crackdown Archives - The Automatic Earth

There have been seven pilot incapacitations and three young pilot deaths just in the past month, reported Dr. @MakisMD

But it's also happening to flight attendants and passengers. "In the past few weeks, there's been a large number of passengers who have either had heart attacks… pic.twitter.com/LT3tF5Dm2I

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) April 15, 2023

Rogan liberalism

The world that has any involvement with the left has gone mad#LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder pic.twitter.com/kzcfhfoiLR

— • ᗰISᑕᕼIᗴᖴ ™ • (@4Mischief) April 15, 2023

“..gain a firm foothold, cling to the territories that already exist..”

• Wagner Chief Calls On Putin To Declare End Of War (ZH)

Head of Russia’s most prominent mercenary firm Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has issued an unexpected call for the Kremlin to declare an end of the war in order to consolidate territory already gained. A Friday statement by Prigozhin released by his press service suggested it’s time to declare ‘victory’ and to focus on fully establishing Russian control over the occupied territories of Ukraine. “For the authorities [of the Russian Federation – ed.] and for society as a whole, it is necessary to put some kind of bold full stop in the ‘special military operation’,” the Wagner chief said [emphasis ours].

The rare statement continued: “The ideal option is to announce the end of the special military operation, to inform everyone that Russia has achieved the results that it planned, and in a sense, we have really achieved them. We have ground a huge number of soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and can report to ourselves that our task has been completed.” “Theoretically, Russia has already received this full stop by destroying a large part of the active male population of Ukraine, by intimidating another part of it that has fled to Europe.” Prigozhin went on: “Russia has cut off the Azov Sea and a large chunk of the Black Sea, seized a fat chunk of Ukraine’s territory, and created a land corridor to Crimea,” and stressed that Russia can “gain a firm foothold, cling to the territories that already exist”.

But he noted that “If earlier Ukraine was part of former Russia, now it is an absolutely national-oriented state”. This comes as Wagner is spearheading the largely successful offensive to capture Bakhmut and surrounding areas of Donetsk region. At least 80% of the largely destroyed city is currently in Russian hands. A Russian defense ministry briefing on Saturday said “Wagner assault units have successfully advanced, capturing two districts on the northern and southern outskirts of the city.” Western media too has generally acknowledged the Russian forces’ steady advance.

Wagner
https://twitter.com/i/status/1647397384115335168

“If changes to tactics are not introduced rapidly, “generations of Ukrainians” could be lost, the document warns.”

• Former NATO Troops See ‘Disarray’ In Ukrainian Military – CTV (RT)

A chaotic military command structure is leading to huge losses among Ukrainian troops and is causing serious doubts over the outcome of the conflict with Russia, Canada’s CTV National News has claimed, citing a report by former NATO soldiers. The so-called ‘White Papers’ were compiled by two former high-ranking members of the US Special Forces and one former major in the Canadian Armed Forces. Each of the group has been training local forces in Ukraine for the last nine months, the broadcaster reported on Friday. According to CTV, the papers describe Ukraine’s military command structure as being in disarray, while it further claims that the country’s military communication system is crumbling. If changes to tactics are not introduced rapidly, “generations of Ukrainians” could be lost, the document warns.

One of the authors, a former Canadian army major who chose to remain anonymous, told CTV that it was “well documented” that the Ukrainian army had suffered “huge losses with their junior officers.” Earlier this month, leaked Pentagon papers claimed that Ukrainian forces have so far suffered between 124,000 and 131,000 dead and wounded during the conflict. The figure, which was based on US estimates, is several times higher than Kiev’s official death toll. The source argued to CTV that the authors of the ‘White Papers’ were not looking to criticize Ukraine, but were “only striving for the better outcome” for the country. The lack of coordination between Ukrainian units is leading to “greater losses of life and equipment as well as failed operations,” the paper is said to have stated.

Another issue of concern for the NATO servicemen is that “military aid, such as tanks, are used as mobile artillery and not in combined operations with infantry” by Kiev’s forces. As a result, “[Ukrainian] infantry will watch as the enemy maneuvers and stages in front of their defensive positions just outside of effective artillery range,” the document is cited as saying. According to the report, Ukraine’s training approach “is based on the legacy Soviet model” which puts the commander at the center, “with no delegation of authority in training, planning, and especially operations.” The widespread lack of application of NATO standards leads to painfully slow decision-making on the battlefield, the document reportedly claims. Russia has long described the conflict in Ukraine as a “proxy war” waged against it by NATO. According to Moscow, the assistance provided to Kiev by the US and its allies, including the supply of weapons, training for Ukrainian troops, and intelligence sharing, has de facto made Western nations parties to the conflict.

Bakhmut

A Ukrainian soldier reveals the shameful reality of the US proxy war. So many Ukrainian men have died that @ZelenskyyUa has ordered to send anyone they can find on the streets to the front, without training. Many don’t even know how to reload a weapon. pic.twitter.com/5kq1JvTa5O

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 15, 2023

“But above all, it is necessary to convince the countries that are supplying weapons, encouraging the war, to stop.”

• US Must Stop ‘Encouraging War’ In Ukraine – Lula (RT)

The United States and its allies should focus on promoting peace in Ukraine instead of “encouraging war” by arming Kiev, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said on Saturday as he concluded a state visit to China, his country’s primary trading partner. “The United States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace,” Lula told reporters in Beijing. “The European Union needs to start talking about peace.” He added that, in doing so, world leaders might be able to “convince” both Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky that “peace is in the interest of the whole world.” In contrast to many Western nations, neither Brazil nor China has imposed sanctions on Moscow following the onset of the conflict in Ukraine last year.

Prior to the trip, Lula, the left-wing leader who returned as Brazilian president last year after succeeding Jair Bolsonaro, had sought to position himself as part of a group that could mediate in the conflict. He did not, however, elaborate on the nature of any such talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping following their meeting on Friday. CNN reported earlier this week that Beijing had requested the removal of issues surrounding Ukraine from the list of topics to be discussed by the two leaders. “It is important to have patience,” Lula suggested on Saturday, “But above all, it is necessary to convince the countries that are supplying weapons, encouraging the war, to stop.”

China has been a key trading partner for Brazil since 2009. In 2022 alone, Beijing imported close to $90 billion worth of Brazilian commodities such as soy, iron ore and petrol. Brazil is also the largest single market for Chinese products on the South American continent. Lula’s comments on Ukraine, as well as the strengthening of economic ties with Beijing, are likely to draw the attention of Washington, with whom Brasilia has sought a closer relationship under his rule. In February, he met with US President Joe Biden in the White House, where they primarily discussed efforts to combat climate change and combat anti-democratic extremism.

The President of Brazil demanded an end to Western support for Ukraine.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva, addressing the US and the EU, said that they should "stop supporting the war and start a dialogue about peace." pic.twitter.com/jbZ5cj84EE

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) April 15, 2023

Twitter thread.

• Spring Offensive (Gonzalo Lira)

Re. the Kiev regime’s spring offensive: Supposedly, 200,000 men have been assembled, 60,000 of them combat troops, to launch a major offensive that will cut Russia’s land bridge to Crimea. Kiev and its Western sponsors have been announcing this offensive for going on months now. It is supposed to break the back of the Russians. For their part, the Russians have heavily fortified the portions of the contact line where this offensive might likely come. This spring offensive was supposed to happen in mid April — that is, now — but it has been postponed supposedly because of weather and ground conditions. At this time, there is no firm date for it, though it’s supposed to happen before July. According to realistic estimates, Kiev has lost already +200,000 men KIA.

They are also rapidly running out of air defense missiles, which have been preventing Russian bombers from being effective on the battlefield. The Pentagon leaks (which are from late February) estimate that by mid May, Kyiv will have run out of air defense missiles, and will be naked to Russian bomber jets. Furthermore, the West’s support is rapidly deteriorating: A dribble of weapons, and dying political support. So there is an enormous time pressure on Kiev and the Washington Warmongers: Launch the offensive NOW—before conditions on the ground turn it into a rout. In Washington, there are two camps — those urging for a settlement and cease-fire, and those urging a make-or-break offensive to smash the Russians. At this time, the Warmongers urging the offensive still have the upper hand. Since the start of this conflict 14 months ago, not once have Kiev regime forces successfully broken through Russian lines in any fortified position.

Don’t tell me about Kharkov and Kherson: The Russians withdrew and gave up the terrain—and still it cost Kiev heavily. With this spring offensive, Kyiv no longer has the tanks or the men to hold onto any territory that they capture. The idea that they will break through all the way to Mariupol — and hold that territory — is just not within the realms of the possible. So even if this offensive breaks through Russian lines, Kiev will not be able to leverage that success. The Russians will simply counterattack, and since they have the men and the gear, their counterattack will likely be successful (though long and bloody). Is THIS what the Washington Warmongers want? I think yes: Marginally degrade Russian forces by throwing away Ukrainian lives in one final push. It would also give the perfect opportunity for Poland to get into the fray. Were the Russians to suffer a bad setback in southern Ukraine, it might provide the distraction (and the time) so that Polish forces could enter western Ukraine.

It would also provide the political rationale for direct Polish intervention. “Look!” the Washington Warmongers could say. “The Russians are losing—let’s get the Poles in there to finish the job!” I think this is the Warmongers’ idea at this time: Use the offensive’s early breathless headlines (which will all be initially positive) to widen the war. Because without widening the war, Russian victory is inevitable. Which means *Washington’s* ignominious defeat—at a time when its global hegemony is seriously teetering. A suicidal Ukrainian offensive—to bring in Poland and widen the war. Tell me what you think.

“Budapest hopes it will give Brussels “enough time to introduce meaningful and lasting EU measures to reconsider the full duty-free nature of Ukrainian goods.”

• Hungary Bans Ukrainian Grain (RT)

The Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture has announced a “temporary ban” on the imports of grain and oilseeds from Ukraine, citing the lack of any “meaningful” EU-wide measures to protect the markets from “destabilization” by the uncontrolled inflow of cheap produce. The Hungarian government is “committed to protecting the interests of the Hungarian farming community,” the ministry said in a statement on Saturday evening, announcing a temporary ban until June 30. Budapest hopes it will give Brussels “enough time to introduce meaningful and lasting EU measures to reconsider the full duty-free nature of Ukrainian goods.” The list of banned products will also include “a number of other agricultural products,” according to the ministry. The Minister of Agriculture, István Nagy, said these “extraordinary measures” are necessary to prevent “serious damage” to Hungarian agriculture.

Poland rolled out similar restrictions earlier in the day, also citing the need to protect local farmers, and triggering backlash from Kiev. In a separate move on Friday, Slovakia banned the processing and sale of Ukrainian grain, citing the discovery of a dangerous pesticide prohibited in the EU in a 1,500-ton haul of the product. The issue stems from Brussels’ efforts to support Ukraine by permitting duty-free imports from the country, touted as a way to help its exports reach poorer nations in the Middle East and Africa. However, much of the produce has ended up in Eastern Europe, sending local prices plummeting. Last month, the prime ministers of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia demanded action from the EU Commission on Ukrainian agricultural imports, calling for the reintroduction of tariffs. In early April, the countries also urged Brussels to buy back accumulated Ukrainian products on “humanitarian” grounds.

“The banned items range “from grain to honey products, very, very many things..”

• Ukraine Accuses Poland Of Violating Grain Deal (RT)

Kiev lashed out at Warsaw’s decision to impose a ban on Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products, accusing it of violating a deal reached by the two countries this month. Poland rolled out the restrictions earlier in the day, citing the need to protect local markets from “destabilization” caused by the inflow of cheap produce from Ukraine. Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry claimed the move violated an agreement reached last week in the wake of mass protests by Polish farmers. At the time, Warsaw said Kiev had “agreed to limit and, for now, halt exports to Poland.” “We understand that Polish farmers are facing a difficult situation, but we are emphasizing that now the most difficult situation is for Ukraine’s farmers,” the ministry said, adding that “resolving various issues by unilateral drastic actions will not accelerate a positive resolution of the situation.”

At the same time, the ministry called upon Warsaw to strike a new agreement on the matter as soon as possible, addressing the concerns of both sides. Announcing the ban, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, insisted the country remains “unchanged friends and allies of Ukraine.” “Today, the government has decided on a regulation that prohibits the entry and importation of grain into Poland, but also dozens of other types of food [from Ukraine],” Kaczynski said during his party convention. The banned items range “from grain to honey products, very, very many things,” he added. Later in the day, another Eastern European nation, Hungary, rolled out a ban of its own on Ukrainian agriculture imports.

Announcing the move, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the restrictions were needed since the status quo would cause severe damage to local farmers. Multiple Eastern European nations, namely Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, have sounded the alarm over the inflow of cheap agriculture goods from Ukraine lately. Last month, they demanded action from the EU Commission on the issue, urging it to re-impose import tariffs on the produce. Last year, agriculture products from Ukraine were allowed duty-free entry into the bloc, with Brussels advertising the move as a way to help Ukraine reach its customers in the Middle East and Africa amid the ongoing conflict with Russia. However, much of the produce ended up in Eastern Europe, creating logistics bottlenecks and sending prices into a downward spiral, with the situation affecting local producers.

“..he responded by firing ten who had been “brazenly bragging about the money they had.”

• Zelensky is Secretly Buying Fuel from Putin with US Taxpayer Funds (CF)

It has been reported that President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials collectively embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid meant to go towards the purchase of diesel. Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that, according to sources familiar with the matter, the amount could be as high as $400 million. In his latest Substack article, Hersh delved into the rampant corruption allegedly taking place among Ukraine’s political elite, suggesting the situation is worse than most people think. He explained that according to one source in the American intelligence community, Zelensky has been purchasing “discount diesel” from Russia with American money, and stashing the leftover funds.

“The Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments,” Hersh wrote. Analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency, he continued, put the number at “$400 million last year, at least,” while another expert likened the level of corruption in Ukraine to that of the war in Afghanistan. During that conflict, the US was paying up to $400 per gallon to move fuel from foreign ports into the nation. It has not been revealed how much is being paid for diesel in Ukraine. As Hersh pointed out, CIA Director William Burns confronted Zelensky on the issue of corruption during a meeting in January, telling the Ukranian president that other officials were mad at him for “taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”

Burns provided Zelensky with a list of high-ranking Ukrainian officials known by the CIA as corrupt, and he responded by firing ten who had been “brazenly bragging about the money they had.” According to the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the US has provided Ukraine with over $35 billion in aid since Russia launched its “premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal war” against the sovereign nation. While the US has been, by far, the greatest supplier of aid to Ukraine, dozens of other countries have stepped up to provide financial, military, and humanitarian support.

FROM Iran or TO Iran?

• Russia Begins Exporting Fuel To Iran By Rail (Cradle)

Earlier this year, Russia launched for the first time fuel-by-rail exports to Iran after its main purchasers stopped importing Russian fuel due to western sanctions imposed on the Kremlin following the start of the war in Ukraine, according to three industry sources that spoke with Reuters. Russia delivered 30,000 tons of diesel and gasoline to Iran in February and March, the sources said. Last year, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak announced that the two nations had clinched a massive energy deal worth $40 billion and agreed to swap oil and natural gas supplies. “We expect fuel supplies to Iran to rise this year, but we already see several issues with logistics due to rail congestion. That may keep exports from booming,” one of the sources reportedly told Reuters.

The fuel cargoes were shipped from Russia through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan by rail. Some of the shipments of gasoline were then sent by truck from Iran to neighboring countries, including Iraq. Before the start of the Ukraine war, Russia exported small volumes of fuels to the Islamic Republic via the Caspian Sea. However, after the west sanctioned seaborne diesel and gasoline cargoes, Moscow had to look for alternative ways to expand deliveries to Tehran. While Iran is an oil-producing country with large deposits and its own refineries, over recent months, demand has surpassed domestic fuel production, according to a trader in Central Asian oil products that spoke with Reuters.

The main overland route for cargo sent from Russia to Iran passes through Azerbaijan as part of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-kilometer-long transit system that connects ship, rail, and road routes for moving cargo between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Russia, and the rest of Europe. Last July, a Russian company completed the first transport of goods via container trains from Russia to India through the eastern branch of the INSTC. Russia and Iran have deepened their economic and defense cooperation due to growing economic pressure from the west and the war in Ukraine.

“Joe Biden is a criminal. He was conducting malfeasance in office to enrich his family. Jake Sullivan is a conspirator in that, and there’s more… Obama officials involved in it, I believe.”

• “Joe Biden Is A Criminal”: Former White House Stenographer (ZH)

Mike McCormick, a stenographer in the White House for 15 years who worked with Biden from 2011 to 2017, told Fox & Friends First that the FBI has completely ignored him despite his willingness to testify under oath before the grand jury investigating Hunter. “In February, I went to the FBI and filed one of their tips on their website. If you do that, and you’re lying to them, you go to jail. I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth, and I’m not going to jail,” McCormick said on Thursday. “Joe Biden is a criminal. He was conducting malfeasance in office to enrich his family. Jake Sullivan is a conspirator in that, and there’s more… Obama officials involved in it, I believe.”

McCormick specifically noted a key dialogue involving then-VP Biden, aide Jake Sullivan and the press on Air Force Two before an April 21, 2014 trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, in which Sullivan – now Biden’s national security adviser – outlined a US investment in the Ukrainian energy sector just days after Hunter joined the board of Burisma. Months after the trip, Congress allocated $50 million to Ukraine’s energy market. “I’m sitting back there with a tape recorder. Jake Sullivan comes back and somebody asks about fracking. His answer is, well, we’re bringing a lot of American assistance over for fracking. Burisma was the direct beneficiary of that fracking, and that’s what I recorded, and that’s in a White House transcript,” said McCormick, adding: “In the transcript, you don’t know who Jake Sullivan is. It’s a senior administration official. I’m the witness that says Jake Sullivan is the guy who said it and he should be investigated because at the time Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma and Joe Biden is bringing American taxpayer money to enrich that company and himself and his family.”

“Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm on April 18, just three days before Biden and his team traveled to Kyiv. But that critical piece of the puzzle was not made public until May 12. McCormick argued the timeline of the events suggests that Biden funneled American money overseas to “enrich” himself and his family, and used his own influence to aid his son’s rookie energy career. The former stenographer made it clear he wants to present the information under oath before the grand jury in Delaware probing Hunter’s business dealings, which is led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss.” -Fox News

Leaks.

• The Crackdown Cometh (Matt Taibbi)

On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times: “Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.” Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all! The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc. You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles. When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating. Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1647202095727083521

View from the Guardian.

• Pentagon Leaks Suspect Wins Praise From Far-Right US Politicians And Media (G.)

Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right. “He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.

Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets earlier this month. Shortly after he was taken into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv – rallied to his defense. “Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.

“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen [sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?” Other documents have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a subject Carlson seized on. “Ukraine is in fact losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace. “The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”

“If you illegally leak anything classified against the Biden regime, even if it proves they’re lying about a war… you’ll get raided by the FBI, perp-walked, slammed in the press as a traitor, and probably spend the rest of your life in prison.”

• Vindman Leaked Documents To Help Impeach Trump – Never Served Time (GP)

In 2019, Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman admitted while being questioned by the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday that he had leaked information to an anti-Trump whistleblower at the center of the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings of President Donald Trump. Vindman attempted to provide talking points to Trump prior to his “infamous” Ukraine phone call and then leaked a mischaracterization of the call afterward. Vindman was directly confronted by California Rep. Devin Nunes. Nunes asked: “Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, did you discuss the July 25 phone call with anyone outside the White House on July 25 or the 26, and if so, with whom?” “Yes. I did,” Vindman responded. Vindman was pressed about the details and asked who he spoke with regarding the phone call. Vindman said he talked with two individuals who were not in the White House.

Vindman was asked to provide the names of the people he had spoken with but was cut off by then-Democratic Chair Adam Schiff. “We need to protect the whistleblower. Please stop. I want to make sure that there is no effort to out the whistleblower through these proceedings. If the witness has a good faith belief that this may reveal the identity of the whistleblower, that is not the purpose that we’re here for. I want to advise the witness accordingly.” Vindman was accused of leaking national security information but never served jail time.. One Twitter user made it clear that he believes there is a two-tiered system of justice in place. He said, “Despite destabilizing a Commander-in-Chief and helping provoke a war in Ukraine,” Vindman now goes on chat shows. Whereas Jack Teixeira leaked information showing how the government is lying to you and the world, I’m furtherance of those wars. He’s in a cell now.

