Menu Icon

Debt Rattle April 24 2026

Apr 242026
 
 April 24, 2026  Posted by at 9:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Georgia O’Keeffe New York Street with Moon 1925


• Trump Says Not Anxious, ‘All The Time In The World’ To End War (ZH)
• Mojtaba Khamenei With Medical Team In 24/7 Hideout, Generals Run Iran: NYT (ZH)
• Trump Orders U.S. Navy to Shoot Any Iranian Mine Ships (Catherine Salgado)
• Trump: Fossil Fuels Essential To National Security (JTN)
• Greg Gutfeld Savages the SPLC and the Democrats Who Took the Bait (Margolis)
• Judge Dismisses Kash Patel’s Defamation Lawsuit (CNBC)
• Lavrov Warns Of ‘Rampant Satanism’ In EU (RT)
• Professor Defines Elderly Americans as the New Class Enemy (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Resurrection of Ron DeSantis (Scott Pinsker)
• Obama’s ‘Dreamer’ Fairy Tale Just Got Torched (Margolis)
• The U.S. Military Is Running a Bitcoin Node, Admiral Paparo Reveals (BCM)
• European Car Sales Jump 11% As Fuel Shock Drives EV Demand (ZH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2046894247761043566?s=20

 


 


First they get a chance to tell him who to talk to. I don’t think he’ll give them much time.

• Trump Says Not Anxious, ‘All The Time In The World’ To End War (ZH)

A huge breakthrough in Lebanon, where President Trump has declared an extended ceasefire for three weeks – though there have still been reports of sporadic fighting involving Israel and Hezbollah – the latter which hasn’t signed on to a ceasefire: Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend their ceasefire by three weeks following a meeting in the White House with top U.S. officials, President Donald Trump said Thursday.


“The Meeting went very well!” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the extension of the temporary truce. “The United States is going to work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah,” Trump wrote, referring to the Iran-backed militia group. “The Ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended by THREE WEEKS,” he wrote. Meanwhile, that Iran timeline keeps getting more and more open-ended…

President Trump pushes back on claims he is anxious to end the war; says he has all the time in the world, Iran does not. However, consumer prices and at the pump could steadily rise and next fall’s Congressional midterms might beg to differ. Here’s some of what Trump said:

• Iran’s Navy is lying at the bottom of the Sea, their Air Force is demolished, their Anti Aircraft and Radar Weaponry is gone, their leaders are no longer with us, the Blockade is airtight and strong and, from there, it only gets worse — Time is not on their side!

• A Deal will only be made when it’s appropriate and good for the United States of America, our Allies and, in fact, the rest of the World.

The earlier reports of ‘air defenses active over Tehran’ was the result of a drill, Iran says. And more importantly, Tehran is rejecting Israeli media reports of a big shake-up centered on Iran’s Parliament Speaker.

Parliament Speaker Resigns after IRGC Intervention
Israel’s N12 News has issued a breaking headline claiming that Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Ghalibaf, who has appeared to run the day to day over the civilian government, has resigned from the country’s negotiating team following the intervention of the IRGC. There have been rumors and unverified murmurings that he was even arrested. Of course, given this comes via Israel – which is a party to the conflict – it should be taken with a grain of salt until verified; however Newsquawk notes it was enough to hit stocks and cause a spike in crude…

Meanwhile, Iranian social media accounts of Iran’s two highest civilian officials have sought to push back against the current White House/MSM consensus that Washington is dealing with a fractured, divided Iranian nation when it comes to negotiations:

Iran Asserts US Blockade Breached; Could Build Nuke “If We Wanted To”
US CENTCOM on Thursday announced its forces have redirected 33 Iran-linked vessels in the Hormuz Strait since the start of the blockade; however, Iranian state media is citing the below public source tanker data (in a Telegram post) to proclaim that four Iranian oil tankers successfully crossed the US blockade and enter Iranian waters.

According to the latest statements out of top Iran officials, Tehran is demonstrating “strength” in the strait, and also the foreign ministry has insisted that while the country is still not seeking nuclear weapons, it possesses the capability to create a bomb if needed. Via Al Jazeera: “We are not seeking to manufacture a nuclear bomb from our stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and if we wanted to, we could.”Meanwhile Iran’s foreign ministry has commented on the freeze on Pakistan talks, saying it has not decided to participate as of yet, but emphasized too that it is “not an option” to transfer out of the country its highly enriched uranium.

