed capital account, independent monetary policy and a tightly managed exchange rate. Capital outflows ratchet up the pain as the central bank has to buy yuan to support the peg and withdraw liquidity from the economy. This was difficult enough when authorities have been attempting to provide sufficient liquidity to put a floor under a foundering economy.

But then the stock market rout heaped further pressure on the PBOC as it was given ultimate responsibility, through a massive state-buying scheme, to also keep shares from falling. If this wasn’t enough, the central bank had just pushed the problem of near-bankrupt municipal authorities out of its in-tray. Weeks earlier the central government had strong-armed state banks into buying 2 trillion yuan’s worth of debt swap bonds designed to refinance broke municipal authorities. It is hardly a stretch to state that with the central government lining up to be on the hook for municipal authority debt and stock-market losses, this deteriorating picture would persuade some investors to get out of yuan.

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Dollar-denominated debt takes center stage.

• China Devaluation Makes Debt Burden Heavier for Others (Bloomberg)

China’s surprise move to weaken the yuan will have repercussions far beyond last week’s market turmoil. For one: Governments and companies in emerging markets will have a harder time paying the dollar-denominated debt they have amassed. The yuan’s depreciation – by almost 3% against the U.S. dollar – triggered instability and exchange-rate declines across emerging markets. As of Friday evening in Asia, the Malaysian ringgit was down 3.8% from a week earlier. The Turkish lira, Mexican peso and Russian ruble also fell sharply. The depreciations might help the countries’ exports remain competitive. But they also expose a vulnerability: Over the past several years, borrowers in emerging markets have built up more than $2 trillion in dollar-denominated debt.

When the U.S. currency was cheap and the Federal Reserve was holding interest rates close to zero, that debt seemed like a great deal. Now, with the dollar getting stronger and the Fed set to start raising rates, it’s becoming more of a burden. If investors decide the debts aren’t sustainable, they could pull out en masse, starting a dangerous spiral of declining exchange rates and financial stress that could render otherwise viable companies and governments insolvent. One can only hope that regulators are trying to understand where the resulting losses would be concentrated, and how to mitigate the potential fallout.

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“They’re happy to let markets go in the direction they want, namely up..” “There’s fear in the government, which is most fearful of the people..”

• Volatility Reveals Beijing’s Market Anxiety (WSJ)

Turmoil in China’s currency and stocks has highlighted the anxiety the Communist Party feels over the power and dynamism that markets represent. Even as market-opening policies have allowed hundreds of millions of Chinese to break out of poverty to build the world’s second-largest economy, the party’s ambivalence can be seen across the economic landscape. The leadership keeps fences around the currency, restricts capital flows and operates a central bank that lacks independence. Many Chinese economic planners have a solid understanding of markets. Still, there remains a “deep-seated narrative of the evils of capitalism, even though they embrace huge parts of it,” said Kerry Brown, director of the University of Sydney’s China Studies Center.

The tug of war has left China dragging its heels on financial overhauls necessary to continue improving living standards at a pace Chinese people have become used to. “The government knows it has to implement a more efficient system because it no longer has double-digit growth that can buy people’s loyalty,” said Mr. Brown. “It’s an epic clash of systems.” The stock market is a basic building block of any financial system, including China’s, but no Chinese president has publicly embraced share ownership. “Where does the stock market’s money come from?” asked Jiang Zemin a month before the Shanghai exchange’s 1990 opening, according to an account in a biography of the former president by American banker Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

President Xi Jinping pledged to let markets take a “decisive role” in the economy, and when stocks rose it was called his bull market in state media. But as the Shanghai Composite started falling sharply in mid-June, regulators under him quickly halted initial public offerings, leaned on state institutions to buy shares and blocked large shareholders from selling. On Friday, China’s stock regulator said government entities would hold shares for years as needed to stabilize the market. “They’re happy to let markets go in the direction they want, namely up,” said Alexander Wolf, economist with Standard Life Investments. “It’s like a car they don’t allow to go in reverse.”