[..] Catturd responded by pointing out the vastly different treatment those willing to help the Democrats have received, saying: “Remember the rules…If you illegally leak anything classified against Trump…you’re a brave whistleblower, and you’ll get a million-dollar book deal or a job at CNN. If you illegally leak anything classified against the Biden regime, even if it proves they’re lying about a war… you’ll get raided by the FBI, perp-walked, slammed in the press as a traitor, and probably spend the rest of your life in prison.”

“The WHO will be empowered to issue binding requirements for lockdowns, masks, quarantines, border closures, travel restrictions, mandatory vaccinations, mandatory medical examinations and other measures that they see fit.”

• Outrageous Plans To Give The WHO Power Over Your Life (Tess Lawrie)

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is proposing the adoption of a ‘Pandemic Treaty’, or ‘Pandemic Accord’ as it is now being called. On Monday, 11 months after a UK petition calling for a debate on the matter reached the threshold of signatures to require a debate in Parliament, this will take place at last. You may be aware that the unelected Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been on social media recently claiming that this new treaty will not affect individual countries’ sovereignty. However, what you are not being told is that in conjunction with the Pandemic Accord, amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) have been proposed and are being negotiated. Some of these amendments would cede unprecedented authority to the WHO and raise serious questions with regards to state sovereignty.

Amendments to the International Health Regulations can be adopted by simple majority vote in the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, without subsequent national ratification procedures. This means that as things stand, these changes can sail through without parliamentary scrutiny and without you, the public, being informed. Instead of being advisory, as is any guidance currently coming out of the WHO, some of the new amendments propose that WHO advice would be legally binding on all state parties and their people. If the amendments are adopted, the unelected and unaccountable Director General of the WHO would be able unilaterally to declare a public health emergency without seeking any advice from member states or WHO committees.

There would be no committees involved in the decision-making, nor would there be any checks and balances on the Director General’s decision. So one unelected, unaccountable person would have the power to take decisions that could result in restricting the lives of billions of people. This is an unimaginable concentration of power. Amongst the more disturbing changes proposed is the removal of a clause requiring the WHO to consider an individual’s human rights in the application of the International Health Regulations. The WHO will be empowered to issue binding requirements for lockdowns, masks, quarantines, border closures, travel restrictions, mandatory vaccinations, mandatory medical examinations and other measures that they see fit.

Proposed amendments also seek to implement an international database system enabling nations to enforce travel restrictions through tools such as vaccine certificates, prophylaxis certificates, testing and recovery certificates along with passenger locator forms and a traveller’s health declaration, all preferably tied to a personal QR code. The proposals further involve significantly increasing the WHO’s funding. Part of this additional funding is required to set up an extensive surveillance process in all member states, which the WHO will verify regularly through a country review mechanism. Both the IHR amendments as well as the proposed Pandemic Accord also encourage systematic global collaboration to counter dissent from official governmental or WHO guidance.

• IMF Unveils New Global Currency Known As The “Universal Monetary Unit” (Snyder)

A new global currency just launched, but 99 percent of the global population has no idea what just happened. The “Universal Monetary Unit”, also known as “Unicoin”, is an “international central bank digital currency” that has been designed to work in conjunction with all existing national currencies. This should set off alarm bells for all of us, because the widespread adoption of a new “global currency” would be a giant step forward for the globalist agenda. The IMF did not create this new currency, but it was unveiled at a major IMF gathering earlier this week…

“Today, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings 2023, the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) announced their official launch of an international central bank digital currency (CBDC) that strengthens the monetary sovereignty of participating central banks and complies with the recent crypto assets policy recommendations proposed by the IMF. Universal Monetary Unit (UMU), symbolized as ANSI Character, Ü, is legally a money commodity, can transact in any legal tender settlement currency, and functions like a CBDC to enforce banking regulations and to protect the financial integrity of the international banking system.”

As the press release quoted above indicates, this new “Universal Monetary Unit” was created by the Digital Currency Monetary Authority. So who in the world is the Digital Currency Monetary Authority? Honestly, I had no idea until I started doing research for this article. The press release says that the organization consists of “sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions”… The DCMA is a world leader in the advocacy of digital currency and monetary policy innovations for governments and central banks. Membership within the DCMA consists of sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions.

Basically, it sounds like a secretive cabal of international banks and national governments is conspiring to push this new currency down our throats. We are being told that the “Universal Monetary Unit” is “‘Crypto 2.0”, and those that created it are hoping that it will be widely adopted by “all constituencies in a global economy”… The DCMA introduces Universal Monetary Unit as Crypto 2.0 because it innovates a new wave of cryptographic technologies for realizing a digital currency public monetary system with a widespread adoption framework encompassing use cases for all constituencies in a global economy.

Autism

Autism's Price Tag Set to Outpace Military Spending: Where Is the Attention?

Autism costs are on pace to reach $1 trillion a year by the mid-2030s, showed Toby Rogers (@uTobian), PhD, in a recent study.

"So just to put this in perspective," he added, "U.S. Defense Department's… pic.twitter.com/tMxGkUv7ux

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) April 15, 2023

Japanese multiplication
https://twitter.com/i/status/1647270979758956544

Bumble bee

Bumblebees change their flight patterns differently when they have to pass through a tight space based on their size, indicating that they have some idea of their own size and shape despite their simple nervous systems

[video: https://t.co/Na76B2P4PG]pic.twitter.com/MDAp8p18SV

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 15, 2023

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Debt Rattle February 14 2022

Feb 142022

February 14, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: anti vaxxers, Ardern, crackdown, free speech, Hillary, Monastiraki kitchen, NATO, Putin, side effects, Ukraine 126 Responses »

Leonardo da Vinci Saint John the Baptist 1513-16

• “If There Were Side Effects, We’d Have Seen Them By Now” (Uncut)

• Anti-vaxxers Who Changed Their Minds On Covid Vaccines (G.)

• NZ Covid Outbreak ‘Like Nothing We’ve Experienced’: Ardern. Cases Skyrocket (G.)

• Pelosi Just Gave The Game Away (CTH)

• Zelensky Asks Biden To Visit Ukraine (RT)

• Ukrainian Ambassador Says Kiev ‘Might’ Drop Bid To Join NATO (RT)

• Putin ‘Doesn’t Give A S*** About Sanctions’ – Russian Diplomat (JTN)

• ‘Oligarchs’ Flee Ukraine – Media (RT)

• Most Democrats Want Hillary Clinton Investigated For Russiagate (Sperry)

• Free Speech Becomes Roadkill In The Crackdown On Canadian Truckers (Turley)

• Monastiraki Kitchen On Greek TV

Hodkinson

Two Medical Ethics to be tried:

First, 'Do no harm' (Delayed-treatment murders)
Second, 'Informed Consent' (Denial of human rights)

How does one give informed consent, if one is not informed? Propaganda is not information, no matter its awesome insistence. https://t.co/ByBGrM1nZD

— Ethical Skeptic ☀ (@EthicalSkeptic) February 14, 2022

Yeah, we have to repeat this all the time, don’t we?

• “If There Were Side Effects, We’d Have Seen Them By Now” (Uncut)

Changes to the Online Harms bill threaten prison for anyone spreading what the Government call “Covid disinformation”. Yesterday, the Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on vaccination for children, quoting paediatrician Petter Brodin, who says “vaccination offers safe, more controlled exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 than infection”. He goes on claim that “the jabs also carry a lower risk of unintended consequences”. If more children have a Covid-19 jab after parents read Brodin’s comments and subsequently suffer injuries or death – facts that have been reported to three separate adverse events reporting systems in the UK, EU and US – will Brodin be held responsible? Will he be threatened with prison for “Covid-19 disinformation”? Today, we are helping Petter Brodin by publishing – again – figures from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency [MHRA], together with real-life accounts from two people severely affected after taking a Covid jab.

“..kids becoming orphans before their time ..”

The Guardian brings you all the drama that vaccine profits can buy.

• Anti-vaxxers Who Changed Their Minds On Covid Vaccines (G.)

Alexis Danielsen sat down and rolled up her sleeve. When the shot went into her arm, one thought flooded her mind: “Finally!” It was May 2021, and she was receiving her first Covid shot – in fact, her first immunization of any kind. She was 39. Danielsen grew up in an anti-vaccine household, views she held well into adulthood. When her son was born, she declined all vaccines for him. Then she hit a personal crisis, and started rethinking all of her beliefs – including on vaccinations. It was like pulling on a thread and watching an entire sweater unravel, she said. “The Covid vaccine was the only logical choice after really re-evaluating what I believe in, what I actually believe is true,” Danielsen said.

Danielsen partly credits her about-face to Lydia Greene and Heather Simpson, the Canada-based founders of Back to the Vax, a support group for people like themselves: one-time vaccine skeptics who’d had a change of heart. “I want to be able to help stop people from going down that road, having been down it myself,” said Greene, now a nursing student. They say their goal is to help families find evidence-based answers to their questions. Vaccine hesitancy was a growing problem even before the pandemic, particularly among parents. Now, nearly one-third of American parents are opposed to vaccinating their children against Covid-19. Although parents still have a lot of questions about vaccines, advocates say that answering them can help.

Online support and in-person community groups can help address longstanding hesitations, some of which arise from poor experiences in the medical system. For example, parents tell Greene they are still waiting for more information to come out on the Covid vaccines before deciding whether to vaccinate their children. “What’s missing is that, in the US right now, millions of children in that age group have been vaccinated and are followed closely with V-Safe and other databases to show the safety of the vaccine,” Greene said. Parents also believe that Covid is mild in children and poses a low risk to them. But kids can suffer from long-term effects – and continued transmission also affects their emotional wellbeing. In the US, more than 167,000 children have lost a caregiver to the virus, Greene said. “We’re seeing this massive epidemic of not just Covid but kids becoming orphans before their time.”

At least admit that everything you’ve done has utterly failed for 2 years. And go hang your head in shame.

• NZ Covid Outbreak ‘Like Nothing We’ve Experienced’: Ardern. Cases Skyrocket (G.)

New Zealand’s prime minister has warned that the country is entering a new phase of its pandemic response that is “like nothing we’ve experienced to date”, as case numbers begin to explode. “We are embarking for the first time in the two years since the start of the outbreak into a period where New Zealanders will see more Covid in the community,” Jacinda Ardern said on Monday. “It is a period of disruption and, I know, of risk and will be like nothing we’ve experienced to date.” Ardern was speaking to reporters after a political reporter produced a positive rapid antigen test moments before the press conference. The empty seats in front of her – and the decision to forge on with the standup regardless – helped illustrate the new era for New Zealand, in which the government expects Omicron to reach every part of the country.

New Zealand has been reporting near-daily record highs in case numbers, as infections begin to hit an exponential growth curve. On Monday, officials announced 981 cases in the community, up from previous all-time highs of 810 on Sunday and 454 the day before. The latest additions mean there are 4,960 active cases recorded across Aotearoa – but experts say the true number is likely much higher, given the lag in test results, and the fact testing is only advised for those with symptoms or who have been a direct contact of a case.

Haka NZ

New Zealand is not afraid of their authoritarian Prime Minister. pic.twitter.com/hRObHbVM3m

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) February 13, 2022

Yes, that was obvious. Can’t lose.

• Pelosi Just Gave The Game Away (CTH)

We have been looking for this exact political construct and today we got it. Nancy Pelosi appears on ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos to discuss current events. This was all planned in advance. This is guaranteed to be a political pantomime. The first topic is the “Russia-Ukraine crisis,” with Stephanopoulos asking Pelosi directly if she believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to invade Ukraine. Nancy Pelosi’s response tells us all we need to hear:

PELOSI: “Well, I think we have to be prepared for it. And that is what the president is — yes, I do believe that he is prepared for an invasion. I also understand why the President of Ukraine wants to keep people calm and that he wants his economy not to suffer. But, on the other hand, if we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade. Let’s hope that diplomacy works. It’s about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the president’s made it very clear. There’s a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” … “I’m very proud of the work that the president has done.”

Can you see the domestic political scenario that has been created out of thin air? Democrats need a win on something; anything, to shift the narrative and change the reality of their failure into an illusion of success. First, accuse Vladimir Putin of doing something he never intends to do, a fabricated scenario. Second, tell the world you will strongly respond to the fabricated scenario. Third, tell the world the exact date when the fabricated scenario is supposed to happen. Then, when the fabricated scenario never happens, it is because you are so brilliant and strong to have outmaneuvered and cowed the Russians.

How likely is that?

• Zelensky Asks Biden To Visit Ukraine (RT)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on his US counterpart Joe Biden to fly into Kiev “in the coming days.” The invitation, which was made by Zelensky during a phone call with Biden on Sunday, comes as several nations, including the US itself, ordered most of their diplomatic staff out of the Ukrainian capital citing fears of a possible Russian invasion. “I am convinced that your arrival in Kiev in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilizing the situation, will be a powerful signal and contribute to de-escalation,” Zelensky told Biden, according to a statement issued by his press service. As the US, UK, Israel, Australia and other countries have urged their nationals to leave Ukraine by all means available, Zelensky insisted that Kiev, as well as other major Ukrainian cities, were “safe and under reliable protection.”

A trip to the capital, however, does not appear to be on Biden’s schedule, CNN reported, citing US officials saying that such a visit would be “extremely unlikely.” “A senior Ukrainian official” told the channel that Biden gave “no positive response” to the invitation during the call. The White House’s readout of the Sunday call made no mention of the invitation either. It noted only that Biden promised Zelensky to “respond swiftly and decisively, together with its allies and partners, to any further Russian aggression against Ukraine.” Several media outlets have attempted to predict the most likely day for a Russian invasion, with Bloomberg reporting that it would take place as soon as on Wednesday – even though Russia has insisted it has no plans to invade its neighbor.

Maybe they won’t if Biden visits?

• Ukrainian Ambassador Says Kiev ‘Might’ Drop Bid To Join NATO (RT)

Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko has appeared to raise the possibility that Kiev could give up its bid to join US-led NATO for the sake of preventing a major conflict with Russia, while admitting that such a proposition would go against his country’s principal law. Asked by BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Stephen Nolan on Sunday if his country might “contemplate not joining NATO” to avert a war, Prystaiko responded: “We might, you know, especially [having] been threatened like that, blackmailed by that, and pushed to it.” He then appeared to indicate that some representatives of the military bloc have also rallied behind that option. “You know, we will sometimes hear voices from NATO that ‘Guys, maybe, really, we will be able to avoid…’” the ambassador said, trailing off mid-sentence.

However, Prystaiko then went on to lament the fact that Ukraine is not part of any military alliance at present, unlike some other countries bordering Russia. He noted that Kiev will have to face the music alone if a crisis like the current one spirals into a military conflict. “We will again stay unprotected by anybody, by any friends, not being a member of any alliance, when everybody, all the neighbors of ours, are already in the organization,” the diplomat said, referring to Poland, the Slovak Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. He argued that these countries’ status as NATO member states “did not change the security of Russia,” insisting that the “addition” of Ukraine wouldn’t change it either.

Asked by Nolan to clarify his remark on NATO so that it is not “lost in translation,” Prystaiko appeared to confirm that Kiev might reconsider its aspirations to join the bloc, but admitted that by saying so he goes “a bit against” the constitution of Ukraine, which since 2019 includes a provision making membership in NATO a strategic goal for the government. “What I’m saying here is that we are flexible, trying to find the best way out. If you have to go through some serious concessions, that’s something we might do, that’s for sure,” the ambassador concluded.

Translation, remember. But yes, sanctions have made Russia much more independent.

• Putin ‘Doesn’t Give A S*** About Sanctions’ – Russian Diplomat (JTN)

Russian leader Vladimir Putin “doesn’t give a s***” about sanctions,” said Russian Ambassador to Sweden Viktor Tatarintsev. The sanctions even helped the Russian economy, the diplomat told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an interview published Saturday evening which was translated by The Independent. “Excuse my language, but we don’t give a s*** about all their sanctions,” he told the outlet. “We have already had so many sanctions, and in that sense, they’ve had a positive effect on our economy and agriculture.” U.S. President Joe Biden has threatened sanctions against Russia if it invades Ukraine. The Kremlin is already subject to various sanctions over its 2014 capture of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and human rights abuses, among other things.

“New sanctions are nothing positive but not as bad as the West makes it sound,” Tatarintsev said. “The more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be.” He told the outlet that the sanctions have helped Russia make products that are “just as good.” “We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports,” Tatarintsev said. “We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes.” Even though about 100,000 Russian troops are massed along the Ukrainian border, the diplomat stated that the Kremlin wants to avoid war. “That is our political leadership’s most sincere wish,” he told Aftonbladet. “The last thing people in Russia want is war.”

The most corrupt country.

• ‘Oligarchs’ Flee Ukraine – Media (RT)

Local media reports have suggested that an exodus of Ukraine’s richest people, including its so-called ‘oligarchs’, is in full swing. A report published by the Ukrayinska Pravda newspaper on Sunday claimed that “about 20 charters and private jets” departed from Kiev on that day alone. The newspaper noted that one of the private jets spotted leaving Ukrainian airspace on Sunday was allegedly owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akmetov, whose net worth is estimated at about $7.1 billion, according to Forbes. Pravda reported that the billionaire himself left the country on January 30, however. Ukraine’s second-richest man and fellow steel magnate, Victor Pinchuk, reportedly departed at the end of last month as well.

Both men help to fund The Atlantic Council, a NATO adjacent lobby group, which pushes for Kiev to join the military bloc. Those who Pravda alleged had “fled” Ukraine in the recent days included prominent politician and businessman Vadym Novynskyi, who has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion; Ukraine’s ninth-richest man, Oleksandr Yaroslavsky; former Verkhovna Rada lawmaker and businessman, Vadim Stolar; and several other high-flying figures – many of whom featured in Forbes Ukraine magazine’s list of its 100 richest people. A number of lawmakers also reportedly scrambled to exit Ukraine. The newspaper said, citing sources, that representative of the Eurosceptic Opposition Platform – For Life party and businessman Igor Abramovych booked a private jet for 50 people to transport them to Vienna, Austria.

Some of the people mentioned in the report as having “fled” Ukraine, however, have already dismissed the claim. For instance, businessman and leader of Ukraine is Our Home party Borys Kolesnikov, who, according to Pravda, left the country on Sunday, called the report “fake news.” “The deceitful and habitually manipulative outlet is, as usual, lying. I’m in Kiev, and I’m not going anywhere until March 1 (The Champions League Final, which takes place in Switzerland),” Kolesnikov wrote on Facebook, threatening to sue the newspaper.

Tulsi

Tulsi Gabbard: Warmongers argue that we must protect Ukraine because it’s a “democracy.” They’re lying. Ukraine isn’t a democracy. pic.twitter.com/lnX5a5PH5J

— Russian American Daily (@RussiaUSA) February 12, 2022

Wishful thinking?

• Most Democrats Want Hillary Clinton Investigated For Russiagate (Sperry)

A surprisingly large share of Democrats wants to see Hillary Clinton investigated over her possible role in manufacturing dirt to try to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, a new poll shows. The survey, conducted by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, polled 1,308 Americans about the mushrooming investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s alleged links to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Nearly three out of four of those polled who are following the story said they think it’s important prosecutors investigate Clinton for her role in the Russiagate scandal along with her top campaign advisers. That includes two-thirds — or 66 percent — of the Democrats polled who said they have been keeping up with the case.

That’s up 20 points from this past October, when TIPP asked the same question of a national panel, and indicates the Durham probe may be turning Democratic opinion regarding Clinton and the controversy. Meanwhile, 91 percent of Republicans in the same group and 65 percent of Independents also called for Clinton to specifically be investigated. Durham has already charged Clinton campaign subcontractor Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying about the sourcing behind the debunked so-called Steele dossier he helped compile, which attempted to frame Trump as a Kremlin agent. Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst, completely fabricated the source for the dossier’s most explosive allegations, according to the indictment. It turns out he also allegedly used a Clinton campaign adviser as another key source for other dirt he gathered. Danchenko was arrested in October and has pleaded not guilty.