Read more …

The attack that killed his father injured Mojtaba much worse than they let on. If it didn’t outright kill him too. Today, they regret presenting him as the leader back then.

• Mojtaba Khamenei With Medical Team In 24/7 Hideout, Generals Run Iran: NYT (ZH)

The NY Times in a new deep dive of what governing structures now look like inside Iran says what’s already long been obvious to many in the wake of longtime Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death: “When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran as the supreme leader, he exerted absolute power over all decisions about war, peace and negotiations with the United States. His son and successor does not play the same role.” The publication says it was able to interview at least half-a-dozen Iranian insiders, including IRGC officials, and individuals who know the younger Khamenei “well”. The NY Times describes of Mojtaba Khamenei: “His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.”


Apparently even top ‘trusted’ generals and IRGC commanders do visit him for fear of being surveilled and tracked to his location by Israel and the United States. Per the sources cited in the Times, “Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health.” And more: “One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.”

All of this provides an explanation as to why he has never been seen or heard from in public since Trump’s Operation Epic Fury began on February 28. He has not so much as been photographed, and when state media has issued a few prior statements, it does so via text or what appears to be AI-configured audio over state media airwaves. This fact has unleashed an avalanche of speculation as to his fate over the course of the war, and who is “really in charge”. And yet it’s also well-known that Iran is able to function militarily based on autonomy and dispersion of command among units, with the IRGC given more independence to act.

The White House has alleged there are essentially two factions vying for power and direction over the war – the civilian leadership and the IRGC command sides. “Mojtaba is not yet in full command or control,” Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa for Chatham House, claimed in the NYT report. But as expected the situation is nuanced: “There is, perhaps, deference to him,” he continued. “He signs off or he is part of the decision-making structure in a formal way. But he is presented with fait accompli presentations right now.”

As we and other have pointed out, in public at least the de facto day-to-day leader of the country remains speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. He has taken point as lead negotiator with the United States in Pakistan, and has been the public face of updating his country and the world on both the status of the war and the now stalled negotiations. One other interesting detail in the Times report is seen in the following:

Messages to him are handwritten, sealed in envelopes and relayed via a human chain from one trusted courier to the next, who travel on highways and back roads, in cars and on motorcycles until they reach his hide-out. His guidance on issues snakes back the same way. Some pundits have correctly pointed out that skepticism is warranted, also given the NYT’s often deeply inaccurate reporting on Bush’s Iraq war invasion, and other Mideast conflict zones including Syria: With all due respect, remain skeptical about the credibility of the The New York Times report.

The NY Times alleged findings has it to the conclusion that even big decisions are currently under control of the generals and IRGC apparatus: “The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now,” the report concludes.

Read more …

Seems a bit late.

• Trump Orders U.S. Navy to Shoot Any Iranian Mine Ships (Catherine Salgado)

President Donald Trump announced that he has given orders to the United States Navy to eliminate any Iranian vessels that they catch trying to drop more mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The president posted on Truth Social Thursday, “I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump emphasized, “There is to be no hesitation. Additionally, our mine ‘sweepers’ are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”


The Iranian regime dropped as many mines in the strait as they could during the active phase of the joint Israeli-U.S. Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion. After the ceasefire announcement and the initial Iranian violations by bombing other countries, the murderous mullahs also absolutely refused to remove mines from the strait but demanded tolls from any countries that sent ships through anyway.

Furthermore, on April 23, Trump posted, “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know! The infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY! We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

It is not clear to whom Trump referred as “moderates,” because all the leaders of the Iranian regime still in power are part of the world’s worst terrorist regime that has been attacking Americans for nearly half a century. Tens of thousands of Persian freedom protesters remain in prison, many scheduled for execution.

Speaking of hardliners, one of the main Iranian leaders supposed to be negotiating with the United States, with whom Vice President JD Vance met in Pakistan, just went on Arab language television to smirk, boast, and defy the U.S. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Baqer “Death to America” Ghalibaf (or Qalibaf) needs to go back on the elimination list, because he is making it perfectly clear he has no intention of ever making peace with the “great Satan” America and the “little Satan” Israel.