One likely reason for China’s early intervention in the stock market is Beijing’s extreme sensitivity to social unrest in a system where discontent is often repressed. “There’s fear in the government, which is most fearful of the people,” said the University of Sydney’s Mr. Brown.

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Guess that would still be a surprise to some?!

• China’s Woes Echo in US Earnings (WSJ)

With the U.S. recession behind them and the European fiscal crisis fading, American companies are grappling with a new threat: China’s economic blues. In quarterly conference calls, U.S. executives recited a litany of pain, from mild to severe, resulting from a slowdown in China’s economy, the world’s second-largest. Engine-maker Cummins, for example, said demand for excavators in China fell 34% in the second quarter from a year ago with no signs of improvement. For such companies as Weyerhaeuser, less construction in China means logs and lumber pile up in the U.S., pushing down prices. “China was weak in the quarter, and we expect it to be weak as we move forward,” Robyn Denholm, CFO of Juniper Networks, told investors.

China pulled down the networking-gear maker’s Asia-Pacific revenues by 3% from the prior quarter; without China, they would have risen 11%. China’s policy makers are stimulating the economy to counter slackening consumer demand and falling factory output. Authorities have intervened in financial markets by devaluing the currency, a move that would help Chinese exporters while pinching some U.S. companies by making their products more expensive for Chinese buyers. Chinese officials are trying to keep the economy growing at 7% in 2015, the country’s slowest pace in more than two decades. It comes at a tough time for U.S. businesses. Overall, companies in the S&P 500 index are on track to eke out a 1.2% increase in second-quarter earnings, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

That is the slowest growth since fall 2012. The modest earnings growth was recorded on a 3.5% decline in revenues—the biggest drop in nearly six years—suggesting that much of the profit gain is from cost-cutting, buybacks or other maneuvers, rather than increased sales. Excluding the hard-hit energy sector, big-company profits fared better in the June quarter. Earnings are poised to rise 8.7%, though revenue growth has remained tepid at just under 1.5%, its lowest level since fall 2009, according to Thomson Reuters. China remains a relatively small part of operations at most big U.S. companies: Just 16 companies in the S&P 500 index say they collected 10% or more of their sales there, with most of those in the technology sector, according to data from Wells Fargo Securities.

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“.. it helps to have scapegoat social groups whose desperate state is an example of what can happen if you do not pay your debts and work for whatever pittance you are offered..”

• Austerity – Elite Terrorism Against Ordinary People (Brian Davey)

So let’s start by reframing the debate about austerity. When Yanis Varoufakis describes what has happened to Greece as “Fiscal Waterboarding” he is part way in the direction that I mean. His description of austerity as a form of terrorism is also right. The purpose of austerity is to create insecurity and instill fear in the general population in order to protect the finance and banking sector from popular rage against the crimes the participants of this sector have committed against ordinary people. This rage ought to have given rise a long time ago to legal actions and desperately needed fundamental reforms to take away from bankers the right to create money, a right which they have abused at tremendous cost to ordinary people.

Instead of a rage focused on collective reforms what we are being subjected to is a policy of deliberately spreading insecurity together with the scapegoating of vulnerable people. Attention and emotion is directed away from the financiers and their political representatives onto easier targets who cannot fight back and who had no part in creating our difficulties. Peoples’ anger and discontent is channelled towards people weaker than themselves which also serves to exacerbate the sense of fear by making the prospect of “social descent” into the vulnerable groups – even more of a frightening prospect. The people who run the mass media and the PR industry have been only too willing to help.

So what, exactly is this fear that is being instilled in people? I am writing here of the sort of ruin in which because one does not have money to pay the rent, one can be evicted from where one lives and through that lose the ability to maintain relationships. Where one can fail in one’s responsibilities to dependents and from this point on fall in a downwards spiral, lose one’s job, lose everything else and that includes one’s emotional and mental equilibrium. Elite terrorism does not operate by setting off bombs but by creating fear of being pushed beyond one’s coping capacities into life management breakdowns.