“I have attended protests and rallies in the past when I agreed with the goals, when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues, Black Lives Matter is an excellent example of that.”

• Free Speech Becomes Roadkill In The Crackdown On Canadian Truckers (Turley)

Canada appears to be facing its greatest threat since Benedict Arnold came close to seizing Ottawa in 1775. The source of this “insurrection” and “attack on democracy,” however, is not a foreign government but Canadians who have descended on their own capital to protest continuing COVID-19 mandates. The protest has been peaceful — and highly successful in cutting off key highways. But the most alarming development has not come from the convoy but from the commentary about it, including calls for mass arrests and even vigilantism. The Ottawa Police Services Board chairman has called it a “nationwide insurrection,” adding, “Our city is under siege.”

CNN analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem was apoplectic at the thought of truckers shutting down roads and interfering with trade. She tweeted out a call to “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.” CNN correspondent Paula Newton said this act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.” Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars in damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy.

But CNN’s Kayyem once called conservative protesters occupying a state capital to be “domestic terrorists.” GoFundMe, which previously helped fund arrested Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them. After the money was frozen by GoFundMe, supporters switched to GiveSendGo to “adopt a trucker.” The Canadian government then moved successfully to freeze millions of donations to the truckers, and the Supreme Court of Canada approved the freeze in a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada.

In the meantime, the government has demonized the convoy. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who praised truckers just two years ago as heroes, has denounced them as “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy.” This is the same Trudeau who praised BLM protesters and stressed that “I have attended protests and rallies in the past when I agreed with the goals, when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues, Black Lives Matter is an excellent example of that.”

Greek national broadcaster ERT did an -almost live- item on the Monastiraki kitchen yesterday. My friend Vasso “translated” part of it. I don’t really know how to make it a separate article. The lovely Filothei is speaking.

• Monastiraki Kitchen On Greek TV

She says they do not ask for money but for tomato sauce pasta rice or a voucher for a super market and they send you back the receipt. They also need volunteers to help in food preparation. Their saucepan is for 500 portions every Tuesday at 4.30. Then the reporter asks how the recipients find food the other days of the week and she mentions a place in Peiraeus as well as Allos anthropos. Then she is asked what she sees in the streets as a photographer and she says pain. Also at the beginning she says that they are now in the basement because of the rain.

Whale 'kisses' boat passengers after breaching water.pic.twitter.com/FePt2QUMCh

— Figen (@TheFigen) February 12, 2022

https://twitter.com/buitengebieden_/status/1492830918968492034

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Debt Rattle January 6 2021

Jan 062021

January 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:18 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, catastrophe, Covid19, crackdown, facemasks, Georgia, Hong Kong, Nuland, Trump, vaccine, WHO, Wuhan 70 Responses »

Georgia O’Keeffe Street of New York II 1926

• The Assange Verdict: What Happens Now (Craig Murray)

• Will Biden DOJ Pursue Assange Extradition? Outgoing Prosecutor Isn’t Sure (NRP)

• 2 People Die In Norway Nursing Home Days After Receiving Pfizer Vaccine (RT)

• Rate Of Adverse Reactions To COVID Vaccines 50x Higher Than Flu Shot (ZH)

• Peru Clashes With Pfizer Over Legal Immunity For Vaccine Side Effects (RT)

• Wuhan Coronavirus Infections 10 Times Higher Than Reported (NI)

• Australia Says China Should Allow In WHO Covid Investigators (G.)

• China Arrests US Lawyer During “Massive Crackdown” In Hong Kong (ZH)

• The US Has Lost More Than 110,000 Restaurants (Snyder)

• Biden To Tap More Obama Vets To Fill Key National Security Roles

• Biden Taps Architect of 2014 Ukraine Coup for State Department (Antiwar)

• Catastrophe Is All Around Us (AIER)

• More Than 1.5 Billion Face Masks Will Pollute Oceans This Year (NYP)

• US Doctor Forgives $650,000 In Medical Bills For Cancer Patients (BBC)

If Julian Assange’s bail is denied today, that will be a huge disappointment for many people. Craig Murray doesn’t think it will be denied, because the US appeal risks opening can of worms for them.

Big day for Assange, big day also for Trump?!

Tulsi Kamala

Just gonna leave this here. #Fweedom pic.twitter.com/sy1EDIpfx7

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) January 5, 2021

Murray remains very optimistic.

• The Assange Verdict: What Happens Now (Craig Murray)

I am not sure that at this stage the High Court would accept a new guarantee from the USA that Assange would not be kept in isolation or in a Supermax prison; that would be contrary to the affidavit from Assistant Secretary of State Kromberg and thus would probably be ruled to amount to new evidence. Not to mention that Baraitser heard other evidence that such assurances had been received in the case of Abu Hamza, but had been broken. Hamza is not only kept in total isolation, but as a man with no hands he is deprived of prosthetics that would enable him to brush his teeth, and he has no means of cutting his nails nor assistance to do so, and cannot effectively wipe himself in the toilet. Not only is it hard to see the point of law on which the USA could launch an appeal, it is far from plain that they have a motive to do so.

Baraitser agreed with all the substantive points of argument put forward by the US government. She stated that there was no bar on extradition from the UK for political offences; she agreed that publication of national security material did constitute an offence in the USA under the Espionage Act and would do so in the UK under the Official Secrets Act, with no public interest defence in either jurisdiction; she agreed that encouraging a source to leak classified information is a crime; she agreed Wikileaks’ publications had put lives at risk. On all of these points she dismissed virtually without comment all the defence arguments and evidence. As a US Justice Department spokesman said yesterday: “While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised.

In particular, the court rejected all of Mr Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offence, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr Assange’s extradition to the United States.” That is a fair categorisation of what happened. Appealing a verdict that is such a good result for the United States does not necessarily make sense for the Justice Department. Edward Fitzgerald explained to me yesterday that, if the USA appeals the decision on the health and prison condition grounds, it becomes open to the defence to counter-appeal on all the other grounds, which would be very desirable indeed given the stark implications of Baraitser’s ruling for media freedom. I have always believed that Baraitser would rule as she did on the substantial points, but I have always also believed that those extreme security state arguments would never survive the scrutiny of better judges in a higher court.

Unlike the health ruling, the dispute over Baraitser’s judgement on all the other points does come down to classic errors in law which can successfully be argued on appeal. If the USA does appeal the judgement, it is far more likely that not only will the health grounds be upheld, but also that Baraitser’s positions on extradition for political offences and freedom of the media will be overturned, than it is likely that the US will achieve extradition. They have fourteen days in which to lodge the appeal – now thirteen. An appeal result is in short likely to be humiliating for the USA. It would be much wiser for the US to let sleeping dogs lie. But pride and the wound to the US sense of omnipotence and exceptionalism may drive them to an appeal which, for the reasons given above, I would actually welcome provided Julian is out on bail. Which I expect he shall be shortly.

Not sure the DOJ has much say in this.

• Will Biden DOJ Pursue Assange Extradition? Outgoing Prosecutor Isn’t Sure (NRP)

The federal prosecutor seeking to try WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges said he’s uncertain about whether the administration of President-elect Joe Biden would continue the extradition effort. Zachary Terwilliger, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, pointed out that the Assange case had already consumed years of work by line prosecutors and other officials. A judge in the United Kingdom dealt American prosecutors a blow Monday by rejecting their efforts to transfer Assange to the United States, citing his mental health troubles. The Justice Department pledged that it would appeal — a process that could drag on for months, if not longer. That means the issue of how to handle Assange, accused in one of the largest compromises of classified information in history, will be one of many questions for the new leadership team at the Justice Department.

“It will be very interesting to see what happens with this case,” Terwilliger said. “There’ll be some decisions to be made. Some of this does come down to resources and where you’re going to focus your energies.” For its part, the Biden transition didn’t comment directly on what position it would take in the Assange matter. But a spokesperson pointed out that Biden has called for an independent Justice Department in his administration. Terwilliger spoke to NPR on one of his final days in government service. Later this month, he’s set to join the law firm Vinson & Elkins. Terwilliger, 39, will beef up the firm’s white collar crime practice, after spending his entire career –a dozen years — on the other side of the courtroom as a career prosecutor and political appointee at the Justice Department.

These reports keep coming in.

• 2 People Die In Norway Nursing Home Days After Receiving Pfizer Vaccine (RT)

The Norwegian Medicines Agency has announced that two nursing home residents passed away days after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, and that an investigation has been launched into the deaths. “We have to assess whether the vaccine is the cause of death, or if it is a coincidence that it happened soon after vaccination,” Medical Director Steiner Madsen said in a statement about the deaths. He also noted that, because people of advanced age are receiving the vaccine first, it is entirely possible the deaths could be coincidental. Around 400 people die every week in Norwegian nursing homes.

The agency, along with the National Institute of Public Health, are looking into the deaths. Reported side effects from the vaccine have been minor and temporary, although there have been reports of allergic reactions in the US and UK among people who had a history of such. Numerous government officials have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, including US Vice President Mike Pence. Vaccinations with the drug began in Norway on December 27.

That’s a lot.

• Rate Of Adverse Reactions To COVID Vaccines 50x Higher Than Flu Shot (ZH)

With reports this morning of another otherwise-healthy patient dying suddenly after receiving her first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, many skeptics in both Europe and the US still have serious reservations about the jabs, even as big pharma and their allies in the US and British governments insist that they are 100% safe. Everyone claiming otherwise is not only wrongheaded, but acting in a deliberately malicious manner. This is why commentary like a video posted by DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Gundlach where he questions the sky-high efficacy numbers published after the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech trials has elicited such vehement repudiation.

However, as new questions about efficacy and timing arise, independent journalist Alex Berenson, one of the most prominent skeptics of lockdowns and masks in the US, noted in a twitter thread earlier on Tuesday that the percentage of patients experiencing severe or potentially life-threatening reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines could be much higher than the data collected by the CDC are letting on. The CDC’s VAERS reporting system was set up to track vaccine-related injury, Most patients can expect to experience some kind of adverse reaction, but for the vast majority of patients, symptoms will be relatively mild and clear up within a couple of days.

But amid a rush of reports about patient deaths, Berenson points out that the number of patients seeing serious complications per the number of doses distributed is roughly 50x higher than the rate of ‘adverse’ reactions caused by the flu vaccine. Berenson also speculated that this number might be even higher due to possible delays in updating the CDC’s data sets. This would seemingly confirm rates of adverse reactions seen during clinical trials. What’s more, clinical trials, generally speaking, tend to “UNDERSTATE” unpleasant or unwanted side effects, while they “OVERSTATE” the drug’s efficacy.

“it is quite clear that they are not responsible for any side effects. If you become an alligator, it’s your problem.”

• Peru Clashes With Pfizer Over Legal Immunity For Vaccine Side Effects (RT)

Peru has reached an impasse with Pfizer as it negotiates a deal for a Covid-19 vaccine, the country’s health minister said, citing a conflict over legal immunity for the pharma firm that could undermine Peru’s sovereignty. While officials have remained in “constant contact” with Pfizer since the summer, the talks ran into trouble last month amid “controversy” over some clauses of the agreement, including those linked to pricing and delivery, as well as legal immunities for the pharmaceutical giant in the case its inoculation leads to death or injury, health minister Pilar Mazzetti told lawmakers on Tuesday. “With Pfizer there are some details where there is no agreement,” Mazzetti said, adding “This has to do with prices and the delivery schedule” as well as “the waiving of important elements such as … jurisdictional immunity.”

“It is true that one needs the vaccine but it is also true that there are aspects related to aspects of our sovereignty that the country has to protect … it has to do with risk for future generations.” The health chief noted that since most aspects of the negotiations are protected under a confidentiality agreement, she could not offer further detail on the ongoing row, but assured that the talks continue. “We hope that the controversy will be resolved so we will be able to determine when the vaccine will arrive,” she went on. Though the country announced a final deal with Pfizer for nearly 10 million vaccine doses in late November, Mazzetti said the process stalled after some clauses in the agreement required “more in-depth analysis” to determine whether they are compatible with Peruvian law.

The Latin American nation is not the first to voice concerns about legal liability waivers in their talks with the pharma firm, with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro observing last month that “it is quite clear that they are not responsible for any side effects. If you become an alligator, it’s your problem.” Officials in Argentina have raised similar worries. As the liability concerns become a major obstacle for some nations, the World Bank said on Tuesday that it is working with over 100 countries to address the issue, whether through local legislative efforts or other processes. The World Bank Group’s president, David Malpass, also noted that the agency aims to distribute $160 billion in resources by June to help developing countries obtain immunizations and fight the pandemic.

Surprised?

• Wuhan Coronavirus Infections 10 Times Higher Than Reported (NI)

Roughly half a million residents of Wuhan—the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated—may have been infected with the virus, a figure that is about ten times higher than what was initially reported. The study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed more than thirty-four thousand people in April, and it eventually discovered that 4.4 percent of those tested were found to be carrying the antibodies for the coronavirus. The presence of antibodies means that individuals, at one point in time, had been carriers of the virus. As of Sunday, Wuhan, which has a population of 11 million, had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.

The Chinese CDC noted that the study was conducted a month after China “contained the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic.” The study also indicated that the infection rate in Wuhan was significantly higher than in other major cities and provinces. For example, it revealed that only 0.44 percent of Hubei residents were found to be carrying the antibodies. “Exactly how much we have missed we don’t exactly know, but this gives us an idea that we have missed quite a bit,” Ian Mackay, an associated professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, told the South China Morning Post. Song Fujian, of Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia in Britain, told the paper that “given the chaotic situation and limited testing capability during the early phase of the epidemic in Wuhan,” the serological survey results might be “more accurate than the reported number of confirmed cases.”

It’s only been a year.

• Australia Says China Should Allow In WHO Covid Investigators (G.)

The Australian government has called on China to allow a visit by World Health Organization experts investigating how the coronavirus pandemic started, insisting the country should grant them visas “without delay”. Canberra raised its concerns on Wednesday over reports that Chinese authorities had blocked the arrival of a WHO team investigating the early cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan. With China arguing the team’s visas had not yet been approved, even as some members of the group were on their way to the country, the development has heightened fears among Australian politicians about whether the WHO mission will be able to uncover answers needed to better prepare the world for the next pandemic.

The Australian foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, said she hoped “that the necessary permissions for the WHO team’s travel to China can be issued without delay”. Speaking after months of rocky relations between the two countries, partly triggered by Australia’s calls for such an investigation, Payne said Australia had “consistently sought transparency in relation to the origins of, and responses to the coronavirus, as have other countries”. “The WHO-convened scientific study is an important part of this work and we look forward to the findings from the international field mission to China,” she said. “During this global pandemic that has affected all countries, international cooperation and partnerships will maximise our ability to respond, and to equip us for the next pandemic.”

53 arrests reported. Including activists’ lawyers.

• China Arrests US Lawyer During “Massive Crackdown” In Hong Kong (ZH)

Update 11:00pm ET: In what would be a shocking development, Bloomberg reports that during its “massive crackdown” purging countless local activists and politicians, the Hong Kong police – i.e. China – has arrested American Lawyer, John Clancey, using as a pretext the National Security Law, which everyone warned China would use as strawman to crack down on Hong Kong citizens and activists. Well, it now appears that the emboldened Beijing – which is delighted by the ascent of pro-China pushover Joe Biden to the White House – is also using that law to arrest American citizens.

H.K. ARRESTS AMERICAN LAWYER JOHN CLANCEY, COLLEAGUE SAYS
CLANCEY ARRESTED UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY LAW: COLLEAGUE

In response, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken sent out a harshly worded tweet, warning China that the “Biden-Harris administration will stand with the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy.” We eagerly await to see just what the ~~Blinken~~ Biden administration will do, besides tweeting angrily in China’s general direction, to secure release of an American citizen unjustly arrested by Chinese proxies in Hong Kong.

Earlier: “Massive Crackdown”: Hong Kong Police Arrest Dozens Of Politicians & Activists 2021 is less than a week old and already Beijing is ramping up its efforts to suppress what’s left of the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong. Right now, China hawks are preoccupied right now by a number of issues: the disappearance of Jack Ma (note: CNBC claims the Alibaba founder is just “laying low”), Beijing’s refusal to allow international investigators inside the Wuhan Institue of Virology and, finally, the CCP’s abusive treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority. Now, less than two months after the last 19 members of the HK LegCo’s pro-democracy opposition quit en masse over Beijing’s demands that they swear a loyalty oath to uphold the new national security law and the supremacy of the CCP, Hong Kong police have rounded up dozens of pro-democracy activists.

“..more than 500,000 restaurants of every business type — franchise, chain and independent — are in an economic free fall.”

• The US Has Lost More Than 110,000 Restaurants (Snyder)

The restaurant industry is in the midst of a complete and total meltdown that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before. If you ask Google how many restaurants there are in the United States, it will tell you that there are 660,755, although that number is a few years old. But for the purposes of this article, that is a good enough estimate. Americans love to eat out, and restaurant workers are some of the hardest working people in the entire country. So it is incredibly sad to see more restaurants constantly going under. In some cases, restaurants that have served their communities for decades are deciding to permanently close their doors. For example, over the weekend Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse in New York City announced that it had finally reached the end of the road…

[..] Unfortunately, Sammy’s is far from alone. In fact, in a recent article that he penned for Fox Business, Adam Piper lamented the fact that more than 100,000 U.S. restaurants have gone out of business during this pandemic… “State and local governments have wielded the coronavirus pandemic as license to steal freedom and opportunity in pursuit of unprecedented omnipotence. Unreasonable, unnecessary and hypocritical actions have forced over 100,000 restaurants to close and endanger countless others.” And according to Bloomberg, the true number of dead restaurants is now over 110,000… “More than 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently or long-term across the country as the industry grapples with the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Just think about that. More than one out of every six restaurants in the U.S. is already gone, and the National Restaurant Association is warning that there will be more carnage in the months ahead because the industry is in “an economic free fall”… “The restaurant industry simply cannot wait for relief any longer,” Sean Kennedy, executive vice president of public affairs at the association, said in a letter to Congress. “What these findings make clear is that more than 500,000 restaurants of every business type — franchise, chain and independent — are in an economic free fall.” This is what an economic depression looks like. With tens of thousands of restaurants sitting empty, and with tens of thousands of others not paying rent, the stage has been set for a commercial real estate disaster of unprecedented scope and size.

Of course there are millions of square feet of office space and retail space that are not being productive right now as well. In a recent article, Lee Adler referred to this looming commercial real estate nightmare as “a monster in the room”… “I think that if there’s anything that illustrates the head in the sand problem of the banks, it’s this. Commercial real estate (CRE) finance. There’s a monster in the room. All that empty space. No longer income producing.” For now, big financial institutions are doing their best to hide their coming losses, but according to Adler for certain sectors the losses will simply be unavoidable… “Multifamily will take a haircut but will survive. My guess is that industrial, while overpriced and overvalued, will produce enough income to get by. Office and retail? Kiss it goodbye. It’s done. Over. Kaput.”

Victoria Nuland is the worst America has to offer.

• Biden To Tap More Obama Vets To Fill Key National Security Roles

President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team have begun to fill out top positions on the incoming National Security Council and at the State Department, with key roles like deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of State going to veterans of the Obama administration. At the State Department, longtime diplomat Wendy Sherman will be nominated to serve as Secretary of State-designee Tony Blinken’s deputy, according to two people close to the transition. Sherman previously served as under secretary of State for political affairs in the Obama administration and was a lead negotiator for the Iran deal. Sherman is currently a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group, the same firm where Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also worked as a senior counselor.