“I, as a soldier, am fighting in the realm of negotiations,” Qalibaf smirked. “In this situation, negotiations constitute a form of fighting. I ask our dear people to unite around the three fighting arenas, which, in fact, constitute one battlefield — raising the flag of victory and making our people’s gains official.” He claimed that Americans removing Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz were a “violation of the ceasefire.”

Read more …

“The five orders seek to address a number of bottlenecks and impediments to coal, natural gas and petroleum production, including financial support, infrastructure development, improved supply chains, and permit expediting.”

• Trump: Fossil Fuels Essential To National Security (JTN)

President Donald Trump has signed five executive orders that address critical segments of the nation’s energy infrastructure – a move made under the presidential determinations of the Defense Production Act that allows a U.S. president to mobilize industry for purposes of national security. The two-term president has long pushed for energy development and the infrastructure to support it as a key aspect of national security. The orders, signed amid the U.S. war with Iran, seek to address issues with the aging electricity grid, the need for natural gas pipelines, coal supply chains and large-scale electricity projects. They don’t refer to wind and solar energy, but they identify “intermittent energy” as a threat to a secure supply of energy.


Iran and neighboring Persian Gulf states account for as much as 50% of the world’s oil reserves, but the U.S. is not dependent on the region for its oil. Still, the orders signed Tuesday by Trump will go a long way toward helping secure American energy dominance, David Blackmon, an analyst with over 40 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, said on his “Energy Additions” Substack, “Taken together, these five actions represent the most comprehensive federal push for all-of-the-above energy in modern history. They cut through the red tape, provide the financial backstops markets sometimes need for massive infrastructure bets, and explicitly reject the notion that we can ‘transition’ away from reliable hydrocarbons without destroying our economy and security,” he wrote.

Order 1: Large-scale energy development
Focuses on large-scale energy development, covering a range of activities from the development of power plants to financing. It aims to cut through red tape and long permitting times to accelerate projects. Reduces financial risks, regulatory delays and other barriers that impede investment and development. Supports the deployment of power plants, supports manufacturing, enables infrastructure construction, site preparation and financing in the early stages of the projects. Prioritizes domestic energy-related manufacturing to support infrastructure development.

Order 2: Grid infrastructure
Aims to shore up America’s electricity grid, which has run into bottlenecks due to long lead times for things like transformers, dependency on foreign supply chains and permitting delays. Transmission projects can take decades and cost billions of dollars. The order identifies America’s aging and inadequate grid as a threat to national defense and economic prosperity. Identifies the need to reduce lead times on equipment and infrastructure, including transformers, conductors, substations and related raw materials. Encourages increased domestic production of materials and components. Identifies purchases, purchase commitments and financial support as actions needed for development of U.S. production capabilities.

Order 3: Domestic petroleum production
Emphasizes that an intermittent energy supply leaves the U.S. vulnerable to hostile foreign actors, and encourages an increase in production, transportation, refining and generation capacity of domestic petroleum production. Provides support for exploration, storage and pipelines Identifies petroleum products as essential for fueling the military and economy Cuts through permitting delays and financial constraints

Order 4: Liquefied natural gas production and infrastructure
This order appears to be directly in response to the impacts of Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has thrown liquefied natural gas markets into chaos and driven up costs. The order states that “hostile foreign actors” weaponized America’s reliance on foreign energy, which caused dramatic swings in international commodity markets. The U.S. has been largely shielded from these shocks due to it being the largest producer of natural gas in the world, and the support of export terminals likely aims to make the U.S. more capable of supplying its allies’ energy needs.

The order seeks to: Provides support for pipelines, compression and processing facilities, underground storage, and export terminals Seeks to remove financing constraints, permitting delays and infrastructure bottlenecks Calls for purchases, purchasing commitments and financial support for the development of natural gas production capabilities.

Order 5: Support for the coal industry
America’s coal industry has long been in decline. It’s partly due to competition from natural gas, but climate policies that began under the Obama administration sought to force coal-fired electrical generation into early retirement. Trump’s order identifies coal as an important energy resource that provides baseload power to the grid. Supports coal mining and rail and barge logistics, export terminals and life-extension work on power plants and on-site stockpiles of coal. Addresses financial constraints, long lead times on maintenance, and expensive repair cycles Provides financial support for the development of production capabilities

Blackmon acknowledged the orders aren’t “magic bullets,” but they will be encouraging to investors, developers and allies that the federal government is supporting American energy production. Energy Secretary Chris “Wright now has the tools to act decisively to speed permitting, reshore supply chains, and speed crucial projects long stuck in bureaucratic limbo to finally break ground,” Blackmon wrote.