For that fear to be generalised it helps to have scapegoat social groups – “swarms” as David Cameron calls them – whose desperate state is an example of what can happen if you do not pay your debts and work for whatever pittance you are offered. The mentality of the elite can be observed from comments like those of the economist Hayek. Unemployment was necessary, he wrote, as an alternative to corporal punishment for disciplining the labour force. In the absence of a “reservoir” of unemployed, he wrote “discipline cannot be maintained without corporal punishment, as with slave labour”.

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I have yet to read it, but here it is for your scrutiny.

• Greece’s Third MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) Annotated (Yanis Varoufakis)

The Third Greek MoU is now enshrined in Greek Law. Written in troika-speak it is almost impossible to decypher by those not speaking this unappetising language. Click the link for the complete MoU text annotated liberally by yours truly – in pdf form. It is best read in conjunction with my annotated version of the EuroSummit Agreement of 12th July.

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Great little 10 minute interview.

• Varoufakis And Lamont Interviewed On Their Peculiar Political Friendship (YV)

YV-Norman Lamont

Further to this piece on my unlikely friendship with Lord Lamont, the BBC’s Radio 4 interviewed us, together. To hear the interview, on World At One, click on the play button below.


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Wait till these start wobbling.

• Still Vulnerable: The Euro Area’s Small And Medium-Sized Banks (Mody, Wolff)

The ECB’s 26 October 2014 publication of the results of a comprehensive assessment of 130 banks under its oversight (ECB, 2014) identified problems in terms of non-performing assets and capital shortfalls. Nevertheless, the outcome brought a sense of relief to financial markets. Unlike stress tests conducted in July and December 2011 by the European Banking Authority, the ECB’s assessment was considered broadly credible.The assessment showed that the largest banks appear to be out of the woods. However, in our recent research we show that the small and medium-sized banks (SMBs) – and among them the unlisted banks – remain under considerable stress.

The ECB data covers 130 banks in 19 countries, which can be divided into three size categories: small (assets below €100bn), medium (assets between €100bn and €500 billion) and large (assets more than €500 billion). Of the €22 trillion in assets in total, the ‘small’ group has 84 banks with €3.1 trillion, the ‘medium’ group has 33 banks with €6.3 trillion, and the ‘large’ group has only 13 banks with aggregate assets of €12.5 trillion. Thus, ‘small’ banks have about 14% and ‘medium’ banks have 29% of total bank assets in the euro area.SMBs thus control a sizeable share of the euro area’s bank assets. They have also received substantial bail-outs. During recent periods of market pressure, SMBs have become closely interconnected in the market’s perception, thereby posing a broader systemic risk.

Though there is no cause to believe that the vulnerabilities of SMBs will lead to widespread banking distress, their weakness could delay the recovery.To measure the vulnerability of individual banks, we conducted a simple ‘stress test’ which asks the following question: if 65% of a bank’s non-performing loans have to be written off, then after accounting for provisions, what would the bank’s equity/assets ratio be? Contrary to the ECB, we look at non risk-weighted equity. If the ratio falls below 3%, we consider the bank to be ‘under stress’. This, we acknowledge, is very crude. It is intended only to assess where the current trouble spots are without claiming to detect all problems.

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Limbo land.

• This Latest Greek Deal Is Nothing to Celebrate (Bloomberg ed.)

At the end of last week, amid much smiling and hand-shaking, European finance ministers said they were ready to give Greece a new bailout of 86 billion euros. It’s the third time in five years they’ve declared victory in the battle to revive the Greek economy. This latest triumph shows every sign of being as durable as those previous failures. The first challenge is to get the deal, regardless of its merits, up and running. Germany’s parliament is due to vote on it this week, and rebellion is stirring in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. The bailout is thought likely to pass despite the protests, thanks to support from other parties in the Bundestag – but skepticism in Germany and some other euro-area countries runs deep.