Another veteran diplomat, Victoria Nuland, will be nominated for the role of under secretary of State for political affairs, one of the people said. Nuland also previously served in the Obama administration, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland and Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy — particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the National Security Council, former State Department official Jon Finer will be named deputy national security adviser, the people said, reporting up to incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Finer, a former journalist, joined the Obama White House as a fellow in 2009 and served in various roles throughout Obama’s tenure, including as a foreign policy speechwriter for Biden and a senior adviser to then-deputy national security adviser Blinken. Finer had been working in political risk and public policy at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, which was co-founded by Blinken’s father, since leaving government in 2017. The key NSC role of senior director for European Affairs will go to Amanda Sloat, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as deputy assistant secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean affairs at the State Department in the Obama administration.

And Nuland’s co-conspirator Geoffrey Pyatt is now US ambassador here in Greece.

• Biden Taps Architect of 2014 Ukraine Coup for State Department (Antiwar)

According to a report from Politico, Joe Biden’s transition team is expected to nominate Victoria Nuland to be the under secretary of state for political affairs for the incoming administration’s State Department. Nuland, who is married to neoconservative Robert Kagan, is known for her role in orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine while she was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration. A recording of a phone call between Nuland and then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked and released on YouTube on February 4th, 2014. In the call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced to step down on February 22nd, 2014.

The US-backed coup sparked the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and led to the Russian annexation of Crimea. Both regions have a majority ethnic-Russian population who rejected the nationalist, anti-Russian post-coup government that even had neo-Nazis in its midst. In a 2020 column for Foreign Affairs titled, “Pinning Down Putin,” Nuland said Russian President Vladimir Putin “seized” on the 2014 coup and other “democratic struggles” to “fuel the perception at home of Russian interests under siege by external enemies.” She also cited the war in the Donbas and annexation of Crimea as examples of Russian aggression, as most in Washington do.

Currently, Nuland is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and works for the Albright Stonebridge Group. She is also a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US-taxpayer funded nonprofit that funds “pro-democracy” movements across the world.

“..the entire litany of brutality to which we’ve been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown. Dr. Henderson warned against it all…”

• Catastrophe Is All Around Us (AIER)

As a naturally optimistic person, it vexes me that the word catastrophe has echoed in my mind since early March 2020. It’s the word the great smallpox eradicator Donald Henderson used in his 2006 prediction of the consequences of lockdown, a word that wasn’t around then. His masterful article addressed the idea of travel restrictions, forced human separation, business and school closings, mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, quarantines, and the entire litany of brutality to which we’ve been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown. Dr. Henderson warned against it all. This is not how you deal with disease, he said; at a minimum society needs to function so that medical professionals can do their work.

Diseases are managed one person at a time, not with grand central plans. That was the old wisdom in any case. Under the influence of vainglorious modelers, ideological resetters, and politicians hoping to make names for themselves, most of the world tried the lockdown experiment anyway. Here we are nearly a year since I wrote my first article warning that governments presumed themselves to possess the quarantine power. They could use it if they wanted to. I didn’t expect they would. I wrote this piece as a “for your information” public service just to let people know how terrible governments could be.

I had no idea that quarantines would be only the beginning. At this point we know what we did not know then. They are capable – by they I mean even governments in presumably civilized countries with functioning democracies – of the unthinkable, and they are capable of persisting in the unthinkable for an appalling amount of time. Now the lockdowns are our life in the US, unless you are lucky enough to live in Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, and perhaps a few other places. Here in these outposts of what we used to call civilization, life seems normal. Our readers in these states don’t even think about the virus much, and they read my articles and find them overwrought, like I’m describing life on another planet.

Externalities.

• More Than 1.5 Billion Face Masks Will Pollute Oceans This Year (NYP)

More than 1.5 billion disposable face masks will wind up in the world’s oceans this year — polluting the water with tons of plastic and endangering marine wildlife, according to a Hong Kong-based environmental group. A report by OceansAsia cites a global market research report that estimates 52 billion masks were made this year to meet the demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It also says that a “conservative” calculation means at least 3 percent of them will be washed out to sea. “Single-use face masks are made from a variety of meltblown plastics and are difficult to recycle due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection,” the report says.

“These masks enter our oceans when they are littered or otherwise improperly discarded, when waste management systems are inadequate or non-existent, or when these systems become overwhelmed due to increased volumes of waste.” With each mask weighing three to four grams, the situation could lead to 6,800-plus tons of plastic pollution that “will take as long as 450 years to break down,” according to the report. In addition to the harmful effects of micro-plastic and nano-plastic particles, elastic ear loops pose a “possible entanglement risk for wildlife,” the report says. The report cites several examples of marine animals killed by masks, including a “dead bloated pufferfish” found tangled in the loops of a disposable blue mask by volunteers cleaning a Miami beach in August.

And sometimes you look up from whatever it is you’re doing and suddenly you see life.

• US Doctor Forgives $650,000 In Medical Bills For Cancer Patients (BBC)

A US oncologist has wiped out nearly $650,000 worth of debts for 200 cancer patients after realising that many of them were struggling to pay. Dr Omar Atiq closed his cancer treatment centre in Arkansas last year after nearly 30 years in business. He worked with a debt collection firm to gather outstanding payments, but then realised many families had been hit hard financially by the pandemic. Over Christmas, he wrote to patients telling them any debts would be erased. “Over time I realised that there are people who just are unable to pay,” Dr Atiq told ABC’s Good Morning America. “So my wife and I, as a family, we thought about it and looked at forgiving all the debt. We saw that we could do it and then just went ahead and did it.” Dr Atiq, who is originally from Pakistan, founded the Arkansas Cancer Clinic in Pine Bluff in 1991, providing treatments including chemotherapy, radiation therapy and CAT scans.

He is now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock. “We thought there was not a better time to do this than during a pandemic that has decimated homes, people’s lives and businesses and all sorts of stuff,” Dr Atiq said, quoted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He said the outstanding bills from about 200 patients totalled nearly $650,000 (£480,000). In his Christmas greeting card to patients, he wrote: “The Arkansas Cancer Clinic was proud to serve you as a patient. Although various health insurances pay most of the bills for majority of patients, even the deductibles and co-pays can be burdensome. Unfortunately, that is the way our health care system currently works. The clinic has decided to forego all balances owed to the clinic by its patients. Happy Holidays.”

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Debt Rattle June 5 2018

Jun 052018

June 5, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, Bayer, bubble, buybacks, carbon, crackdown, dollar funding, euro, Facebook, Fed, Italy, Monsanto, Snowden, steel 7 Responses »

John French Sloan East Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia 1901

• Carbon Bubble To Destroy Trillions Of Dollars Of Global Wealth (Ind.)

• The Effects Of Trump’s Steel Tariffs On Red State Energy (F.)

• US Firms To Pour $2.5 Trillion Into Buybacks, Dividends, M&A This Year (CNBC)

• India Central Banker Sees Sudden “Evaporation” Of Dollar Funding (ZH)

• China’s Debt Crackdown To Hurt Emerging Markets, Oil, Metals – Fitch (R.)

• Italy’s Long, Hot Summer (Carmen Reinhart)

• Why The Euro Was Created (ZH)

• Toronto’s House Price Bubble Not Fun Anymore (WS)

• Why Australia’s Great Banking Boom Has Ended (SMH)

• Apple Jams Facebook’s Web-Tracking Tools (BBC)

• A West Coast State of Mind (Jim Kunstler)

• Edward Snowden: ‘The People Are Still Powerless, But Now They’re Aware’ (G.)

• Who Should Feed The World: Real People Or Faceless Multinationals? (Vidal)

Don’t think it will happen without an overall economic collapse.

• Carbon Bubble To Destroy Trillions Of Dollars Of Global Wealth (Ind.)

Trillions of dollars of fossil fuel wealth will be wiped out at some point over the next 17 years even if governments fail to impose binding carbon emissions limits on industry to curb global warming, according to a major new study. Environmentalists and policymakers have long warned of the threat of a “carbon bubble” and “stranded assets” for listed energy companies, based on the possibility they will never be able to realise the value of their vast stores of oil, gas and coal if politicians actually deliver on their decarbonisation promises.

But today a group of scientists and analysts from Cambridge, Nijmegen, Macao and the Open University take that warning a step further by arguing that these assets are destined to be stranded regardless of official policies to discourage the use of fossil fuels because clean energy technologies are now developing so rapidly that those polluting assets will be worthless in any case. “Our analysis suggests that, contrary to investor expectations, the stranding of fossil fuels assets may happen even without new climate policies. This suggests a carbon bubble is forming and it is likely to burst,” said Professor Jorge Viñuales from Cambridge University. If policymakers did deliver on the decarbonisation programmes, the loss for investors would be even more rapid.

The research is at odds with work from the International Energy Agency, which projects steady price rises for fossil fuels until 2040. And Donald Trump’s decision last year to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change has also done nothing to persuade most investors to take the stranded assets warning seriously. But the researchers’ new “simulation-based, energy-economy-carbon-cycle climate” model suggests investing in fossil fuel firms today is likely to prove a disastrous bet, suggesting that between $1 trillion and $4 trillion could be wiped off the value of global fossil fuel assets by 2035.

Steel and concrete prices better not rise.

• The Effects Of Trump’s Steel Tariffs On Red State Energy (F.)

Electricity production is heavily dependent on materials like steel, concrete, copper and aluminum, for both producing electricity and moving it around to where it’s needed (see figure). Solar and Wind energy take more steel than any other energy source. Natural gas and nuclear take the least. Solar needs 1,600 tons of steel per MW, wind energy needs over 400 tons of steel, while gas and nuclear need only 4 and 40 tons, respectively. Wind and solar also require ten times more transmission, also heavily steel-intensive, since they are usually sited far away from where the energy is used.

The average high-voltage transmission tower includes about 30 tons of steel and transmission wire contains about a ton of steel per mile. Going from our biggest solar array, located in the Mohave Desert, to Los Angeles is almost 300 miles, requiring on the order of 10,000 tons of steel depending on specific design. While we tend to think of renewables as associated with Blue States, they are actually growing faster in Red States. Four of the five states with the most installed wind energy are Texas (20,321 MW), Iowa (6,917 MW), Oklahoma (6,645 MW) and Kansas (4,451 MW). The only Blue State in the top five is California (5,662 MW).

Prop up your stock some more.

• US Firms To Pour $2.5 Trillion Into Buybacks, Dividends, M&A This Year (CNBC)

Money is pouring into the U.S. economy and in turn helping provide support for the otherwise struggling stock market. If current conditions persist, corporations are likely this year to inject more than $2.5 trillion into what UBS strategists term “flow” — the combination of share buybacks, dividends, and mergers and acquisitions activity. The development comes as companies find themselves awash in cash, thanks primarily to years of stashing away profits plus the benefits of a $1.5 trillion tax break this year that slashed corporate rates and encouraged firms to bring back money idling overseas. Companies have nearly $2.5 trillion in cash parked domestically, according to the Federal Reserve, and as much as $3.5 trillion overseas, various estimates have shown.

When all is said and done for 2018, UBS expects dividend issuance to top $500 billion, buybacks to range from $700 billion to $800 billion, and M&A to constitute about $1.3 trillion. If the numbers pan out, they would equate to about 10% of the S&P 500’s market cap and 12.5% of GDP. “Assuming improving growth and stable rates, we expect the positive positioning/flow backdrop to support US equities, which is important as the daily corporate flow slows from mid-June to mid-July,” UBS strategist Keith Parker said in a note. Parker pointed out that the firm has overweight positions in both tech and health care as the two sectors are leading the buyback boom.

Buybacks specifically have been on a torrid pace and are helping provide a floor to a market that for much of 2018 had looked tired and volatile after a 20% S&P 500 gain the year before. Repurchases are up 83% year to date, far ahead of the 9% gain in dividends, while M&A activity involving U.S. companies has surged 130%, according to UBS. [..] UBS estimates that the combination of buybacks, dividends and demand flows account for some 40% in performance this year. The S&P 500 has nudged 2.6% higher and the Dow industrials are just ahead of breakeven.

The Fed retreats and the Treasury issues new debt.

• India Central Banker Sees Sudden “Evaporation” Of Dollar Funding (ZH)

In an op-ed published overnight in the FT, a central banker writes that when it comes to the turmoil gripping the world’s Emerging Markets, whether it is the acute, idiosyncratic version observed in Argentina and Turkey, which according to JPM may be doomed, or the more gradual selloffs observed in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico and India, don’t blame the Fed’s rate hike cycle. Instead blame the “double whammy” of the Fed’s shrinking balance sheet coupled with the dollar draining surge in debt issuance by the US Treasury.

That’s the message from the current Reserve Bank of India, Urjit Patel, who writes that “unlike previous turbulence, this episode cannot be attributed to the US Federal Reserve’s moves on interest rates, which have been rising steadily since December 2016 in a calibrated manner.” But does that mean that the Fed is not to blame for what increasingly looks like another budding EM crisis? Not at all: according to Patel, the dollar funding shortage “upheaval” stems from what he sees as the confluence of two significant events of which the Fed’s balance sheet reduction is one, while the second is the dramatic increase in US Treasury issuance to pay for Trump’s tax cuts; what is notable is that both events are drastically soaking up dollar liquidity.

As a result, Patel blames a lack a coordination between the Fed and Treasury on the adverse flow through across global funding markets as a result of this decline in dollar liquidity, and writes that “given the rapid rise in the size of the US deficit, the Fed must respond by slowing plans to shrink its balance sheet. If it does not, Treasuries will absorb such a large share of dollar liquidity that a crisis in the rest of the dollar bond markets is inevitable.” Putting these two parallel processes – which threaten to materially impair dollar funding markets – in context, on one hand there is QT, or the gradual decline in the Fed’s balance sheet which is set to peak at a rate of $50BN/month by October, while at the same time US net Treasury issuance is set to jump to $1.2 trillion in 2018 and 2019 to cover the forecasted budget deficit of $804BN and $981BN in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

And in a curious coincidence, the withdrawal of dollar funding by the Fed in monthly terms, as it reduces its reinvestment of income received, is proceeding at roughly the same pace as that of net issuance of debt by the US government. Furthermore, both processes are open ended which means that over the next few years, the government’s net issuance will stabilize, albeit at a high level, whereas the Fed’s balance-sheet reduction will keep rising. Both are terrible news for Emerging Markets, which are in desperate need of reversing the ongoing dollar outflows; however as long as Trump continues to make America great, and funds said stimulus with excess debt issuance, emerging market turmoil is virtually guaranteed.

China retreats, too.

• China’s Debt Crackdown To Hurt Emerging Markets, Oil, Metals – Fitch (R.)

China’s debt crackdown is a key risk to the country’s economic growth and will have significant knock-on effects for the global economy, particularly emerging markets with high commodity dependence or close Chinese trade links, Fitch Ratings said. Beijing’s campaign to put a lid on debt could also lead to a sharp slowdown in business investment, Fitch said late on Sunday, forecasting that growth in the world’s second-biggest economy would slow to around 4.5% over the medium term. Fitch said the implications of this scenario for the global economy would be significant but not dramatic, unlike a full-scale hard landing.

One of the most significant effects would be on commodity prices, with Fitch expecting oil and metal prices to fall 5 to 10% from its baseline scenario, reflecting China’s large role as a commodity consumer. In April, a Reuters poll of 72 institutions showed economists expected China’s economic growth to slow to 6.5% this year and 6.3% next year as Beijing extends its crackdown on riskier lending practices. GDP in 2017 expanded 6.9% in real terms and 11.2% in nominal terms. Beijing’s financial crackdown, now in its third year, has slowly pushed up borrowing costs and is choking off alternative, murkier funding sources for companies such as shadow banking.

The ratio of Chinese corporate debt to GDP is already very high by international standards – at 168% in 2017 – and is expected to start rising again as nominal GDP growth declines towards 8% from the unusually high rate of more than 11% in 2017, Fitch said. If the government aims to stabilize its corporate debt ratio by 2022, Fitch said China’s nominal economic growth rate could fall by 1 percentage point a year over the medium term while business investment growth would drop 5percentage points per year.

Restructuring Target2. That should be fun.

• Italy’s Long, Hot Summer (Carmen Reinhart)

The political upheaval and social unrest fueling the current crisis in Italy should surprise no one. On the contrary, the only uncertainty was when exactly matters would come to a head. Now they have. Italy’s per capita GDP in 2018 is about 8% below its level in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis triggered the Great Recession. And the International Monetary Fund’s projections for 2023 suggest that Italy will still not have fully recovered from the cumulative output losses of the past decade. Among the 11 advanced economies that were hit by severe financial crises in 2007-2009, only Greece has suffered a deeper and more protracted economic depression.

Greece and Italy were the two economies carrying the highest debt burdens at the outset of the crisis (109% and 102% of GDP, respectively), leaving them poorly positioned to cope with major adverse shocks. Since the crisis erupted a decade ago, economic stagnation and costly banking weaknesses have propelled debt burdens higher still, despite a decade of exceptionally low interest rates. Greece has already faced more than one “credit event” and, while Italy has also had a couple of close calls, the spring of 2018 is turning out to be its most tumultuous episode yet. The summer will probably be worse, bringing Italy closer to a sovereign debt crisis. On the surface, general government debt appears to have stabilized since 2013, at around 130% of GDP. However, as I have stressed here and elsewhere, this “stability” is misleading.

General government debt is not the whole story for Italy, even setting aside the private debt loads and the recent renewed upturn in nonperforming bank loans (a daunting legacy of the financial crisis). When evaluating Italy’s sovereign risk, the central bank’s debts (Target2 balances) must be added to those of the general government. As the most recent available data (through March) show, these balances increase the ratio of public-sector debt to GDP by 26%. With many investors pulling out of Italian assets, capital flight in the more recent data is bound to show up as an even bigger Target2 hole. This debt, unlike pre-1999, pre-euro Italian debt, cannot be inflated away. In this regard, it is much like emerging markets’ dollar-denominated debts: it is either repaid or restructured.

What the euro has meant for Greece and Italy: lower wages, higher unemployment and higher current account deficit.

• Why The Euro Was Created (ZH)

[..] we thought it would be a good idea to remind readers why the euro exists in the first place. The briefest possible answer: to make sure the Deutsche Mark does not. As presented in the chart below – which shows the performance for each of the EU12 countries against the German DEM in every decade from the 1950s to the start of the Euro in 1999 – apart from a small revaluation of core countries in the 1990s, every country devalued to Germany in every decade between the 1950s and the start of the Euro. Said otherwise, the Deutsche Mark appreciated in value against all of its European peers for 5 consecutive decades, a condition which if left unchanged, would have led to an economic and trade crisis.

And as a bonus chart, here is same data (with the US and UK added) from the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 to the start of the Euro (Lira -82% devaluation to German DM) and during the 1990s (-24% devaluation) – the decade immediately leading up to the Euro start. As can be seen Italy is amongs the weakest performers relative to the German DM over these periods and showed the momentum that existed in the period leading up to the start of the Euro.

And while the fixed exchange of the Euro for European nations allowed the German export industry to go into overdrive, the lack of the possibility for an external, i.e. currency, devaluation, meant that Italy has been forced to do it all by engaging in internal devaluation, i.e., lower wages, higher unemployment and boosting its current account deficit, which however is made virtually impossible given Italy’s deteriorating demographics. This is what DB’s Jim Reid said of Italy’s potential future: Looking forward, Italy will not find it easy to grow out of its problems as its facing one of the worst set of demographics of the G20 countries. Its population size has peaked (according to the UN) and is expected to decline out to 2050. Its working age population (15-64 year olds as a proxy) is set to fall -24% over the same period and is again one of the worst placed in the G20.

“Home sales plunged 22% in May compared to a year ago..”

• Toronto’s House Price Bubble Not Fun Anymore (WS)

Housing in the Greater Toronto Area is, let’s say, retrenching. Canada’s largest housing market has seen an enormous two-decade surge in prices that culminated in utter craziness in April 2017, when the Home Price Index had skyrocketed 32% from a year earlier. But now the hangover has set in and the bubble isn’t fun anymore. Home sales plunged 22% in May compared to a year ago, to 7,834 homes, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB). It affected all types of homes, even the once red-hot condos: • Detached houses -28.5% • Semi-detached houses -29.4% • Townhouses -13.4% • Condos -15.5%.