Read more …

“The SPLC’s whole model, Gutfeld argued, depended on a steady supply of racism — and when organic hate proved insufficient, the group manufactured it. ”

• Greg Gutfeld Savages the SPLC and the Democrats Who Took the Bait (Margolis)

For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center occupied a kind of sacred space in American media — the unquestioned arbiter of hate, the group whose pronouncements landed on front pages without so much as a raised eyebrow from the reporters who carried their water. Turns out, the whole operation may have been rotten from the inside. On Wednesday’s episode of Gutfeld!, host Greg Gutfeld savaged the SPLC and the Democrats who bought into the false narrative it was selling.


Gutfeld began by playing a montage of Joe Biden clips hammering the same line about the infamous Charlottesville hoax — that Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Biden ran that narrative into the ground. He even built his 2020 campaign around it. He said it over and over, repeating the lie incessantly as gospel.

Now the SPLC, long treated by the media as the gold standard on American hate groups, has been indicted by a grand jury for allegedly funneling millions in donor funds directly to the extremist groups it claimed to be fighting — including the KKK and neo-Nazis. Gutfeld’s response was characteristically blunt. “I would say you can’t make this stuff up, but that’s exactly what these hate mongers were doing, funding the very extremist groups it claimed to fight,” he said. “The arsonist may have been running the fire department. It’s like donating to save the whales and finding out that the money was going to feed The View.”

The SPLC’s whole model, Gutfeld argued, depended on a steady supply of racism — and when organic hate proved insufficient, the group manufactured it. Actual hate groups in America, he noted, have been about “as robust as Blockbuster Video.” That’s a problem when your fundraising, your media relevance, and your entire reason for existing depend on the country being crawling with white supremacists. So the SPLC has a reputation for labeling virtually any organization it can as a hate group, such as Turning Point USA or the Family Research Council. “Hate morphs into ideas that liberals hate,” Gutfeld said, “especially since it’s the only tool they have to ruin people by calling them bigots.”

And, of course, the press was a willing partner in all of it. Every hate map published by the SPLC got treated like scripture. If the SPLC said your neighbor’s bowling league was a hate group, Gutfeld quipped, it was front-page news, no questions asked That manufactured climate of fear had real political consequences. Gutfeld rolled a series of Biden clips, in which he insisted that white supremacy was “the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not Al-Qaeda, white supremacists.” Biden repeated variations of this false claim across multiple appearances, each one more emphatic than the last. That narrative, Gutfeld argued, traces directly back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the “fine people hoax.”

“The entire narrative of Biden’s candidacy was based on a hoax created by a left-wing group, then protected by the media, who did no investigation into who these haters were,” Gutfeld noted. “The media’s oddly incurious, in addition to corrupt and stupid.” One detail Gutfeld found particularly telling — the identities of the torch carriers at Charlottesville were never seriously investigated. The same media apparatus that tracked down every Capitol Hill grandmother from January 6 somehow never got around to finding out who those people actually were or where they came from. That asymmetry, he suggested, tells you everything about whose narrative the press was protecting.

The SPLC’s reach extended well beyond the Biden campaign and cable news chyrons. Corporate America lined up to fund what now turned out to be a racket for funding hate. “It’s about politicians who embrace them, the corporations that donated to them,” Gutfeld said, and the media outlets “who needed to make the lies true so they could say it’s racist to deport people in the country illegally, so that everyone in the next Star Trek is trans and that hiring based on merit is as out of date as the canned beans I donate to food drives.”

Gutfeld acknowledged that the allegations still need to be proven in court. But the broader point, he said, stands regardless of how the legal case unfolds. “America is one of the least racist societies in human history,” he concluded, “and that’s bad for business if your business is racism.” And, as we know, that’s exactly the business the Democratic Party is in.

Read more …

It’s quite OK to write and publish that the head of the FBI, known for his long working hours, is really a drunk who hangs out in bars at all hours. That is just hyperbole. Well, unless he’s a democrat, we fear.