That’s a problem because it suggests low or zero tolerance of any departure by Greece from the program it has agreed to – an extraordinarily demanding series of tax increases, spending cuts and structural reforms. The scope of the plan all but guarantees some backsliding. Greece is resentful and agreed to the terms only under extreme duress. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s ruling Syriza party is deeply split on the issue, and fresh elections may soon be necessary. Supposing that these difficulties can be overcome, and the program is followed conscientiously, will it work? That depends on what “work” means. The program assumes that output will contract even further both this year and next. Recovery after that, according to the IMF and most observers, will depend on new debt relief.

Speaking after last week’s meetings, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said: “I remain firmly of the view that Greece’s debt has become unsustainable and that Greece cannot restore debt sustainability solely through actions on its own.” This complicates things even more. The IMF is rightly embarrassed by its participation in the two previous bungled bailouts, and has warned that it won’t join the third unless debt relief “well beyond what has been considered so far” is part of the plan. Germany and its supporters, on the other hand, have opposed new debt reduction throughout – while insisting that IMF participation in the new bailout is vital.

Merkel this weekend said lower interest rates and new maturity extensions – though not, presumably, outright write-downs – were possible, and she was confident the IMF would sign up. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has spent most of this year insisting on steely-eyed clarity about Greece’s obligations, says he is “assuming” the fund will get on board. If this is clarity, one shudders to think what confusion would look like.

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PASOK is irrelevant.

• Greek Opposition Party Refuses To Back Tsipras In Any Confidence Vote (Reuters)

Greece’s socialist PASOK party joined the main opposition on Sunday in saying it would not back Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras if he calls a confidence vote following a rebellion in the governing party over a new bailout deal. Tsipras had to rely on opposition groups including PASOK to win a parliamentary majority on Friday in favour of the bailout programme, Greece’s third with international creditors since 2010. By contrast, Tsipras suffered the biggest rebellion yet among anti-bailout lawmakers from his leftist Syriza party, forcing him to consider a confidence vote that would pave the way for early elections if he loses. PASOK made clear that while it had backed the government over bailout for the sake of saving Greece from financial ruin, that support would not extend to any confidence vote in the coming weeks.

The party blamed Tsipras and Panos Kammenos, who leads the minority partner in the coalition government, for the fact that Greece had to take yet another bailout with tough austerity and reform conditions demanded by the euro zone and IMF. “The government has signed the third and most onerous bailout. All the negative consequences for the country and its citizens bear the signatures of Mr Tsipras and Mr Kammenos,” the party said in a statement. “We have no confidence in the Tsipras-Kammenos government and of course will not give it if we are asked.” PASOK, once the dominant force on the Greek left, now has just 13 members in the 300 seat parliament but Tsipras may need all the support he can get. Crucially, it did not say whether it would vote against the government, or merely abstain.

On Friday, support for the government from within its own coalition parties fell below 120 votes, the minimum needed to survive a confidence vote if some others abstain. The main conservative opposition party, New Democracy, has also said it would not back the government, which won power in January on promises to reverse austerity policies. Tsipras was forced to back down to secure the new deal. Opinion polls show Tsipras remains popular, even though he presided over the closure of banks for three weeks, the imposition of capital controls and a near brush with financial collapse. This has raised doubts about how much the opposition parties may want to force new elections.

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Someone’s going to torpedo the deal.

• Merkel Fights To Contain Greece Rebellion (FT)

Chancellor Angela Merkel is fighting to contain the largest revolt from her party this week when the German parliament votes on a new, €86bn rescue plan for Greece. Ms Merkel has rescheduled trips to Italy and Brazil to maximise her time in Berlin and party managers have been mobilised to dissuade potential rebels from voting against the bailout in the Bundestag on Wednesday. She took to national television on Sunday evening to rally support for the bailout deal, saying Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras had changed his approach after a “real confrontation” with creditors. Greece’s third international bailout, which was approved by eurozone finance ministers on Friday night, faces a stormy ride through some of the bloc’s parliaments this week as doubts over its viability continue to surface.