It was particularly unpleasant at the higher end: Sales of homes costing C$1.5 million or more plummeted by 46% year-over-year to 508 homes in May 2018, according to TREB data. Compared to the April 2017 peak of 1,362 sales in that price range, sales in May collapsed by 63%. But it’s not just at the high end. At the low end too. In May, sales of homes below C$500,000 – about 68% of them were condos – fell by 36% year-over-year to 5,253 homes. The TREB publishes two types of prices – the average price and its proprietary MLS Home Price Index based on a “composite benchmark home.” Both fell in May compared to a year ago.

The average price in May for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) fell 6.6% year-over-year to C$805,320, and is now down 12.3%, or an ear-ringing C$113,000, from the crazy peak in April 2017. There are no perfect measures of home prices in a market. Each has its own drawbacks. Average home prices can be impacted by the mix and by a few large outliers – but over the longer term, it gives a good impression of the direction. The chart below shows thepercentage change in average home prices in the GTA compared to a year earlier:

Because the boom was a bubble.

• Why Australia’s Great Banking Boom Has Ended (SMH)

It doesn’t feel all that long ago that Australian banks were the envy of the world. In March 2009, when stress-testing of US financial institutions drove the final spasm of the previous year’s credit crisis, you could have bought all the shares in Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Barclays with their $US8.4 trillion ($11 trillion) of gross assets for less than you’d pay for the equity of Westpac, with $US347 billion of assets. Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s share price peaked six years later just a sliver south of three times the value of its net assets, an extraordinary level in a business where price-book ratios have struggled to break above one times over the past decade.

With the current Royal Commission inquiring into practices in the country’s financial services industry and a slew of court cases, those high-flyers have come to earth with a bump. CBA on Monday agreed to pay $700 million to settle a money laundering case in which it admitted that a software update allowed about 54,000 reportable transactions to go unreported over a period of almost three years. On Friday, ANZ and local units of Deutsche Bank and Citigroup announced they were facing possible criminal cartel charges over their handling of a $2.5 billion placement of ANZ shares in 2015. Having executives hauled up before government inquiries and paying out hundreds of millions in court settlements isn’t great for headlines, but it would be a mistake to see the declines in Australia’s banking sector as purely a result of this.

When your annual net income is in the region of $10 billion, as CBA’s is, a $700 million charge is more than just a rounding error. But the 1.2 per cent jump in the company’s stock after the settlement was announced Monday is an indication that the cost is worth less to shareholders than the benefit of putting the issue firmly in the past. The greater risk to Australia’s banks lurks not in the papers of regulators and inquisitors, but on the streets of the country’s sprawling suburbs. As we’ve argued before, the most ominous indicator to watch is also a favourite one of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Rents, as measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, have been increasing at less than 1 per cent for nine consecutive quarters , the worst performance for the measure since the housing crash of the early 1990s.

The spirit of Steve Jobs?!

• Apple Jams Facebook’s Web-Tracking Tools (BBC)

Apple will attempt to frustrate tools used by Facebook to automatically track web users, within the next version of its iOS and Mac operating systems. “We’re shutting that down,” declared Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi, at the firm’s developers conference. He added that the web browser Safari would ask owners’ permission before allowing the social network to monitor their activity. The move is likely to add to tensions between the two companies. Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook had previously described Facebook’s practices as being an “invasion of privacy” – an opinion Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg subsequently denounced as being “glib”.

At the WWDC conference – held in San Jose, California – Mr Federighi said that Facebook keeps watch over people in ways they might not be aware of. “We’ve all seen these – these like buttons, and share buttons and these comment fields. “Well it turns out these can be used to track you, whether you click on them or not.” He then pointed to an onscreen alert that asked: “Do you want to allow Facebook.com to use cookies and available data while browsing?” “You can decide to keep your information private.”

One cyber-security expert applauded the move. “Apple is making changes to the core of how the browser works – surprisingly strong changes that should enable greater privacy,” said Kevin Beaumont. “Quite often the changes companies make around privacy are small, incremental, they don’t shake the market up much. “Here Apple is allowing users to see when tracking is enabled on a website – actually being able to visually see that with a prompt is breaking new ground.”

Building on the Ring of Fire.

• A West Coast State of Mind (Jim Kunstler)

It’s only been in the last thirty years that Seattle hoisted up its tombstone cluster of several dozen office and condo towers. That’s what cities do these days to demonstrate their self-regard, and Seattle is perhaps America’s boomingest city, what with Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters there — avatars of the digital economy. A megathrust earthquake there today would produce a scene that even the computer graphics artistes of Hollywood could not match for picturesque chaos. What were the city planners thinking when they signed off on those building plans?

I survived the journey through the Seattle tunnel, dogged by neurotic fantasies, and headed south to California’s Bay Area, another seismic doomer zone. For sure I am not the only casual observer who gets the doomish vibe out there on the Left Coast. Even if you are oblivious to the geology of the place, there’s plenty to suggest a sense of impossibility for business-as-usual continuing much longer. I got that end-of-an-era feeling in California traffic, specifically driving toward San Francisco on the I-80 freeway out in the suburban asteroid belt of Contra Costa County, past the sinister oil refineries of Mococo and the dormitory sprawl of Walnut Creek, Orinda, and Lafayette.

Things go on until they can’t, economist Herb Stein observed, back in the quaint old 20th century, as the USA revved up toward the final blowoff we’ve now entered. The shale oil “miracle” (so-called) has given even thoughtful adults the false impression that the California template for modern living will continue indefinitely. I’d give it less than five years now.

Snowden deserves as much support as Assange does.

• Edward Snowden: ‘The People Are Still Powerless, But Now They’re Aware’ (G.)

Edward Snowden has no regrets five years on from leaking the biggest cache of top-secret documents in history. He is wanted by the US. He is in exile in Russia. But he is satisfied with the way his revelations of mass surveillance have rocked governments, intelligence agencies and major internet companies. In a phone interview to mark the anniversary of the day the Guardian broke the story, he recalled the day his world – and that of many others around the globe – changed for good. He went to sleep in his Hong Kong hotel room and when he woke, the news that the National Security Agency had been vacuuming up the phone data of millions of Americans had been live for several hours.

Snowden knew at that moment his old life was over. “It was scary but it was liberating,” he said. “There was a sense of finality. There was no going back.” What has happened in the five years since? He is one of the most famous fugitives in the world, the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, a Hollywood movie, and at least a dozen books. The US and UK governments, on the basis of his revelations, have faced court challenges to surveillance laws. New legislation has been passed in both countries. The internet companies, responding to a public backlash over privacy, have made encryption commonplace.

Snowden, weighing up the changes, said some privacy campaigners had expressed disappointment with how things have developed, but he did not share it. “People say nothing has changed: that there is still mass surveillance. That is not how you measure change. Look back before 2013 and look at what has happened since. Everything changed.” The most important change, he said, was public awareness. “The government and corporate sector preyed on our ignorance. But now we know. People are aware now. People are still powerless to stop it but we are trying. The revelations made the fight more even.”

Bayer-Monsanto: “It will effectively control nearly 60% of the world’s supply of proprietary seeds, 70% of the chemicals and pesticides used to grow food, and most of the world’s GM crop genetic traits..”

• Who Should Feed The World: Real People Or Faceless Multinationals? (Vidal)

Unless there is a major hiccup in the next few days, an incredibly powerful company will shortly be given a licence to dominate world farming. Following a nod from Donald Trump, powerful lobbying in Europe and a lot of political arm-twisting on several continents, the path has been cleared for Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, to be taken over by Bayer, the second-largest pesticide group, for an estimated $66bn (£50bn). The merger has been called both a “marriage made in hell” and “an important development for food security”.

Through its many subsidiary companies and research arms, Bayer-Monsanto will have an indirect impact on every consumer and a direct one on most farmers in Britain, the EU and the US. It will effectively control nearly 60% of the world’s supply of proprietary seeds, 70% of the chemicals and pesticides used to grow food, and most of the world’s GM crop genetic traits, as well as much of the data about what farmers grow where, and the yields they get. It will be able to influence what and how most of the world’s food is grown, affecting the price and the method it is grown by. But the takeover is just the last of a trio of huge seed and pesticide company mergers.

Backed by governments, and enabled by world trade rules and intellectual property laws, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont and ChemChina-Syngenta have been allowed to control much of the world’s supply of seeds. You might think that these mergers would alert the government, but because political parties in Britain are so inward-looking, and because most farmers in rich countries already buy their seeds from the multinationals, opposition has barely been heard.

Debt Rattle November 8 2017

Nov 082017

November 8, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: arms sales, Catalonia, corruption, crackdown, homeless, Lebanon, malls, MMT, reversal, Saudi 4 Responses »

Henri Cartier Bresson Nehru Announces Gandhi’s Death, Birla House, Delhi, India Jan 30, 1948

• 700 Years of Data Forewarn of Rapid Reversal From Low Interest Rates (BBG)

• Saudi Banks Freeze More Than 1,200 Bank Accounts in Anti-Corruption Purge (R.)

• Saudi Crackdown to Confiscate Up to $800 Billion in Assets (WSJ)

• Leaked Secret Israeli Cable Confirms Israeli-Saudi Coordination In Lebanon (ZH)

• Lebanon – The Next Front In The Great Gas War (Golem XIV)

• UK Sales Of Bombs And Missiles To Saudi Arabia Increase By Almost 500% (Ind.)

• May to Lose Second Top Minister in One Week Over Secret Israel Meetings (BBG)

• Those Who Broke The Economy Cannot Fix It (Ann Pettifor)

• German ‘Wise Men’ Sound Alarm Over ‘Overheating’ Economy (R.)

• Bean Counters: Lost in Paradise (Ren.)

• British Mainstream Media Spreading Dangerous MMT Ideas (Bilbo)

• Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown Sinks Property Prices (WS)

• Catalan Secessionist Parties Fail To Agree On Unity Ticket For Vote (R.)

• 1 in 200 British, 1 in 60 Londoners Are Homeless (G.)

Long term is always better.

• 700 Years of Data Forewarn of Rapid Reversal From Low Interest Rates (BBG)

Forget secular stagnation. One historian says the world is actually in its ninth “real rate depression” and 700 years of data show that – when it comes – the turnaround could be sudden. In research published on the Bank of England’s staff blog, Harvard University’s Paul Schmelzing says most work pointing to a period of permanently lower equilibrium real interest rates is too short term. Instead, he tracked the risk-free rate since 1311 by identifying the dominant asset of each period – starting with sovereign rates in the Italian city states in the 14th and 15th centuries and moving to long-term rates in Spain, then the Province of Holland, the U.K., Germany, and finally the U.S. Real rates, or the benchmark interest rates minus inflation, have averaged 4.78% while the 200-year real-rate average is 2.6%.

That makes the current market environment “severely depressed,” Schmelzing wrote. However, it’s simply following a five-century downward trend, in which there have been nine periods of secular decline followed by reversals. The current period – since the 1980s – is the second-longest recorded and its closest historical analogy is the global “Long Depression” of the 1880s and 1890s which saw low productivity growth, deflationary price dynamics, and the rise of global populism and protectionism. This spell seems to have ended without a push from policy makers. That could be good news for those struggling to find a fix for the current low-rate environment. “There is strong evidence suggesting that the last ‘secular stagnation cycle’ started fading relatively autonomously after just over two decades following the key financial shock, not requiring the aid of decisive fiscal or monetary stimulus.”

There’ll be more.

• Saudi Banks Freeze More Than 1,200 Bank Accounts in Anti-Corruption Purge (R.)

Saudi Arabian banks have frozen more than 1,200 accounts belonging to individuals and companies in the kingdom as part of the government’s anti-corruption purge, bankers and lawyers said on Tuesday. They added that the number is continuing to rise. Dozens of royal family members, officials and business executives have been detained in the crackdown and are facing allegations of money laundering, bribery, extorting officials and taking advantage of public office for personal gain. Since Sunday, the central bank has been expanding the list of accounts it is requiring lenders to freeze on an almost hourly basis, one regional banker said, declining to be named because he was not authorised to speak to media.

The banker did not name the companies affected but said they included listed and unlisted firms across many sectors. He added that if the freezes stayed in place for long, they could start to hurt day-to-day business activities such as paying staff and creditors or making other transactions. A second banker said, however, that most of the frozen accounts belonged to individuals rather than companies, and that banks were being allowed by the regulator to continue to fund existing commitments. Among top business executives detained in the probe are billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of investment firm Kingdom Holding; Nasser bin Aqeel al-Tayyar, founder of Al Tayyar Travel; and Amr al-Dabbagh, chairman of builder Red Sea International.

The stocks of all three companies, which have issued statements saying they continue to operate as normal, plunged between 9 and 10% on Tuesday. One of the bankers speaking to Reuters said the central bank had met with some foreign banks this week to reassure them that the freezing of accounts targeted individuals, and that firms linked to those people would not be damaged.

WSJ has gone full paywall.

• Saudi Crackdown to Confiscate Up to $800 Billion in Assets (WSJ)

The Saudi government is aiming to confiscate cash and other assets worth as much as $800 billion in its broadening crackdown on alleged corruption among the kingdom’s elite, according to people familiar with the matter. Several prominent businessmen are among those who have been arrested in the days since Saudi authorities launched the crackdown on Saturday, by detaining more than 60 princes, officials and other prominent Saudis, according to those people and others. The country’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, said late Tuesday that it has frozen the bank accounts of “persons of interest” and said the move is “in response to the Attorney General’s request pending the legal cases against them.”

The purge is the most extensive of the kingdom’s elite in recent history. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman, was named heir to the throne in June and has moved to consolidate power. He has said that tackling corruption at the highest level is necessary to overhaul what has long been an oil-dependent economy. The crackdown could also help replenish state coffers. The government has said that assets accumulated through corruption will become state property, and people familiar with the matter say the government estimates the value of assets it can reclaim at up to 3 trillion Saudi riyal, or $800 billion.

Strange bedfellows.

• Leaked Secret Israeli Cable Confirms Israeli-Saudi Coordination In Lebanon (ZH)

Early this morning, Israeli Channel 10 news published a leaked diplomatic cable which had been sent to all Israeli ambassadors throughout the world concerning the chaotic events that unfolded over the weekend in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which began with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s unexpected resignation after he was summoned to Riyadh by his Saudi-backers, and led to the Saudis announcing that Lebanon had “declared war” against the kingdom. The classified embassy cable, written in Hebrew, constitutes the first formal evidence proving that the Saudis and Israelis are deliberately coordinating to escalate the situation in the Middle East. The explosive classified Israeli cable reveals the following:

• On Sunday, just after Lebanese PM Hariri’s shocking resignation, Israel sent a cable to all of its embassies with the request that its diplomats do everything possible to ramp up diplomatic pressure against Hezbollah and Iran.
• The cable urged support for Saudi Arabia’s war against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
• The cable stressed that Iran was engaged in “regional subversion”.
• Israeli diplomats were urged to appeal to the “highest officials” within their host countries to attempt to expel Hezbollah from Lebanese government and politics.

As is already well-known, the Saudi and Israeli common cause against perceived Iranian influence and expansion in places like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq of late has led the historic bitter enemies down a pragmatic path of unspoken cooperation as both seem to have placed the break up of the so-called “Shia crescent” as their primary policy goal in the region. For Israel, Hezbollah has long been its greatest foe, which Israeli leaders see as an extension of Iran’s territorial presence right up against the Jewish state’s northern border.

“Having failed to liberate the Syrians, Saudi, the West, its Sunni Gulf allies and Israel will now see if they can succeed in blocking any Iranian gas ambitions by liberating the Lebanese from their own government.”

• Lebanon – The Next Front In The Great Gas War (Golem XIV)

The Great Gas War has already two distinct fronts: The now relatively quiet Northern Front in Ukraine and the Southern Front in Syria in which the Western empire has been losing. It looks to me that Lebanon is being targeted as the next front, where the West hopes its loses might be recouped. Yesterday, November 6th, Reuters reported, “Saudi Arabia said on Monday that Lebanon had declared war against it because of attacks against the Kingdom by the Lebanese Shi‘ite group Hezbollah.” This comes after Israel, Saudi’s long time though largely un-offical best friend in the region, has been very publicly preparing to renew its own war with Lebanon – or more accurately with Hezbollah. As the American news journal Newsweek put it recently, “ISRAEL PREPARES FOR ANOTHER WAR WITH HEZBOLLAH AS IDF PRACTICES LEBANON INVASION.”

Why now and why Lebanon? Well the rulers of Saudi, a Sunni dominated country, will tell us that it is because Hezbollah is a Shia terrorist organisation. “Hezbollah” literally means the “Party of Allah” or “Party of God”. Saudi Gulf affairs minister Thamer al-Sabhan yesterday pointedly referred to Hezbollah as, “the Lebanese Party of the Devil”. Saudi is not alone of course, Hezbollah has also been listed as a terrorist organisation by America, Israel, the Arab League, the UK and the EU. It is also, however, part of the popular government of Lebanon having seats in its parliament. I suggest, however, a powerful reason that a new war with Hezbollah may be in the offing is because Lebanon is the next link in any gas pipeline that could potentially bring Iranian Gas to Europe.

That was the reason the West decided to “liberate” the Syrian people and it will be why they decide to enforce the same salvation upon the people of Lebanon. Having failed to liberate the Syrians, Saudi, the West, its Sunni Gulf allies and Israel will now see if they can succeed in blocking any Iranian gas ambitions by liberating the Lebanese from their own government. I would not be surprised to hear quite soon from opposition groups vocally denouncing the government or at least Hezbollah. I expect spokes people from those groups to suddenly get a global platform along-side American and regional supporters such as Saudi.

How to spell insanity.

• UK Sales Of Bombs And Missiles To Saudi Arabia Increase By Almost 500% (Ind.)

The number of British-made bombs and missiles sold to Saudi Arabia since the start of its bloody campaign in Yemen has risen by almost 500%, The Independent can reveal. More than £4.6bn of arms were sold in the first two years of bombings, with the Government grant increasing numbers of export licences despite mounting evidence of war crimes and massacres at hospitals, schools and weddings. The United Nations says air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition are the main cause of almost 5,295 civilian deaths and 8,873 casualties confirmed so far, warning that the real figure is “likely to be far higher”. It has condemned the “entirely man-made catastrophe” leaving millions more on the brink of famine and sparking the world’s worst cholera epidemic, while blacklisting Saudi Arabia for killing and maiming children.

There is also fresh concern over the Kingdom’s attempt to shut all air, land and sea ports into Yemen, which it said was to stop the flow of weapons but will also halt aid imports. British-made bombs have been found at the scene of bombings deemed to violate international law but the UK has continued its political and material support for Riyadh’s campaign. Figures from the Department for International Trade (DIT) show that in the two years leading up to the Yemen war, £33m of ML4 licences covering bombs, missiles and countermeasures were approved. But in the two years since the start of Saudi bombing in March 2015, the figure increased by 457% to £1.9bn, according to calculations by Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT). Licences covering aircraft including Eurofighter jets have also risen by 70% to £2.6bn in the same period.

Secret meetings as the Middle East is imploding. And arms sales are exploding.

• May to Lose Second Top Minister in One Week Over Secret Israel Meetings (BBG)

Prime Minister Theresa May is weighing whether to fire a member of her cabinet only seven days after her defense secretary quit in a sexual harassment scandal, as the U.K. government faces fresh turmoil in the midst of Brexit talks. May is likely to dismiss her International Development Secretary Priti Patel in a row over a succession of unauthorized meetings she held with Israeli officials behind the prime minister’s back, according to reports from the BBC and The Sun Tuesday, which the U.K. government declined to deny. The premier has not yet had the chance to speak to Patel – who is on an official trip to Africa – about the latest revelations. A conversation would be expected before a decision is made about the minister’s future. If she is forced out, Patel will be the second minister to depart May’s cabinet in one week, after Michael Fallon resigned from the defense ministry amid allegations over his past behavior toward women.

For some, May’s latest headache is yet another demonstration of her weakness, which draws repeated questions over how her government can last long enough to see Brexit to the finish line. If more dominoes drop – in the shape of senior ministers – the last one to fall could ultimately be the prime minister herself. “The destabilizing effect on an already weak administration has prompted another burst of speculation that May could soon be forced to resign,” Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group said in a note to clients. He thought one likely scenario is for May to be toppled if she fails to get a grip on the latest crisis and is ousted because her MPs judge that the government cannot go on like this – and is incapable of recovering the authority a prime minister needs.