• Judge Dismisses Kash Patel’s Defamation Lawsuit (CNBC)

A Houston federal court judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by FBI Director Kash Patel alleging that former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi defamed him by saying Patel last year had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of” the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation,” U.S. District Court Judge George Hanks Jr. wrote in his decision. “Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.”


The dismissal came a day after Patel filed an unrelated $250 million defamation lawsuit in D.C. federal court against The Atlantic magazine over a new article that alleged he has abused alcohol. While ruling on the key question of defamation in Figliuzzi’s favor, the judge denied his request that he be awarded court costs and attorneys’ fees under Texas’ anti-SLAPP law. SLAPP is an acronym for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Figliuzzi’s lawyer, Marc Fuller, in a statement to CNBC, said, “This is a victory for press freedom and the First Amendment.”

“Director Patel’s claim against Frank was baseless, and we are pleased that the court dismissed it,” Fuller said. Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, made his crack about Patel on May 2, 2025, on the MS NOW show “Morning Joe.” “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building,” said Figliuzzi. Patel sued him in June, accusing Figliuzzi of “fabricating a specific lie” about the FBI director because of Figliuzzi’s “clear animus” toward him.

Read more …

Member states have backed the Kiev authorities’ “blasphemous practices” at a major Orthodox monastery, the Russian foreign minister has said

• Lavrov Warns Of ‘Rampant Satanism’ In EU (RT)

There is “rampant Satanism” in certain EU member states, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has alleged, citing their connivance in the Ukrainian authorities’ “blasphemous practices” at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra Orthodox monastery.Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the government in Kiev has intensified its crackdown on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church over allegations that it has connections to Moscow. The Ukrainian authorities have since conducted numerous raids on monasteries and launched dozens of criminal cases on collaboration charges against clerics, as well as property seizures.


At the same time, Vladimir Zelensky’s government has backed the rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which the Russian Orthodox Church considers schismatic. Speaking at a Russian Foreign Ministry reception on Wednesday dedicated to Orthodox Easter, Lavrov stated that the Ukrainian leadership has rejected “their spiritual and civilizational roots.” “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been persecuted for over a decade now, with churches [forcibly] taken over, vandalized and clergy and parishioners harassed,” he said.

Particularly “outrageous and disgusting” is the Ukrainian authorities’ initiative to create an “inventory and inspect the holy relics in terms of their historical and scientific value” at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery. According to Lavrov, the “Ukrainian Ministry of Culture used this bureaucratic formula to conceal its legalized blasphemous practices, while several European countries have turned a blind eye to these developments or even directly supported them.” “There is rampant Satanism in these countries, too,” the Russian foreign minister concluded.

Last March, the first reports emerged of Ukrainian government officials and police forcing their way into the catacombs of what is considered the nation’s most significant monastery and the final resting place of several Christian saints. Incidentally, this is not the first time Lavrov has suggested there are Satanic tendencies in the West. Speaking in February, after the US Department of Justice released a large trove of the so-called Epstein files, the Russian foreign minister said that the materials had “revealed the face of the West.” “Every normal person knows this is beyond comprehension and pure Satanism,” Lavrov stated then.

Read more …

PCR does not like getting old.

• Professor Defines Elderly Americans as the New Class Enemy (Paul Craig Roberts)

A Yale University professor of law and history, Samuel Moyn, has resurrected and redefined Marxian class conflict. In the old Marxism, the capitalists exploited the workers. In Moyn’s version, elderly Americans exploit the young. Moyn’s solution, espoused, of course, in the New York Times (April 21), is for the old to be dispossessed of their homes, jobs, accumulated wealth, and political and judicial offices. These dispossessions and more are needed for “intergenerational justice,” by which Moyn means redistribution from the aged to the young, and in order to stop older Americans from “Hoarding America’s Potential.” Moyn thinks that a poorly educated and undisciplined youth can manage all of America’s affairs better than better educated and more disciplined older Americans.


Moyn builds his case against “gerontocratic society.” Older Americans, that is more experienced Americans, are overrepresented in political life and have too much power. This results in inequality and injustice and in regressive public policies.