The deal is certain to get German legislative approval thanks to support from the Social Democrats, but a big rebellion by Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, would represent the biggest challenge to Ms Merkel since she took power a decade ago and could dent her reputation for political invulnerability. It could also raise concerns that if the three-year Greece rescue runs into difficulties over implementation in Athens or debt relief, opposition to handing over loan instalments could grow in Berlin and among an increasingly sceptical German population.

Parliamentary approval in Germany and a few other eurozone states, including the Netherlands and Estonia, is the final political hurdle for the rescue deal, following months of difficult negotiations in which Greece came close to default, financial meltdown and exit from the single currency. Crucially for conservative MPs, finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble on Friday backed the deal, despite considerable misgivings about the radical left Greek government s willingness to deliver the promised reforms. He told Bild-am-Sonntag newspaper on Sunday that Greece would have to implement reforms to the letter of the agreement. “We shall pay attention. Any further aid will be dependent on it”, he said.

Mr Schäuble was unable to secure a guarantee that the IMF will join the new rescue plan in the autumn, which could add to sceptical lawmakers concerns. The fund may not decide until October whether to take part and has indicated it will only do so if the eurozone grants debt relief to Athens. Adding to Berlin’s discomfit, Christine Lagarde, IMF chief, on Friday said the eurozone needed to make “concrete commitments” … to provide significant debt relief, well beyond what has been considered so far .

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And now Angela starts to gamble. Great timing.

• Angela Merkel Expects IMF Involvement In Greek Debt Deal (Guardian)

Angela Merkel has said that she expects the IMF to take part in a new €86bn bailout for Greece, as the German chancellor prepares to face Bundestag opposition to the package in a vote on Wednesday. In an attempt to reassure sceptical MPs, Merkel said the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, would ensure the fund’s participation if conditions on Greek pension reform and debt relief were met. “Mrs Lagarde, the chief of the IMF, made very clear that if these conditions are met, then she will recommend to the IMF board that the IMF takes part in the programme from October,” Merkel told the broadcaster ZDF. “I have no doubts that what Mrs Lagarde said will become reality.”

Representatives from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, want the IMF involved because of its reputation for rigour. Lagarde, who has been pressing eurozone countries to provide Athens with “significant” debt relief, reiterated at the weekend that Greece’s European creditors must make “concrete commitments” on relieving the debt burden. She has said the IMF will wait until October to decide whether to participate. That would force lawmakers to vote without any guarantees that the Washington-based institution would have a role. In a nod to IMF calls for debt relief, Merkel said there was room to ease the burden on Greece by extending the maturities on its debt and reducing interest rates.

Greece’s three European creditors – the EC, ECB and the ESM bailout fund – also admitted last week that they had “serious concerns” about the level of Greek debt. Meanwhile, Merkel’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the deal reached last week was “responsible” and ensured that Athens had to execute tough reforms in return for aid. “After truly arduous negotiations, they understand now in Greece that the country cannot get around real and far-reaching reforms,” he said, referring to changes that include an overhaul of the Greek VAT regime and the state pension system.

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The cynicism of making such statements AFTER so many have already drowned is suffocating. Merkel should act, not talk. As Europe’s de facto leader, there’s blood on her hands. Lots of blood.

• Merkel Says Migrants Bigger Challenge For EU Than Debt Crisis (AFP)

Chancellor Angela Merkel today condemned a surge in German attacks on refugee shelters and warned that the issue of asylum could become a bigger challenge for the European Union than the Greek debt crisis. Asked about more than 200 arson attacks against homes for asylum-seekers seen in Germany this year as the country faces a record influx of refugees, Merkel said: “That is unworthy of our country.” Merkel warned that waves of refugees would “preoccupy Europe much, much more than the issue of Greece and the stability of the euro”. “The issue of asylum could be the next major European project, in which we show whether we are really able to take joint action,” she told ZDF public television.