The British economy is being bled dry….

• Those Who Broke The Economy Cannot Fix It (Ann Pettifor)

Make no mistake, last week’s increase in interest rates was a big deal. Painful as it might be for a good share of the population, the real point is that the Bank is signalling the end of a particular phase of monetary policy. Since 2010 the counterpart to self-defeating austerity policies has been expansionary monetary policies. These have inflated assets – enriching the already-rich, while failing to stimulate wider economic recovery. Yesterday the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee signalled an end of this dangerous game. But this technocratic realignment makes no difference to the fact that ‘the Guardians of the nation’s finances’ – Bank and Treasury economists – have failed absolutely to revive the economy.

You need look no further than the (ongoing) decline in real wages, to continuing low levels of private investment, and to the dangers of rising household debt. A small interest rate rise is hardly likely to improve these conditions. Bank and Treasury economists (aided and abetted by the OBR) are guilty of defeatism. They argue that despite their powers, THERE IS NOTHING TO BE DONE. It is assumed that somehow ‘the invisible hand’ or ‘the markets’ will, without intervention by the authorities, correct the weakness, insecurity and failures of the British economy. The prolonged and painfully weak recovery is regularly blamed on something defined as “productivity”. By shifting responsibility for economic failure on to productivity, the Bank, Treasury and OBR economists are saying that somehow economic failure is inherent to the economy – to businesses and especially to workers.

“Nothing to do with us, guv” they mutter. They add that the situation has been exacerbated by the vote to leave the EU. This is a handy way of denying that the ongoing economic failure of the British economy (and the Brexit vote) can be explained by austerity policies, and the failures of the financial system. By taking this approach, economists at the Bank have – conveniently – set the scene for endorsing further inaction by the Chancellor later this month. Yesterday the Governor of the Bank was flanked by Ben Broadbent and Dave Ramsden. Ben Broadbent, as a Goldman Sachs economist, was among the earliest to call for austerity policies. Dave Ramsden (who did not vote for the rate rise) implemented these policies as top economist at the Treasury.

But both Broadbent and Ramsden were senior figures in economic policy-making throughout the debt inflation that preceded the crisis, and (we presume) supporters of financial globalisation. It is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that austerity policies have hurt the most vulnerable, and damaged Britain’s economic potential, by forcing a brutal adjustment to lower quality and lower paid work. Labour has been forced to bear the brunt of the Global Financial Crisis. The weakness in productivity is just the outcome of these policies, not the cause.

… while Germany’s needs diverge ever more from those of southern Europe.

• German ‘Wise Men’ Sound Alarm Over ‘Overheating’ Economy (R.)

The German economy is at risk of overheating, according to a leaked advisory council report that follows pressure from the Bundesbank for a swifter end to the ECB’s expansive monetary policy. In their annual report, seen by Handelsblatt newspaper, the five “wise men” who advise the German government on economic policy said the economy, which they expected to expand strongly this year and next, was moving gradually into a “boom phase”. “There are clear signs that economic capacity is over-utilised,” read the report, which is due to be published on Wednesday. Germans have been among the foremost critics of the ECB’s bond-buying program, which was introduced three years ago to depress borrowing costs and reignite growth in the euro zone’s heavily indebted southern periphery.

The wise men expected Germany’s economy to expand by 2% this year and by 2.2% in 2018, Handelsblatt said. With unemployment at its lowest level since the early 1990s, Germany’s circumstances are very different from Italy’s or Spain‘s, straining the ECB’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ monetary policy. ECB President Mario Draghi last month announced a halving n the size of its 2 trillion euro bond-buying program, but this is far from the return to conventional monetary policy many Germans, including Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann, demand. Without an intervention to cool the economy, Germany’s hawks fear the buoyant economy could tip over into an inflationary cycle. Last week, a senior official from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives warned that German savers would not tolerate continued low interest rates for much longer.

Accountants and auditors are not doing their jobs.

• Bean Counters: Lost in Paradise (Ren.)

“The phrase ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’ is common parlance,” says Professor Atul K. Shah. “‘Set a global brand of professional accountants to rob society and pilfer its taxes, bleeding governments’, is not, but it should be.’ Professor Bill Black says internal controls are absolutely critical in reducing fraud by insiders in particular, but not just insiders, as the Paradise Papers have repeatedly demonstrated. Emile Woolf says there is no way to remove control fraud and dodgy accounting practices from the economy without first prosecuting the culprits. “The devils that committed this criminal negligence – with the exception of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – have never been fined or prosecuted” he said. “What you can then do is create a ring fenced fund inside those institutions, earmarked to save them from going under. But the company has to recognise it has to be paid back.

“RBS is incapable of paying back the billions of fines it still owes for misconduct,” he says. “Where does that money come from and where does it go? Without the fines RBS would have made £100 million profit this year, but because of the reserve for fines in the USA and UK, all those fines are far too great to allow for payment of a dividend.” Of course calculating a true profit figure is difficult when a significant portion of that profit is fraudulent, because it doesn’t take into account the result of the inequities of ten years ago. “The worrying thing for all of us is if it happens again,” he says. “My hope is that three years from now, banks will be forced to recognise their loans that will never be repaid. But my worry is that this is going to be after the next financial crisis, because it’s happening again. There is no redeeming features in the present. The only difference is the next crisis is going to be bigger.”

Joel Benjamin told Renegade Inc that accounting is as much about *what* you count or don’t count as it is *how* you count it. “This is evidenced through the practice of ‘base erosion and profit shifting’ – shifting profits to offshore low or no tax jurisdictions, ” he said. In the space of 50 years, Britain’s economy has transformed from an industrial power house, to that of a finance-led extractive parasite, where the cash starved productive economy receives less than 10% of bank credit. “Until the Big Four accountancy firms are accurately viewed as enablers of corporate offshore dealing, regulatory arbitrage and ardent defenders of the neoliberal order, not the ‘reputable’ objective independent arbiters of the public interest as they claim, society will continue to be taken for a ride, and public services and social cohesion will continue their long decline,” he said.

Bill Mitchell in a long talk with his alter ego.

• British Mainstream Media Spreading Dangerous MMT Ideas (Bilbo)

Mitchell tried to tell me that governments do not spend by ‘printing money’ but rather just adjust bank accounts with numbers. But I know as anyone in the street knows that they just want to print more and more. That is at the core of MMT – they want the government to go on a spending spree and just ignore the inflationary consequences. They hide that by saying that “public spending cannot be unlimited and must be commensurate to the capacity of the economy” which is just a smokescreen that I can see through. And everybody will see through it. It is code for spend like a drunken’ sailor – throw money at lazy people who cannot be bothered finding a job. Throw money at public schools that teach socialist doctrines – you know about inequality and stuff like that.

Throw money at public hospitals so that people can receive unlimited health care without having to pay for it – that is the quickest way to encourage waste and bad behaviour. People know that they can just get sick and no matter what their income is they will get some care. Where is the incentive to stay healthy in that sort of system. The article also shows how stupid Mitchell is when it says he: “… debunks the idea that governments borrow money from international markets and with it the notion that they are hostage to the market.” Well where the hell else do they get the cash from? Does he really think we are that stupid? How come China has all those US government debt bonds or whatever they are called and the US government is spending the Chinese cash? How does he explain that obvious point?

Well he tried to claim the Chinese doesn’t issue US dollars and that only the US government issues US dollars so that it cannot possibly be funded by the Chinese. I don’t buy that, not that I understood anything he said about this – all this talk about trade surpluses accumulating financial claims in the currency that the deficit country issues, and then allowing the surplus nation to use those claims (say, US dollars in the first instance) to purchase US dollar financial assets etc ad nauseum. As if that tells us anything. How come the Chinese can loan the US government money that is what I want to know? Mitchell told the journalist that Jeremy Corbyn should not worry about international capital markets because Britain could impose capital controls if it wanted to. That gets to the nub of my worries – socialist governments stealing hard-earned cash from investors who actually have some get up and go.

Malls don’t look like good investments.

• Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown Sinks Property Prices (WS)

Commercial real estate prices soared relentlessly for years after the Financial Crisis, to such a degree that the Fed has been publicly fretting about them. Why? Because US financial institutions hold nearly $4 trillion of commercial real estate loans. But the boom in most CRE sectors is over. The Green Street Property Price Index – which measures values across five major property sectors – had soared 107% from May 2009 to the plateau that began late last year, and 27% from the peak of the totally crazy prior bubble that ended with such spectacular fireworks. But it has now turned around, dragged down by a plunge in prices for retail space. The CPPI by Green Street Advisors dropped 1.1% in October from September. In terms of points, the 1.4-point decline was the largest monthly decline since March 2009. The index is now below where it had been in June 2016:

This phenomenal bubble, as depicted by the chart above, has even worried the Fed because US financial institutions hold nearly $4 trillion of CRE loans, according to Boston Fed governor Eric Rosengren earlier this year. Of them, $1.2 trillion are held by smaller banks (less than $50 billion in assets). These smaller banks tends to have a loan book that is heavily concentrated on CRE loans, and these banks are less able to withstand shocks to collateral values. Rosengren found that among the root causes of the Financial Crisis “was a significant decline in collateral values of residential and commercial real estate.” But the CRE bubble isn’t unraveling as gently as the chart suggests. Some sectors are still surging, while others are plunging. According to the report, the index, which captures the prices at which CRE transactions are currently being negotiated and contracted, “was pushed down by falling mall valuations.”

Puidgemont predicted to get 14-15 out of 135 seats. He won’t be the leader.

• Catalan Secessionist Parties Fail To Agree On Unity Ticket For Vote (R.)

Catalan secessionist parties on Tuesday failed to agree on a united ticket to contest a December snap regional election, making it more difficult to rule the region after the vote and press ahead with their collective bid to split from Spain. Catalonia’s secessionist push has plunged Spain into its worst political crisis in four decades, triggered a business exodus, forced Madrid to cut its economic forecast and reopened old wounds from Spain’s civil war in the 1930s. Pro-independence groups have called for a general strike in the restive region on Wednesday. Catalan political parties had until midnight on Tuesday to register coalitions ahead of the Dec. 21 vote, but the two main forces which formed an alliance to rule the region for the last two years did not manage to agree on a new pact in time.

While they could still find an agreement after the vote, political analysts say the lack of a deal on a joint campaign may also trigger a leadership fight at the top of the movement. This is because center-right PdeCat (Catalan Democratic Party) of sacked Catalan president Carles Puigdemont is expected to be overtaken by leftist Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) of former regional vice president Oriol Junqueras. Puigdemont and Junqueras are the two main leaders behind the current secession bid that last month led to a unilateral declaration of independence which Spain thwarted by imposing direct rule on the region. Junqueras is currently in custody pending a potential trial on charges of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds. Puigdemont, who faces the same charges, is currently in self-imposed exile in Belgium and has said he would oppose extradition.

An opinion poll released on Sunday by Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia showed Junqueras’ ERC could garner between 45 and 46 seats in the 135-strong regional assembly while Puigdemont’s PdeCat would win between 14 and 15 seats. In order to reach the 68-seat threshold for a majority, they would then have to form a parliamentary alliance with anti-capitalist CUP, which is expected to get seven or eight seats. Such an alliance previously existed between 2015 and 2017.

Down the drain.

• 1 in 200 British, 1 in 60 Londoners Are Homeless (G.)

More than 300,000 people in Britain – equivalent to one in every 200 – are officially recorded as homeless or living in inadequate homes, according to figures released by the charity Shelter. Using official government data and freedom of information returns from local authorities, it estimates that 307,000 people are sleeping rough, or accommodated in temporary housing, bed and breakfast rooms, or hostels – an increase of 13,000 over the past year. Shelter said the figures were an underestimate as they did not include people trapped in so-called “hidden homelessness”, who have nowhere to live but are not recorded as needing housing assistance, and end up “sofa surfing”. London, where one in every 59 people are homeless, remains Britain’s homelessness centre. Of the top 50 local authority homelessness “hotspots”, 18 were in Greater London, with Newham, where one in 27 residents are homeless, worst hit.

However, while London’s homeless rates have remained largely stable over the past year, the figures show the problem is becoming worse in leafier commuter areas bordering the capital, such as Broxbourne, Luton, and Chelmsford. Big regional cities have also seen substantial year-on-year increases in the rate of homelessness. In Manchester, one in 154 people are homeless (compared with one in 266 in 2016); in Birmingham one in 88 are homeless (119); in Bristol one in 170 are affected (199). Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said: “It’s shocking to think that today, more than 300,000 people in Britain are waking up homeless. Some will have spent the night shivering on a cold pavement, others crammed into a dingy hostel room with their children. And what is worse, many are simply unaccounted for.

Debt Rattle November 1 2017

Nov 012017

November 1, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, Catalonia, crackdown, Greece, grid, OxyContin, Papadopoulos, refugees, stress, Trump 5 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Blue nude 1902

• Americans Are Officially Freaking Out (BBG)

• Mueller Mugs America: The Case Of Baby George Papadopoulos (Stockman)

• Some Of The Scariest Charts In Finance To Celebrate Halloween (BV)

• Most Of UK Fruit And Veg Is From Other EU Nations, Brexit To Be Dramatic (G.)

• Corbyn Has a Plan to Get May’s Tories to Give Up 58 Brexit Secrets (BBG)

• Australia’s Housing Boom Is ‘Officially Over’ – UBS (BBG)

• Government Raids On Catalonia Police Spark Fears Of Wider Crackdown (Ind.)

• Puigdemont Says Can’t Return To Catalonia, Spain Intent On ‘Vengeance’ (Ind.)

• New Jersey Sues OxyContin Maker, Links Marketing To Opioid Crisis (R.)

• Germany Forced To Pay Consumers To Use More Electricity

• Greece Plans An Unprecedented €30 Billion Debt Swap (BBG)

• Greek PM Under Fire Over Migrants, Refugees (K.)

Major point in this: the media freaks out the people.

• Americans Are Officially Freaking Out (BBG)

For those lying awake at night worried about health care, the economy, and an overall feeling of divide between you and your neighbors, there’s at least one source of comfort: Your neighbors might very well be lying awake, too. Almost two-thirds of Americans, or 63%, report being stressed about the future of the nation, according to the American Psychological Association’s Eleventh Stress in America survey, conducted in August and released on Wednesday. This worry about the fate of the union tops longstanding stressors such as money (62%) and work (61%) and also cuts across political proclivities. However, a significantly larger proportion of Democrats (73%) reported feeling stress than independents (59%) and Republicans (56%).

The “current social divisiveness” in America was reported by 59% of those surveyed as a cause of their own malaise. When the APA surveyed Americans a year ago, 52% said they were stressed by the presidential campaign. Since then, anxieties have only grown. A majority of the more than 3,400 Americans polled, 59%, said “they consider this to to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember.” That sentiment spanned generations, including those that lived through World War II, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. (Some 30% of people polled cited terrorism as a source of concern, a number that’s likely to rise given the alleged terrorist attack in New York City on Tuesday.)

“We have a picture that says people are concerned,” said Arthur Evans, APA’s chief executive officer. “Any one data point may not not be so important, but taken together, it starts to paint a picture.” The survey didn’t ask respondents specifically about the administration of President Donald Trump, Evans said. He points to the “acrimony in the public discourse” and “the general feeling that we are divided as a country” as being more important than any particular person or political party. [..] And keeping up with the latest developments is a source of worry all its own. Most Americans—56%—said they want to stay informed, but the news causes them stress. (Yet even more, 72%, said “the media blows things out of proportion.”)

Who brought in Baby George? Haven’t seen anyone dig into his contacts. His story doesn’t seem to add up. Been pushing Russia on Trump far too much. A Trojan Horse?

• Mueller Mugs America: The Case Of Baby George Papadopoulos (Stockman)

This is how the Deep State crushes disobedience by the unwashed American public. It indicts not only ham sandwiches but, apparently, political infants in diapers too, if that’s what it takes. Hence the sudden notoriety of Baby George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to “lying” about an essentially immaterial date to the FBI. Oh, and by all signs and signals that plea came after this 30 year-old novice had been wearing a wire for several months. So here’s how this noxious act of bullying by Robert Mueller’s Federally-deputized thugs came down. It seems that during the early months of 2016, when Trump was winning primary after primary against all mainstream media expectations, the Donald’s establishment betters began attacking his foreign policy credentials with special malice aforethought.

That was mainly owing to his sensible suggestion that it would be better to seek rapprochement with Russia rather than pursue Hillary’s Cold War 2.0 and that 25 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the pages of history that NATO was obsolete. Since this totally plausible (and correct) viewpoint was deeply offensive to the Imperial City’s group think and threatened the Warfare State’s existential need for a fearsome enemy, Trump’s ruminations about making a deal with Putin were belittled. They were, in fact, attributed not to a fresh look at the realities abroad or the possibility that homeland security does not require a global empire, but to the candidate’s lack of any pedigreed foreign policy advisors. Indeed, when it came to the Republican-oriented foreign policy establishment-nearly all of which had joined the Never Trump cause-the Donald added insult to injury.

That is, by suggesting he got his foreign policy views watching TV (like most of Washington) and that he could do a better job against terrorism than the Pentagon generals (not hard). At length, however, the “who are your foreign policy advisors” meme got so relentless that the Donald relented. On March 21, 2016 he announced a group of five advisors that exactly no one who was anyone in the Imperial City had ever heard of, and for good reason. Trump apparently rarely even met with the Five and no one running the campaign paid much attention to them. Still, Baby George’s carelessness about the exact dates and sequences of utterly irrelevant and inconsequential events is enough to get him time in one of Uncle Sam’s hospitality suites.

“..ECB QE is currently 7 times bigger than net issuance. So is it any wonder why yields have fallen, and what happens when the ECB tries to turn off the easy money tap?”

• Some Of The Scariest Charts In Finance To Celebrate Halloween (BV)

Investment markets have been remarkably resilient over the course of 2017. Sure, the geopolitical environment has thrown up a few frightening days which saw markets sell-off but on the whole volatility has been muted and most asset classes have generated solid total returns. That said, any horror movie fan will tell you that the scariest part of a horror film happens when things are relatively calm. With that in mind, here are a few charts that shine a light on a number of threats that are lurking just below the surface of the global economy.

ECB quantitative easing has propped up government bond markets

The strength of the European economy, and signs of labour market healing across the euro area, has been the surprise story of 2017. It is undeniable that the ECB, and its quantitative easing programme, has played a huge part in the economic success seen to date. Many point to the fall in yields on peripheral area debt as a sign that the euro sovereign debt crisis is well and truly over. The question is, do falling yields signify increasing confidence in the ability of euro area nations to repay their debt, or do they simply reflect the asset purchases that the ECB has conducted since the QE programme started? The above chart, published in the most recent IMF Global Financial Stability Report, shows that official purchases of euro area debt has eclipsed net issuance since May 2015. Indeed, ECB QE is currently 7 times bigger than net issuance. So is it any wonder why yields have fallen, and what happens when the ECB tries to turn off the easy money tap?

Debt is a beast that cannot be tamed

The EU forces food transports across the Union. Damn transport costs, including pollution. The result: “the system is very fragile”. Don’t depend for your essentials on people living 1000 miles away. It’s not that hard.

• Most Of UK Fruit And Veg Is From Other EU Nations, Brexit To Be Dramatic (G.)

The UK faces serious health implications if the government fails to agree a Brexit deal, finds a report that says of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, a figure relating to the five-a-day recommendation for individuals, just one “portion” is grown in the UK and picked by British or non-EU workers. The report, to mark the launch of a new RSA commission examining the impact of Brexit on food and farming, found that the five-a-day health target – which adds up to the 35 portions of fruit and vegetables a week – was overwhelmingly met by food grown in the EU or harvested by EU workers in the UK. Sue Pritchard, director of the RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, said Brexit offered a great opportunity to reshape farming and food, but warned that no deal over the exit from the union would have a dramatic and immediate effect.