Moyn claims that older Americans are overrepresented in elections which gives them a stranglehold. What Moyn means is that older Americans take their citizenship responsibility more seriously than do the young and actually vote in elections. By being overrepresented in voting due to youthful disinterest the elderly have amassed “excessive power” that “harms society” by resisting open borders and “environmental remediation” (global warming claims), and denying society youthful creativity and dynamism such as we are currently observing in New York City.

Other evidence of unfairness and inequality are the rise in the median net worth of the elderly and fall in net worth of youths and that the elderly have a larger share of wealth than the young. Apparently, it is beyond Moyn’s comprehension that the elderly got established in life before so many well-paying American jobs were offshored and before robotics and AI cut into remaining good jobs. It doesn’t dawn on Moyn that the elderly have had many more years to accumulate wealth than have youth via such means as paid off home mortgages.

Moyn also blames the elderly for owning more homes than the youth. Again he overlooks the obvious. The replacement jobs for the “dirty fingernail” jobs sent abroad don’t support both a mortgage and a car payment. Why does Moyn think it is the elderly’s fault that the median age of a home buyer has risen from 30 in 1981 to 56 in 2024?

Moyn demonstrates faulty reasoning throughout his case against the elderly. He alleges that the elderly are privileged because more dollars go to the elderly than to children, which he thinks makes it “clear that older Americans have helped widen the chasm between classes in our neoliberal era.” The “more dollars” are of course Social Security and Medicare payments. But these are retirement age programs sponsored and legislated by liberals, not reactionary elderly, that the elderly have paid for in Social Security and Medicare taxes on their wages and salaries for all of their working life. It is beyond Moyn’s imagination that it is the neoliberal policies, such as offshoring American high-productivity jobs, that have damaged the prospects for American youth. It was not the elderly who took down the ladders of upward mobility that characterized the old American “opportunity society.”

In the end Moyn has written a brief for removing any remaining requirements that voting depends on proof of citizenship. He claims that this reduces voting by younger Americans. However, the claims are nonsensical. All any American citizen, regardless of age, has to do to vote is to register. But Moyn sees registration as a burden the elderly put on the young to make it inconvenient for them to vote.

Moyn wants to violate the age discrimination laws by bringing back mandatory retirement. So what happens to the elderly who cannot survive without a paycheck? Moyn doesn’t seem to care. Any false argument will do to move them aside.

Moyn wants to force elderly homeowners out of their home with progressive property taxes that rise the longer the elderly insist on living in their own homes. Apparently, Moyn thinks that widespread selling will collapse house prices, and the youth will be able to buy in a buyers’ market.

One of the many worrisome revelations in Moyn’s article is that it demonstrates that neither Yale law school nor The NY Times opinion editor have a concept of private property. Property is just something that is redistributed from those with a negative image to those with a positive image. Moyn sets the images: the elderly are regressive; the youth are dynamic and creative. Formerly property was redistributed from capitalists to workers. The liberals preferred from rich to poor. Moyn says from the old to the young.

I could continue, but this is enough for all to see that a Yale University law professor is positioning the American elderly as the next victim to be plundered. The NY Times supports the plunder of the elderly as does Moyn’s publisher of his attack on old people, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It.

Note: Many years ago I predicted that the approval of abortion would lead to euthanasia of the old. If birth can be terminated because someone sees it as a problem, old age can be terminated as well. Moyn has initiated the attack on the elderly. First they will be dispossessed, which will increase their burden on society. Then a legislated lifetime will become law. As morality in the Western world has been greatly weakened, there will be no opposition to aborting the elderly.

Read more …

DeSantis is a political animal. Trump is the opposite.

The Supreme Court is an interesting place for him to go.

DeSantis and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, that source said, “almost have a father-son relationship and would be a hell of a legacy for Trump.”

• The Resurrection of Ron DeSantis (Scott Pinsker)

His one mistake was challenging Donald Trump in 2024. More specifically, it was challenging Trump — and failing. Like Omar Little said on The Wire, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” Gov. Ron DeSantis came at the king… and missed very, very badly. Were it not for his ill-advised 2024 campaign, DeSantis would be on the GOP’s 2028 shortlist for president, along with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In an alternate reality, Vance, Rubio, and DeSantis would be our Big Three. I’ll go one step further: Had he not challenged Trump in 2024, DeSantis probably wouldn’t even be the governor right now.