For Germany, where some officials have said the number of asylum-seekers could top 600,000 this year, Merkel said the issue posed particular challenges. With thousands of refugees sleeping in tents and authorities saying they are overwhelmed with applications, Merkel said the current situation was “absolutely unsatisfactory”. She called for the European Union to establish a list of safe countries of origin, where citizens are not under threat of violence or persecution. Last week Germany’s interior minister said it was “unacceptable” that 40 percent of asylum-seekers in his country were from the Balkans, calling it “an embarrassment for Europe”.

About half of Germany’s 300,000 asylum applications since January have come from the southeast European region that includes Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Berlin is looking at ways to deter such claims in order to better serve people from crisis zones such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN refugee agency has said the number of people driven from their homes by conflict and crisis has topped 50 million for the first time since World War II, with Syrians hardest hit.

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What better way to illustrate Cameron’s, and British, hypocrisy?

• The Exploitation Of Migrants Has Become Our Way Of Life (Felicity Lawrence)

When the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, talked of the threat to the UK from “marauding migrants” at Calais last week, I decided to review the stories of the hundreds of foreign-born workers I have met in more than a decade of writing about their lives in the UK: those working for the mainstream economy, albeit hidden in the shadows of its long subcontracted supply chains, whether in food production, construction, care work, cleaning or catering. What becomes immediately clear is the deep dishonesty at the heart of much of the rhetoric on this issue. The right claims to be tough on immigration, but it is the opposite of tough on the causes of immigration. It promotes a business model that depends on a constant churn of workers to carry out jobs that are underpaid and insecure at best, and all too often dirty, dangerous, and degrading.

It requires not just immigration, but immigration without end, since only the newly arrived, the desperate and the vulnerable will tolerate the conditions that have been created, as the roll call of migrant workers I have met, with its constantly changing nationalities, shows. [..] The zero-hours agency habits pioneered in the food and agriculture sector have spread across the economy. In the south-east, Ukrainian and Chinese workers are the predominant nationality on the domestic building sites I have seen, providing cheap hard labour to dig out new underground floors for affluent renovations by hand. We have created jobs that are inhuman, and incompatible with any normal settled existence.

Instead of regulating these sectors properly, taxpayers’ money has been used to augment inadequate pay in the form of tax credits to low-paid UK and EU workers – introduced by Labour – subsidising profitable businesses with corporate welfare. The Conservatives have trumpeted their intention to move from tax credits to a living wage. But enforcement of the national minimum wage, never mind a living wage, has been feeble and inadequate under successive administrations, including theirs. The government’s migration advisory committee calculated in 2014 that that a business might statistically expect a visit from one of just 142 national minimum wage inspectors once every 250 years. The government has increased the team this year to 230, hardly enough to make employers quake.

A sustained assault on union rights has seen the steep decline of recognition and collective bargaining that might take on the asymmetries of power in the work place. The Conservatives have announced yet more anti-union legislation. Equally dishonest is the myth that migration can be controlled, if only we had sharper razor wire, or more border dogs, or more deportations of illegal immigrants. As the Ministry of Defence’s strategic trends programme makes clear, today’s large-scale migrations are a historic force, just as those from rural areas to emerging cities were in the industrial revolution.

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The Greeks have a lot more decency than most Europeans. Why there are not entire teams of German, Dutch, British volunteers helping out on the Greek islands is beyond me. Instead, they go to lie on the beaches.

• Volunteers Fill Aid Void In Greece’s Migrant Crisis (Reuters)

Father Efstratios Dimou knows all about physical suffering and his family has also known what it is to be a refugee. Now the Orthodox priest leads a small army of volunteers on the island of Lesbos tackling Greece’s crisis within a crisis. Despite suffering from lung cancer, Dimou – along with fellow volunteers from near and far – has toured the island offering people help that the Greek state, mired in a five-year debt crisis, can scarcely afford to provide any more. Once Dimou’s group Aggalia – Greek for “Embrace” – fed only the local poor, victims of the long economic depression. But now Greece is struggling with what Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called a “humanitarian crisis within the economic crisis”.