“What would be available on the shelves would change dramatically. There will be delays at ports and all along the food supply system – the impact will be felt very, very quickly,” she said. The study found that of the average 28 portions consumed by Britons of the recommended weekly intake of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, the equivalent of 11 portions came from the EU, seven from the rest of the world and nine arose from the UK and were harvested by workers from other EU countries. The equivalent of just one portion was grown in the UK and harvested by British or non-EU workers. Pritchard added: “If there is no deal the system is very fragile and the impact in the UK food supply is likely to be dramatic.” The majority of farmers backed Brexit, but the National Farmers’ Union has since suggested that crops will “rot in the fields” and that Britain will be unable to produce the food if the government cannot secure a deal that allows tens of thousands of EU workers to continue to work on UK farms.

Fitting. The entire country is back in Victorian times.

• Corbyn Has a Plan to Get May’s Tories to Give Up 58 Brexit Secrets (BBG)

The main U.K. opposition party wants to deploy a parliamentary tool hardly used since the 19th century to get Theresa May’s Conservatives to spill Brexit secrets. The political prize? The release of 58 studies on how leaving the European Union will affect industries that make up 88 percent of the economy. Brexit Secretary David Davis said he didn’t want to publish the studies because it would compromise the U.K.’s negotiating position. On Monday, he listed the sectors in a letter but stopped short of revealing more. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour wants to use an obscure legislative device to force the hand of Tories, who have been coy about what the economic fallout might be when the country leaves the 28-nation bloc.

On Wednesday, Labour will argue that lawmakers should have the right to see the studies, and will ask Parliament to vote to make “an humble address” to Queen Elizabeth II, asking her to order her ministers to release the assessments to the House of Commons Brexit Committee. This means-to-an-end hasn’t been used much since Victorian times. “Ministers cannot keep withholding vital information from Parliament about the impact of Brexit on jobs and the economy,” Labour Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said in an emailed statement.

Panic in Canberra.

• Australia’s Housing Boom Is ‘Officially Over’ – UBS (BBG)

The housing boom that has seen Australian home prices more than double since the turn of the century is “officially over,” after data showed prices now flatlining, UBS said. National house prices were unchanged in October from September, while annual growth has slowed to 7% from more than 10% as recently as July, CoreLogic data released Wednesday showed. “There is now a persistent and sharp slowdown unfolding,” UBS economists led by George Tharenou said in a report. “This suggests a tightening of financial conditions is unfolding, which we expect to weigh on consumption growth via a fading household-wealth effect.”

An end to Australia’s property boom will be welcome news for first-time buyers, who have struggled to break into the market after surging prices propelled Sydney past London and New York to be the second-most expensive housing market. Less impressed may be property investors, already squeezed by regulatory lending curbs that drove up mortgage rates. The cooling housing market may encourage the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates at a record low. A rate hike would be undesirable as it would put further downward pressure on dwelling prices, said Diana Mousina, senior economist at AMP Capital Investors.

Once they start locking up people, will Catalans still be non-violent?

• Government Raids On Catalonia Police Spark Fears Of Wider Crackdown (Ind.)

The acrimony and recriminations which followed Catalonia’s declaration of independence shows little sign of defusing following the fleeing of president Carles Puigdemont to Brussels. Spain’s civil guard raided the headquarters of the regional police, Mossos d’Esquadra, today drawing accusations of starting a crackdown. Computers and documents were taken away from the building in Sabadell as well as seven other offices. “We are carrying out inspections related to the Mossos d’Esquadra’s communications on the day of the illegal referendum,” said a civil guard spokesman. “This is something we are entitled to do.” The Mossos had been ordered by Madrid to stop the vote taking place, but they had refused, pointing out that this would have led to clashes with activists who had been protecting the polling stations. The national police, who were sent in, seized ballot boxes sparking violence.

The raids were viewed by some as the beginning of a punitive drive which will continue against separatists. As the news of the raids came in the afternoon, a group of activists approached police in Plaza de Colon in Barcelona city centre, the scene of huge demonstrations in recent weeks, offering sympathy and solidarity. The officers, whose chief Josep Lluis Trapero was sacked by Madrid at the weekend, were cautious in their response. “We are waiting to hear more details,” said one. “We don’t know any more than you do.” For Adreia Carbonell, a 23-year-old student and supporter of independence, the civil guard action was an ominous pointer for the future. “It is a form of counter-revolution,” she said. “The Spanish can now do what they like. There will be more raids, more arrests soon, you will see. They are intimidating our police who protect us and of course our government has gone.”

Double-sided. He’s gotten much weaker by leaving. But probably avoided a long jail term.

• Puigdemont Says Can’t Return To Catalonia, Spain Intent On ‘Vengeance’ (Ind.)

Hot, last-minute and chaotic, ousted Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont’s first press conference since fleeing Barcelona for Brussels was a fitting tribute to the political crisis that has gripped Spain. Amid speculation that he and members of his former cabinet would seek political asylum, fuelled by the comments of a Belgian minister, the disputed Catalan president instead recommitted himself to the independence cause. It is believed that Mr Puigdemont and his colleagues drove across the border into France before flying to Brussels on Monday, after Spain took over control of the Catalan region’s government and agencies. Mr Puigdemont said he could not return to Spain unless given clear assurances that he will be protected, accusing Madrid of being intent on “vengeance”.

He and his colleagues would stay in Belgium as long as their safety was not assured in Spain and would “continue our work despite the limits imposed on us.” Insisting he remained the rightful leader of Catalonia, Mr Puigdemont said his centre-right PDeCAT party would nonetheless accept the challenge of regional elections called for 21 December “with all our strength” and vowed that Catalan separatists would come out to vote. Spain wants Catalonia “to abandon our political project, and they won’t achieve it,” he said. As the news emerged on Monday that Mr Puigdemont’s contingent had fled the country, there was a distinct sense of deflation among those of his allies who remained in Barcelona to carry out a planned campaign of civil disobedience.

And as he entered the building in Brussels, he walked past protesters holding Spanish national flags and a sign that read “Estado de Derecho” – “Rule Of Law”. Other anti-independence demonstrators waving Catalan and Spanish flags chanted “viva Espana, viva Cataluña!” amid a heavy presence from Belgian police.

Horses and barns.

• New Jersey Sues OxyContin Maker, Links Marketing To Opioid Crisis (R.)

New Jersey on Tuesday sued Purdue Pharma LP, accusing the maker of the chronic pain medication OxyContin of fueling the state’s opioid crisis through deceptive marketing to doctors and patients, including the elderly and the “opioid-naive.” The state’s attorney general, Christopher Porrino, faulted what he called Purdue’s “almost inconceivable callousness and irresponsibility” in a decade-long campaign of downplaying the risks and exaggerating the benefits of opioids in the pursuit of profit. “We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense,” Purdue said in a statement. “We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution.” At least 11 U.S. states have sued Purdue over opioids, including a complaint filed by Alaska on Monday.

The grid’s a harsh mistress.

• Germany Forced To Pay Consumers To Use More Electricity

A stormy weekend led to free electricity in Germany, as Bloomberg reports wind generation reached a record, forcing power producers to pay customers the most since Christmas 2012 to use electricity. Power prices turned negative as wind output reached 39,409 megawatts on Saturday, equivalent to the output of about 40 nuclear reactors. To keep the grid supply and demand in balance, negative prices encourage producers to either shut power stations or else pay consumers to take the extra electricity off the network.

We get the intent, but what does this solve?

• Greece Plans An Unprecedented €30 Billion Debt Swap (BBG)

The Greek government is planning an unprecedented debt swap worth 29.7 billion euros ($34.5 billion) aimed at boosting the liquidity of its paper and easing the sale of new bonds in the future. Under a project that could be launched in mid November, the government plans to swap 20 bonds issued after a restructuring of Greek debt held by private investors in 2012 with as many as five new fixed-coupon bonds, according to two senior bankers with knowledge of the swap plan. The bank officials requested anonymity as the plan has yet to be made public. The maturities of the new bonds may be the same as for the existing notes, which range from 2023 to 2042. “The move aims to address the current illiquidity of the Greek bond market, ” according to analysts at Pantelakis Securities SA in Athens.

It will also “establish a decent yield curve, thus facilitating the country’s return to public debt markets.” The move comes as Greece prepares for life after the end of its current bailout program in August 2018. The debt swap is a step toward the country’s full return to markets required to avoid a new bailout program. The government plans to tap the bond market in 2018 to raise at least 6 billion euros to create an adequate buffer to honor debt obligations, according to a government official. The government has yet to decide on the exact timing of the swap, the Greek official said on condition of anonymity. One of the bank officials said that transaction could start on Nov. 13 and the settlement could happen a week later. The goal is to conclude the swap before the next mission of the country’s creditors, which is scheduled for the last week of November.

Maybe SYRIZA is the only force that can stop this.

• Greek PM Under Fire Over Migrants, Refugees (K.)

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his migration minister came under a hail of fire Monday from a radical faction within SYRIZA over the plight of the thousands of refugees and migrants stranded in Greece. The criticism was launched during a meeting of the party’s political secretariat at which Tsipras had hoped to showcase his government’s success in steering the country toward a post-bailout era. But instead, the government and Migration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas were slammed by members of the political secretariat that represent the Group of 53 faction – seen as a custodian of party purity – within SYRIZA, over the consistent violation of migrants and refugees’ human rights. More specifically, they blamed the leftist-led coalition government and Mouzalas for delays in providing migrants and refugees with appropriate accommodation as winter approaches.

Moreover, they slammed Tsipras for failing to absorb funds from the European Union and other international organizations intended to aid migrants and refugees. The government was also chided by the Group of 53 for giving its full support to last year’s agreement between the European Union and Turkey to stem the flow of migrants into Europe, while EU countries were not doing the same. “If you think I’m doing everything wrong, then I’ll resign,” Mouzalas told his critics at the meeting. However, members of the faction shot back, calling Mouzalas a hypocrite as they said he is planning to leave the ministry anyway as his name has been put forward for a seat on the Council of Europe.

Debt Rattle March 25 2016

Mar 252016

March 25, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: bubbles, crackdown, debt, extinction, housing, junk, NPL, refugees, sterling, yuan, zombies 2 Responses »

DPC Shoppers on Sixth Avenue, New York City 1903

• Bubbles Spread Like a Zombie Virus (BBG)

• Junk Territory: US Corporate Debt Ratings Near 15-Year Low (CNN)

• Earnings Growth Based On Debt And Buybacks? Totally Unsustainable (SA)

• Everyone Is Worried That A Third China Bubble Is About To Pop (BI)

• Coming to the Oil Patch: Bad Loans to Outnumber the Good (WSJ)

• Traders Are Betting Heavily That The Pound Will Drop To 1980s Lows (BBG)

• Yuan Weakens For 6th Straight Day – Longest Losing Streak In 2 Years (ZH)

• Sweden Cuts Maximum Mortgage Term To 105 Years -The Average Is 140 (Tel.)

• Shenzhen is Home To The Planet’s Fastest Rising House Prices (Guardian)

• Hedge Funds Control Greek NPLs Anyway (Kath.)

• Who Will Speak For The American White Working Class? (Guardian)

• China ‘Detains 20 Over Xi Resignation Letter’ (BBC)

• Facing Life Sentence, Turkish Journalist Vows To Expose State Crimes (Reuters)

• Mass Extinctions and Climate Change (C.)

• Has James Hansen Foretold The ‘Loss Of All Coastal Cities’? (G.)

• Greece Pledges To Provide Shelters For 50,000 Refugees Within 20 Days (Kath.)

Bubbles are so prevalent people tend not to see them anymore.

• Bubbles Spread Like a Zombie Virus (BBG)

The leading academic theory of asset bubbles is that they don’t really exist. When asset prices skyrocket, say mainstream theorists, it might mean that some piece of news makes rational investors realize that fundamental values like corporate earnings are going to be a lot higher than anyone had expected. Or perhaps some condition in the economy might make investors suddenly become much more tolerant of risk. But according to mainstream theory, bubbles are not driven by speculative mania, greed, stupidity, herd behavior or any other sort of psychological or irrational phenomenon. Inflating asset values are the normal, healthy functioning of an efficient market. Naturally, this view has convinced many people in finance that mainstream theorists are quite out of their minds. The problem is, mainstream theory has proven devilishly hard to disprove.

We can’t really observe how investors in the financial markets form their beliefs. So we can’t tell if their views are right or wrong, or whether they’re investing based on expectations or because of changing risk tolerance. Basically, because we can usually only look at the overall market, we can’t get into the nuts and bolts of how people decide what prices to pay. But what about the housing market? Housing is different from stocks and bonds in at least two big ways. First, because house purchases are not anonymous, we can observe who buys what. Second, housing markets are local, so we can see what is happening around them, and thus have some sort of idea what information they are receiving. These unique features allow us to know much more about the decision-making process of each buyer than we know about investors in the anonymous national financial markets.

In a new paper, economists Patrick Bayer, Kyle Mangum and James Roberts make great use of these features to study the mid-2000s U.S. housing boom. Their landmark results ought to have a major effect on the debate over asset bubbles. Bayer et al. find that as the market overheated, the frenzy spread like a virus from block to block. They look at the greater Los Angeles area – a hotbed of bubble activity – from 1989 through 2012. Since they want to focus on people buying houses as investments (rather than to live in), the authors looked only at people who bought multiple properties, and they tried to exclude primary residences from the sample. They found, unsurprisingly, that the peak years of 2004-2006 saw a huge spike in the number of new investors entering the market. Here is the graph from their paper:

It’s like when you start with a basket with a few bad apples: in the end, everything turns to junk.

• Junk Territory: US Corporate Debt Ratings Near 15-Year Low (CNN)

Red flags are rising on Corporate America’s debt. The average rating on U.S. corporate debt has hit nearly a 15-year low, according to a new report by Standard & Poor’s. “We believe corporate default rates could increase over the next few years,” according to S&P credit analysts Jacob Crooks and David Tesher. The average rating on companies that issue debt has fallen to ‘BB,’ or junk status. That is even below the average S&P rating for U.S. corporate debt during and in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. There are already concerns about energy companies defaulting on loans due to low oil prices. But new tech firms like Solera and media companies like iHeart too have had their credit rating downgraded this year, according to S&P. Since 2012, there’s been a surge in low-rated companies seeking cash.

In the past four years, S&P has assigned a single-B rating to 75% of companies accessing the debt markets for the first time. That rating is just one notch up from triple-C, a rating given to companies with a high probability of default. Companies with a single-B rating include PF Chang’s, Toys R US and Men’s Wearhouse (MW). That doesn’t mean they’re going to default: They’re just dangerously close to the territory where companies tend to default. The “rapid rise” in companies with low credit ratings accessing the bond markets can be traced to the easy availability of cash in recent years. How did this happen?

Here are a few key dominoes.
1. The Fed created a super low interest rate environment when it put rates next to zero in 2008.
2. Investors looking for more yield move away from safe assets like U.S. Treasury bonds and into higher-risk assets like bonds issued by lower-rated companies.
3. That makes it easier for low-rated companies to get cash at low rates from the capital markets.
Now, however, the tables are turning. The Fed is slowly starting to increase rates and investors’ appetite – and the cash available – for low-rated companies is on the decline. Add to that the gloomy outlook for the global economy and low commodity prices, and some companies may struggle to pay back what they borrowed.

History rhymes.

• Earnings Growth Based On Debt And Buybacks? Totally Unsustainable (SA)

My grandfather was never rich. He did have some money in the 1920s, but he lost most of it at the tail end of the decade. Some of it disappeared in the stock market crash in October of 1929. The rest of his deposits fell victim to the collapse of New York’s Bank of the United States in December of 1931. I wish I could say that my grandfather recovered from the wrath of the stock market disaster and subsequent bank failures. For the most part, however, living above the poverty line was about the best that he could do financially, as he buckled down to raise two children in Queens. There was one financial feature of my grandfather’s life that provided him with greater self-worth. Specifically, he refused to take on significant debt because he remained skeptical of credit. And with good reason.

The siren’s song of “you-can-pay-me-Tuesday-for-a-hamburger-today” only created an illusion of wealth in the Roaring Twenties; in fact, unchecked access to favorable borrowing terms as well as speculative excess in the use of debt contributed mightily to the country’s eventual descent into the Great Depression. G-Pops wanted no part of the next debt-fueled crisis. Here’s something few people know about the past: Consumer debt more than doubled during the ten year-period of the Roaring 1920s (1/1/1920-12/31/1929). And while you may often hear the debt apologist explain how the only thing that matters about debt is the ability to service it, the reckless dismissal ignores the reality of virtually all financial catastrophes.

During the Asian Currency Crisis and the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management (1997-1998), fast-growing emerging economies (e.g., South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) experienced extraordinary capital inflows. Most of the inflows? Speculative borrowed dollars. When those economies showed signs of strain, “hot money” quickly shifted to outflows, depreciating local currencies and leaving over-leveraged hedge funds on the wrong side of currency trades. The Fed-orchestrated bailout of Long-Term Capital coupled with rate cutting activity prevented the 19% S&P 500 declines and 35% NASDAQ depreciation from charting a full-fledged stock bear. Did we see similar debt-fueled excess leading into the 2000-2002 S&P 500 bear (50%-plus)? Absolutely. How long could margin debt extremes prosper in the so-called New-Economy?

How many dot-com day-traders would find themselves destitute toward the end of the tech bubble? Bring it forward to 2007-2009 when housing prices began to plummet in earnest. How many “no-doc” loans and “negative am” mortgages came with a promise of real estate riches? Instead, subprime credit abuse brought down the households that lied to get their loans, destroyed the financial institutions that had these “toxic assets” on their books, and overwhelmed the government’s ability to manage the inevitable reversal of fortune in stocks and the overall economy. Just like 1929-1932. Just like 1997-1998. Just like 2000-2002.

Housing, stocks and now credit.

• Everyone Is Worried That A Third China Bubble Is About To Pop (BI)

First, China’s property bubble popped. Then, China’s stock market bubble burst over the summer, and investors lost a ton of money before the government took control of the system. Now the concern floating around the world of markets is that the third in China’s “triple bubble” is about to burst. That bubble is credit, especially corporate bonds, which have absolutely exploded over the past year as refugees from the other bubble bursts searched for yield. This one is going to be for a very straightforward reason, too — supply. Simply put, there are about to be too many bonds in China, and that could ultimately harm the weakest part of the Chinese economy, the debt-loaded zombie companies that helped form the property bubble and are now unable to turn a healthy profit.

Here’s how all of this happened. When the Chinese stock market went careening downward last summer, a ton of the money that was invested in the market ran into the credit market, specifically corporate bonds. “In our view, China is in the midst of a triple bubble, with the third-biggest credit bubble of all time, the largest investment bubble (proxied by the investment share of GDP) and the second-biggest real-estate bubble,” Credit Suisse analyst Andrew Garthwaite wrote in a note back in July. This was great for China’s debt-laden corporates. They could keep running on easy credit because demand was so high. Corporate-bond issuance increased 21% from 2014 to 2015, and by the end of last year their total stock made up 21.6% of GDP, as opposed 18.4% the year before, according to Societe Generale.

Chinese Treasury-bond supply is set to increase too, from 936 billion yuan in 2015 to 1.4 trillion yuan in 2016. At the same time, the government has been getting a move on an important project it has been working on for some time — turning local-government debt from the country’s infrastructure boom into a real municipal-bond market. We’re talking a lot of money here. In March alone the government allowed 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) of local-government debt to be converted into local-government bonds (LGB). In 2016 analysts expect the government to issue another 6 trillion yuan in LGBs. That’s a lot of bonds.

Denial continues.

• Coming to the Oil Patch: Bad Loans to Outnumber the Good (WSJ)

Bad loans are likely to outnumber good ones soon in the U.S. oil patch, an indication of the pressure on energy companies and their lenders from the crash in prices. The number of energy loans labeled as “classified,” or in danger of default, is on course to extend above 50% this year at several major banks, including Wells Fargo and Comerica, according to bankers and others in the industry. In response, several major banks are reducing their exposure to the energy sector by attempting to sell off souring loans, declining to renew them or clamping down on the ability of oil and gas companies to tap credit lines for cash, according to more than a dozen bankers, lawyers and others familiar with the plans.