He has acknowledged his cash-strapped government cannot cope with boatloads of migrants fleeing war and poverty who are crossing to the Greek islands from neighboring Turkey. So once again Aggalia is trying to fill the gap created by strained government resources. “State services are virtually non-existent so volunteers are stepping in. We are doing as much as we can, but there are so many arrivals,” said Dimou, known as “Papa Stratis”, who is permanently hooked up to an oxygen tank because of his chronic respiratory condition. Greece has become the biggest European gateway for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa seeking a safer and better life. Numbers exceeded 135,000 this year at the last count, more even than those making the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean to Italy.

On Lesbos, local people often sympathize with the migrants’ plight because among the population of about 75,000 are many descendents of refugees from Turkey. Dimou, 57, himself is the third generation of a family that arrived as refugees. In the 1920s huge numbers of ethnic Greeks were forced out of Turkey, many settling on Greek islands such as Lesbos which lies in sight of the Turkish coast. Under this “population exchange”, hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Greece were forced to move in the opposite direction. Dimou has long set off from his home town of Kalloni, touring the island in a sturdy old car he affectionately calls “Tarzan”, helping where he can. “We fed 100 people today,” he told Reuters. “We offer them love, a plate of food and hope.”

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“We are in the process of killing off our only known companions in the universe, many of them beautiful and all of them intricate and interesting.”

• How Humans Cause Mass Extinctions (Paul and Anne Ehrlich)

There is no doubt that Earth is undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history – the first since the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. According to one recent study, species are going extinct between ten and several thousand times faster than they did during stable periods in the planet’s history, and populations within species are vanishing hundreds or thousands of times faster than that. By one estimate, Earth has lost half of its wildlife during the past 40 years. There is also no doubt about the cause: We are it. We are in the process of killing off our only known companions in the universe, many of them beautiful and all of them intricate and interesting. This is a tragedy, even for those who may not care about the loss of wildlife.

The species that are so rapidly disappearing provide human beings with indispensable ecosystem services: regulating the climate, maintaining soil fertility, pollinating crops and defending them from pests, filtering fresh water, and supplying food. The cause of this great acceleration in the loss of the planet’s biodiversity is clear: rapidly expanding human activity, driven by worsening overpopulation and increasing per capita consumption. We are destroying habitats to make way for farms, pastures, roads, and cities. Our pollution is disrupting the climate and poisoning the land, water, and air. We are transporting invasive organisms around the globe and overharvesting commercially or nutritionally valuable plants and animals. The more people there are, the more of Earth’s productive resources must be mobilized to support them.

More people means more wild land must be put under the plow or converted to urban infrastructure to support sprawling cities like Manila, Chengdu, New Delhi, and San Jose. More people means greater demand for fossil fuels, which means more greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere, perhaps the single greatest extinction threat of all. Meanwhile, more of Canada needs to be destroyed to extract low-grade petroleum from oil sands and more of the United States needs to be fracked. More people also means the production of more computers and more mobile phones, along with more mining operations for the rare earths needed to make them. It means more pesticides, detergents, antibiotics, glues, lubricants, preservatives, and plastics, many of which contain compounds that mimic mammalian hormones.

Indeed, it means more microscopic plastic particles in the biosphere – particles that may be toxic or accumulate toxins on their surfaces. As a result, all living things – us included – have been plunged into a sickening poisonous stew, with organisms that are unable to adapt pushed further toward extinction. With each new person, the problem gets worse. Since human beings are intelligent, they tend to use the most accessible resources first. They settle the richest, most productive land, drink the nearest, cleanest water, and tap the easiest-to-reach energy sources.

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