The pullback is curtailing the flow of money to companies struggling to survive a prolonged stretch of low prices, likely quickening the path to bankruptcy for some firms. 51 North American oil-and-gas producers have already filed for bankruptcy since the start of 2015, cases totaling $17.4 billion in cumulative debt, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. That trails the number from September 2008 to December 2009 during the global financial crisis, when there were 62 filings, but is expected to grow: About 175 companies are at high risk of not being able to meet loan covenants, according to Deloitte. “This has the makings of a gigantic funding crisis” for energy companies, said William Snyder, head of Deloitte’s U.S. restructuring unit. If oil prices, which closed at $39.79 a barrel Wednesday, remain at around $40 a barrel this year, “that’s fairly catastrophic.”

Against the USD is a safe bet if the term is long enough.

• Traders Are Betting Heavily That The Pound Will Drop To 1980s Lows (BBG)

As Britain ponders its future in the EU, investors are betting an amount almost the size of Iceland’s economy on the pound falling to levels last seen in the 1980s. At least 11 billion pounds ($16 billion) has been wagered this year on options that would profit if sterling fell to or below $1.3502, a 4.5% drop from current levels, after the June 23 referendum. More than half of the positions were placed since the date of the vote was set on Feb. 20. The figures give an indication of what’s at stake as investors weigh the possibility of the U.K. quitting the world’s largest single market, which accounts for about half its imports and exports. Even with opinion polls showing no clear lead for either side, the prospect of a “Brexit” has seen the pound fall more than any other major currency versus the dollar this year.

“There is a risk premium in sterling, both in terms of the spot rate and in terms of the volatility market, but this is one of those events where you have no way of calibrating how big it should be,” said Paul Meggyesi at JPMorgan Chase in London. “Few investors believe that sterling has fallen to levels where the risk-reward favors buying.” While tumbling to $1.3502 would barely exceed the pound’s decline so far this year, it would take the U.K. currency to the lowest level since 1985. Traders assign 54% odds to sterling reaching that level by the day of the referendum, according to Bloomberg’s options calculator. Meggyesi sees the pound falling to $1.38 by mid-year, from $1.4145 as of 4:45 p.m. London time on Thursday. Even forecasts of a drop to these levels may be optimistic if the U.K. actually ends up leaving the EU.

In the shadows, China keeps devaluing.

• Yuan Weakens For 6th Straight Day – Longest Losing Streak In 2 Years (ZH)

PBOC fixed the Yuan at its weakest in 3 weeks, pushing the devaluation streak to its longest since early January. However, Offshore Yuan has now dropped over 1.1% against the USD, extending losses for the 6th straight day to 3-week lows. This is the longest streak of weakness in the offshore Yuan since April 2014.

It appears EUR and JPY took enough pain so the basket is reverting to the USD again…

What’s the opposite of passive-aggressive as a clear message is being sent to The Fed – tighten and we unleash the Yuan-weakness-driven turmoil…

Now that’s a housing bubble.

• Sweden Cuts Maximum Mortgage Term To 105 Years -The Average Is 140 (Tel.)

Think there’s a housing affordability crisis in Britain, with low mortgage rates likely to drive house prices even higher? Take a look at Sweden where lending policies have been more generous, and where house price inflation has been (at least recently) more extreme. A number of banks and analysts have warned that Sweden’s housing market is overheating, with HSBC in January saying: “The pace of acceleration in the housing market points to a bubble.” House prices across the country were up 18pc last year. This compares to Britain’s house price rises in 2015 of between 5pc and 10pc, depending on which index is used. Now Sweden is dealing with its overheated housing market by reining in mortgage availability.

Regulators introduced restrictions which will mean mortgage terms – the time homebuyers have to clear the debt – will be drastically reduced to just… 105 years. The move comes because historically there has been no time limit on mortgage duration. So as prices rose and affordability became tougher, Swedish banks’ response was to extend terms, as had been the case in other high-cost property markets including Japan in the Eighties. The average term is reported to be 140 years. This meant many people who inherited property but who could not afford to take on the mortgage debt had to sell up. Swedish banks were quoted in the local press as opposing the move.

“It isn’t good for the finances of households as it will make mortgages more expensive and the terms not as good. And it isn’t good for financial stability,” the head of Swedish Bankers’ Association was reported to say. In Britain, there has been a move by some lenders to increase mortgage terms but only for younger borrowers. Even then, the maximum term tends to be 35 years, although some lenders – including Halifax and Nationwide – go up to 40, brokers say. The Mortgage Market Review introduced by British regulators in 2013 made it difficult for lenders to arrange loans which went into borrowers’ likely retirement.

And here’s another one. How desperate must Xi be to let this happen?!

• Shenzhen is Home To The Planet’s Fastest Rising House Prices (Guardian)

House prices in Shenzhen, the city which is a hub for technology hardware and known as China’s Silicon Valley, soared by almost 50% last year – the fastest growth in residential property prices worldwide. A new survey puts two Chinese cities – Shenzhen and Shanghai – in the top five fastest-growing property markets despite the Chinese stock market tumbling in 2015. The research, by the estate agents Knight Frank (pdf), also shows the impact of last year’s debt crisis in Greece. House prices in the two biggest Greek cities – Thessaloniki and Athens – were both ranked among the worst six in the survey of 165 cities, falling 5.9% and 4.8% respectively. There were also significant drops in some Italian cities, including Rome, Trieste and Genoa. Nicosia and Larnaca in Cyprus were also among the worst performers.

The Global Residential Cities Index showed that house prices in cities worldwide went up 4.4%. Behind Shenzhen, Auckland was the second fastest growing market with rises of 25.4%, followed by Istanbul (25%) and Sydney (19.9%). Shenzhen has become a hub for the production of hardware used in electronics and has a permanent population of 10 million, rising to 15 million in the summer – autumn electronics season. Their average age is 30. The city bordering Hong Kong did not exist 30 years ago, sporting just a few fishing villages. In 1979, it was declared China’s first special economic zone and surrounded by an 85-mile long, barbed wire fence. Investment and migrant workers flooded the area and factories and housing were built from scratch. By the mid-90s, the population had climbed to 3 million.

In 2004, the first metro station opened and a decade later the network had grown to 131 stations. Two Turkish cities featured in the top 10 – Istanbul and Izmir – while Budapest recorded the biggest rise among European Union cities, with prices up 16.3%. Budapest is also the strongest performing capital city in the index, with demand fuelled by an investment immigration bond for Chinese nationals. Cities traditionally associated with high prices failed to feature prominently. London was ranked at 16 (11.4% growth) with New York at 89th (3.3%). The fast rising prices of Sydney, the fourth fastest rising market, has resulted in high rents and the same sort of concerns about the effects on the young population in the city as in London. In the US, Portland in Oregon and San Francisco were the highest risers, both with increases over the year of 10%. The fastest growing North American city was Vancouver, with prices up nearly 12% on an annual basis.

Greece is ruled by the global finance squid.

• Hedge Funds Control Greek NPLs Anyway (Kath.)

Despite all the government talk about the nonperforming loans secured by borrowers’ homes being protected from falling into the hands of hedge funds, the latest recapitalization process has resulted in the entire credit sector now being controlled by foreign investors – hedge funds no less. Those foreign firms, the majority of which control high-risk portfolios, hold stakes of more than 50% in all of Greece’s systemic lenders, and in some cases far above that. Therefore, by extension, they control a loan portfolio which exceeds 200 billion euros and includes performing loans amounting to some 100 billion and bad loans that also add up to around 100 billion, and there is currently a negotiations battle under way for them not to be sold on to others.

It makes no difference to borrowers who owns their loans; it is the general legal framework and the legal moves they can make in case they are unable to fulfill their obligations that matter. The banks’ planning does not provide for the sale of bad loans, and there are strong indications that the existing stock of NPLs includes many strategic defaulters who have taken advantage of the crisis to avoid fulfilling their obligations. The Bank of Greece estimates that they account for 20% of all bad loans.

“..an economic version of the Hunger Games.”

• Who Will Speak For The American White Working Class? (Guardian)

The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support. The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt to dissect what he calls “downscale communities”. He describes them as filled with welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy – and then proclaims: “Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster, There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

A few days later, another columnist, David French, added: “Simply put, [white working class] Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin.” Both suggested the answer to their problems is they need to move. “They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” Downscale communities are everywhere in America, not just limited to Appalachia and the Rust Belt – it’s where I have spent much of the past five years documenting poverty and addiction. To say that “nothing happened to them” is stunningly wrong. Over the past 35 years the working class has been devalued, the result of an economic version of the Hunger Games.

It has pitted everyone against each other, regardless of where they started. Some contestants, such as business owners, were equipped with the fanciest weapons. The working class only had their hands. They lost and have been left to deal on their own. The consequences can be seen in nearly every town and rural county and aren’t confined to the industrial north or the hills of Kentucky either. My home town in Florida, a small town built around two orange juice factories, lost its first factory in 1985 and its last in 2005. [..] Over the past 35 years, except for the very wealthy, incomes have stagnated, with more people looking for fewer jobs. Jobs for those who work with their hands, manufacturing employment, has been the hardest hit, falling from 18m in the late 1980s to 12m now.

The economic devaluation has been made more painful by the fraying of the social safety net, and more visceral by the vast increase at the top. It is one thing to be spinning your wheels stuck in the mud, but it is even more demeaning to watch as others zoom by on well-paved roads, none offering help. It is not just about economic issues and jobs. Culturally, we are witnessing a tale of two Americas that are growing more distinct by the day.

Crackdowns deflate economic confidence.

• China ‘Detains 20 Over Xi Resignation Letter’ (BBC)

A total of 20 people have been detained in China following the publication of a letter calling on President Xi Jinping to resign, the BBC has learned. The letter was posted earlier this month on a state-backed website Wujie News. Although quickly deleted by the authorities, a cached version can still be found online. In most countries the contents of the letter would be run-of-the-mill political polemic. “Dear Comrade Xi Jinping, we are loyal Communist Party members,” it begins, and then cuts to the chase. “We write this letter asking you to resign from all party and state leadership positions.” But in China, of course, and in particular on a website with official links, this kind of thing is unheard of and there have already been signs of a stern response by the authorities. The detention of a prominent columnist, Jia Jia, was widely reported to be in connection with the letter.

Friends say he simply called the editor of Wujie to enquire about it after seeing it on line. But now the BBC has spoken to a staff member at Wujie who has asked to remain anonymous and who has told us that in addition to Jia Jia another 16 people have been “taken away”. The source said they included six colleagues who work directly for the website, including a senior manager and a senior editor, and another 10 people who work for a related technology company. And a well-know Chinese dissident living in the US said three members of his family, living in China’s Guangdong Province, had also been detained in connection with the letter. Wen Yunchao said he believed his parents and his brother had been detained because authorities were trying to pressure him to reveal information. But he told the BBC that he knew nothing about the letter.

The letter focuses its anger on what it says is President Xi’s “gathering of all power” in his own hands, and it accuses him of major economic and diplomatic miscalculations, as well as “stunning the country” by placing further restrictions on freedom of speech. The latter is a reference to Mr Xi’s high profile visit last month to state-run TV and newspaper offices, where he told journalists that their primary duty was to obey the Communist Party. The letter first appeared on an overseas-based Chinese language website, well outside the realm of Communist Party censors, but the big question is how it then made its way onto Wujie. The idea that any Chinese editor of sane mind would knowingly publish such a document seems so unlikely that there has been speculation amongst some Chinese journalists, in private, that Wujie was either hacked, or had perhaps been using some kind of automatic trawling and publishing software.

The backdrop of the refugee deal. Yes, we have no decency.

• Facing Life Sentence, Turkish Journalist Vows To Expose State Crimes (Reuters)

One of two prominent Turkish journalists facing life in prison on charges of espionage vowed to make the trial, which begins on Friday, a prosecution of official wrongdoing. Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, told Reuters he would use his trial, which has drawn international condemnation, to refocus attention on the story that landed him in the dock. Dundar, 54, and Erdem Gul, 49, Cumhuriyet’s Ankara bureau chief, stand accused of trying to topple the government over the publication last May of video purporting to show Turkey’s state intelligence agency helping to truck weapons to Syria in 2014. “We are not defendants, we are witnesses,” Dundar said in an interview at his office, promising to show the footage in court despite a ban and at the risk that judges may order the hearings to be held behind closed doors.

“We will lay out all of the illegalities and make this a political prosecution … The state was caught in a criminal act, and it is doing all that it can to cover it up.” Dundar and Gul spent 92 days in jail, almost half of it in solitary confinement, before the constitutional court ruled last month that pre-trial detention was unfounded because the charges stemmed from their journalism. Both were subsequently released pending trial, although President Tayyip Erdogan said he did not respect the ruling. Erdogan has acknowledged that the trucks, which were stopped by gendarmerie and police officers en route to the Syrian border, belonged to the MIT intelligence agency and said they were carrying aid to Turkmens in Syria. Turkmen fighters are battling both President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and Islamic State.

Erdogan has said prosecutors had no authority to order the trucks be searched and that they acted as part of a plot to discredit the government, allegations the prosecutors denied. Erdogan has cast the newspaper’s coverage as part of an attempt to undermine Turkey’s global standing and has vowed Dundar would “pay a heavy price.” The trial comes as Turkey deflects criticism from the European Union and rights groups that it is bridling a once vibrant press. “We were arrested for two reasons: to punish us and to frighten others. And we see the intimidation has been effective. Fear dominates,” Dundar said.

800,000 years and counting.

• Mass Extinctions and Climate Change (C.)

We now know that greenhouse gases are rising faster than at any time since the demise of dinosaurs, and possibly even earlier. According to research published in Nature Geoscience this week, carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is being added to the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during a major warming event about 50 million years ago. We have emitted almost 600 billion tonnes of carbon since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and atmospheric COC concentrations are now increasing at a rate of 3 parts per million (ppm) per year. With increasing CO2 levels, temperatures and ocean acidification also rise, and it is an open question how ecosystems are going to cope under such rapid change. Coral reefs, our canary in the coal mine, suggest that the present rate of climate change is too fast for many species to adapt: the next widespread extinction event might have already started.

In the past, rapid increases in greenhouse gases have been associated with mass extinctions. It is therefore important to understand how unusual the current rate of atmospheric CO2 increase is with respect to past climate variability. There is no doubt that atmospheric COC concentrations and global temperatures have changed in the past. Ice sheets, for example, are reliable book-keepers of ancient climate and can give us an insight into climate conditions long before the thermometer was invented. By drilling holes into ice sheets we can retrieve ice cores and analyse the accumulation of ancient snow, layer upon layer. These ice cores not only record atmospheric temperatures through time, they also contain frozen bubbles that provide us with small samples of ancient air. Our longest ice core extends more than 800,000 years into the past.

During this time, the Earth oscillated between cold ice ages and warm interglacials . To move from an ice age to an interglacial, you need to increase COC by roughly 100 ppm. This increase repeatedly melted several kilometre-thick ice sheets that covered the locations of modern cities like Toronto, Boston, Chicago or Montreal. With increasing COC levels at the end of the last ice age, temperatures increased too. Some ecosystems could not keep up with the rate of change, resulting in several megafaunal extinctions, although human impacts were almost certainly part of the story. Nevertheless, the rate of change in COC over the past million years was tame when compared to today. The highest recorded rate of change before the Industrial Revolution is less than 0.15 ppm per year, just one-twentieth of what we are experiencing today.

“All hell will break loose in the North Atlantic and neighbouring lands..”

• Has James Hansen Foretold The ‘Loss Of All Coastal Cities’? (G.)

James Hansen’s name looms large over any history that will likely be written about climate change. Whether you look at the hard science, the perils of political interference or modern day activism, Dr Hansen is there as a central character. In a 1988 US Senate hearing, Hansen famously declared that the “greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. Towards the end of his time as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen described how government officials had on other occasions changed his testimony, filtered scientific findings and controlled what scientists could and couldn’t say to the media – all to underplay the impact of fossil fuel emissions on the climate. In recent years, the so-called “grandfather of climate science” has added to his CV the roles of author and twice-arrested climate activist and anti-coal campaigner. He still holds a position at Columbia University.

So when Hansen’s latest piece of blockbuster climate research was finalized and released earlier this week, there was understandable global interest, not least because it mapped a potential path to the “loss of all coastal cities” from rising sea levels and the onset of “super storms” previously unseen in the modern era. So what is Hansen claiming? Well, the first thing to understand is that Hansen’s paper, written with 18 other co-authors, many of them highly-reputable names in climate science in their own right, is far from conventional. Most scientific papers only take up four or five pages in a journal. Hansen’s paper – in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics – grabs 52 pages (although it’s hard to quibble over space when you’re laying out a possible path to widespread global disruption and the complete reshaping of coastlines).

Nor was the paper published in a conventional way. If you’re getting a faint sense of déjà vu about Hansen’s findings, then that could be down to how a draft version of the study was published and widely covered in July last year. The journal runs an unconventional interactive system of peer review where comments and criticisms from other scientists are published for everyone to see, as are the responses from Hansen and his colleagues. This is arguably a more transparent way of conducting the scientific process of peer review – something usually carried out privately and anonymously. None of this should really detract from Hansen and his co-author’s central claims. Firstly, Hansen says they may have uncovered a mechanism in the Earth’s climate system not previously understood that could point to a much more rapid rise in sea levels. When the Earth’s ice sheets melt, they place a freshwater lens over neighboring oceans.

This lens, argues Hansen, causes the ocean to retain extra heat, which then goes to melting the underside of large ice sheets that fringe the ocean, causing them to add more freshwater to the lens (this is what’s known as a “positive feedback” and is not to be confused with the sort of positive feedback you may have got at school for that cracking fifth grade science assignment). Secondly, according to the paper, all this added water could first slow and then shut down two key ocean currents – and Hansen points to two unusually cold blobs of ocean water off Greenland and off Antarctica as evidence that this process may already be starting. If these ocean conveyors were to be impacted, this could create much greater temperature differences between the tropics and the north Atlantic, driving “super storms stronger than any in modern times”, he argues. “All hell will break loose in the North Atlantic and neighbouring lands,” he says in a video summary.

Europe is waiting for unrest in Greece to break out. Then it can send in it own police and military forces. or so it thinks.

• Greece Pledges To Provide Shelters For 50,000 Refugees Within 20 Days (Kath.)

The government said Thursday it will fast-track procedures to create new centers to accommodate 30,000 people within the next 20 days as it finds itself in a race against time to meet an obligation to provide shelter to more than 50,000 asylum seekers stranded in the country, and to prevent an imminent humanitarian disaster. The current capacity of shelters is 38,000. The decision came after a meeting of the government’s council of ministers, chaired by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, amid a growing sense of urgency surrounding camps around the country and the increasing realization that the existing infrastructure simply cannot cope with the huge refugee numbers. It also follows the worsening toll on migrants’ health after the withdrawal on Wednesday of aid agencies from camps in Greece to protest the recent EU-Turkey deal – which was activated last Sunday – to stem refugee inflows to Europe, which, they say, contravenes international law.

At the same time, the spokesman of the coordinating committee for refugees, Giorgos Kyritsis, said legislation facilitating the implementation of the EU deal will be tabled in Parliament on Wednesday. The government also said it will further empower the Immigration Policy Ministry to deal with increased obligations implicit in the deal, while temporary staff will also be enlisted. Kyritsis also announced the creation of a monitoring mechanism under the general secretary of the Defense Ministry, Yiannis Tafyllis. The government’s immediate priority, Kyritsis said, will be to provide relief to the sprawling and overcrowded border camp of Idomeni in northern Greece. He added that transport means will be made available over the next few days to transfer refugees to other centers affording more humane conditions.

The mayor of the nearby town of Paionia, Christos Goudenoudis, is calling for the camp’s immediate evacuation as the local community, he said, is feeling increasingly insecure as crime in the area has proliferated. Meanwhile the latest figures suggest a marked decrease in refugee flows into the country over the last few days, while none arrived Thursday – for the first time since the deal between the European Union and Turkey was struck. Authorities, however, have attributed this mostly to bad weather. On Tuesday, inflows were limited to 260 – a significant decrease from the several thousand a couple of weeks ago.