Although we still think of Trump as the quintessential New Yawker, he’s been a Floridian for quite a while. As are a slew of his top cabinet members and closest advisors: Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Rubio. Mike Waltz. Key supporting staff. Even scandal-tarred Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was (briefly) floated for attorney general — before being replaced by fellow Floridian, the since-fired Pam Bondi. But does DeSantis want to work in D.C.? After all, he’s still the governor of Florida, America’s third-most populous state. That’s a plumb position for a young, ambitious politician. (Plus, the weather in Tallahassee is way better.) Axios says yes (April 21): Scoop: DeSantis ‘Begging’ Trump for Prime Role in Administration

“President Trump has told confidants that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is “begging” for a job in Trump’s administration — including attorney general — Axios has learned. DeSantis also has expressed interest in being secretary of defense and even a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court, according to six sources briefed on the discussions.” Why it matters: DeSantis has to leave office at the end of his second term in January and is “looking for what to do next,” according to one source who said Trump is inclined to consider helping out his understudy-turned-rival-turned-friend. Inside the room: DeSantis’ future was on the menu after the two men had lunch at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami a week ago Sunday.

“Ron was begging me to be AG,” Trump told one confidant, who relayed the remark to Axios. Said another source: “There was a conversation at that lunch. I don’t think AG is real. But he’s gonna be looking for work and Trump likes him.” Among those three positions — attorney general, secretary of war, and Supreme Court justice — Axios suggests that the last two are a distinct possibility: …Trump would strongly consider DeSantis for the [Secretary of War] post if Hegseth left — though Hegseth remains in good standing with the president. “DeSantis is 100% not interested in the AG job, but he would be interested in two things: War secretary or Supreme Court, which would be his dream job,” said another source familiar with the discussions.

DeSantis and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, that source said, “almost have a father-son relationship and would be a hell of a legacy for Trump.” The intrigue: DeSantis waged a bitter — but brief — primary bid in the 2024 presidential cycle against Trump, whose campaign and White House are stocked with critics of the governor. “Bygones are bygones,” said one Trump adviser. “But that doesn’t mean people forget.” Said another: “There’s a big reason the president wouldn’t pick Ron to be his attorney general: There’s a way-too-high chance he would try to f*** the president over.” [emphasis added]

Reading between the lines, it sounds as if DeSantis has (mostly) rebuilt his tattered relationship with President Trump, but obviously, a degree of mistrust remains. From Trump’s point of view, they’re still in the “trust-but-verify” phase.= Can’t really blame Trump for being cautious. When DeSantis’ decided to challenge Trump in 2024, it revealed something significant about his character — namely, his loyalty.

[..]

There’s a very real possibility that the gerrymandering push will benefit the Democrats more than the Republicans. Between California, Virginia, and Utah(!), the Dems now stand to gain 10 seats. Between Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, the GOP will gain only 9. Which means, Republicans will be down a seat. Unless Florida’s governor gets involved. This is the moment DeSantis has patiently waited for. It’s his chance in the spotlight — his opportunity to save the day for the MAGAverse. Right now, Florida has 28 congressional seats. The GOP currently controls 20.

Under the Virginia’s precedent of gerrymandering seats 10-1 in the Democrat’s favor, why shouldn’t Florida match their numbers and gerrymander it, say, 25-3 for the Republicans? (That’s actually a more forgiving ratio than Virginia’s Dems gave us.) And we’d instantly go from -1 seat to +4. This week, we were reminded why we fell in love with DeSantis: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries threatened the governor not to pull a Virginia and redistrict Florida. DeSantis’ response was pure gold: https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2047031432841941308

Read more …

“.. DACA recipients who commit crimes are deportable under existing law, just like any other illegal alien.”

• Obama’s ‘Dreamer’ Fairy Tale Just Got Torched (Margolis)

Last year, on the 13th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an unconstitutional program he had conjured into existence by executive fiat, Barack Obama was singing its praises. “DACA was an example of how we can be a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” Obama said. “And it’s an example worth remembering today, when families with similar backgrounds who just want to live, work, and support their communities, are being demonized and treated as enemies.” And it’s all a lie.


Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has arrested nearly 300 DACA recipients nationwide — 75 of them in Texas alone, who were previously protected from deportation. And here’s the number the left doesn’t want to talk about: of 270 DACA recipients arrested between Jan. 1, 2025, and Sept. 28, 2025, 250 — that’s 92% — had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Nine out of ten.

The breakdown is telling. Of those 270 arrests, 130 had criminal convictions, 120 had pending charges, and 14 were cited for immigration violations. Within the same window, 174 DACA recipients were removed from the country. According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Of those removed, 71 were convicted criminals, 66 had pending criminal charges, and 66 were in violation of immigration law. None of these applicants had been granted protected status at the time of their removal.”

DACA defenders insisted that the program’s beneficiaries were innocent, law-abiding, upstanding members of their communities. The best and brightest, vetted and re-vetted, posed zero threat to the communities they lived in. Democrats have pushed that line for years, insisting with practiced outrage that no, the administration isn’t shielding criminals — that just doesn’t happen.

The federal data proves otherwise. None of this is to say every DACA recipient is dangerous. There are over 505,000 currently active recipients in the country, more than 84,000 in Texas alone. But when 92% of the nearly 300 who wound up being targets for deportation had criminal histories, that’s a troubling statistic that undermines the very argument used to justify the DACA program, not to mention the desire to give these people a pathway toward full legal citizenship.

Of course, the media doesn’t want this detail to get out there. The Texas Tribune, which first reported on DACA recipients who were “targeted” for deportation, curiously left out the criminal records of the DACA recipients from its report: Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has begun to target DACA recipients for deportation as part of its mass deportation efforts. From January 2025 to November 2025, at least 261 DACA recipients have been arrested — 75 of them in Texas. And between 86 and 174 DACA recipients have been deported, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (The agency gave different figures to two different Democratic members of Congress who requested the information).

“DACA does NOT confer any form of legal status in this country,” DHS has said on this issue. “Any illegal alien who is a DACA recipient may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons, including if they’ve committed a crime.” In other words, DACA recipients who commit crimes are deportable under existing law, just like any other illegal alien. The program never granted immunity. In the end, the Trump administration is doing something radical by Washington standards: enforcing the law as written. And the left can’t take it.

Read more …

“..many nodes operate behind firewalls and are not publicly visible..”

• The U.S. Military Is Running a Bitcoin Node, Admiral Paparo Reveals (BCM)

The United States military has an active node on the Bitcoin network, according to Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The disclosure, made at a House Services committee hearing, marks the first known confirmation that a U.S. military combatant command is directly participating in the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. “We have a node on the Bitcoin network,” Paparo wrote. “We’re doing a number of operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol.” The statement landed one day after Paparo made waves in Congress with testimony that framed Bitcoin as a tool of American power.


What Paparo said yesterday
On April 21, Paparo testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee during a FY2027 defense authorization hearing. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) asked Paparo whether U.S. leadership in Bitcoin could give the country an edge against China in the Indo-Pacific theater. Paparo did not deflect. He told the committee that INDOPACOM’s research centers on Bitcoin as a computer science tool — not as a financial asset. “Our research into Bitcoin is as a computer science tool,” Paparo said. “It’s the combination of cryptography, a blockchain, and a proof of work. And Bitcoin shows incredible potential as a computer science tool that through the proof-of-work protocols, actually imposes more cost than just the algorithmic securing of networks and our ability to operate.”

He described Bitcoin as “a peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value” and said that “anything that supports all instruments of national power for the United States of America is to the good.” The testimony was notable for what Paparo did not say. He did not describe Bitcoin as a reserve asset, a payment system, or a speculative instrument. He framed it as a computer science system with direct military relevance — a distinction that set his remarks apart from most official government commentary on crypto.

What running a Bitcoin node means
A Bitcoin node is a computer that runs the Bitcoin software, maintains a full copy of the blockchain, and independently validates every transaction and block against the network’s consensus rules. Nodes do not mine Bitcoin. They enforce the rules of the protocol and relay data across the peer-to-peer network.Running a node gives an operator direct, trustless access to the Bitcoin network without relying on any third party. The operator’s computer connects to other nodes worldwide, verifies incoming transactions and blocks, and rejects anything that violates Bitcoin’s protocol rules.

For INDOPACOM, operating a node positions the command as a first-hand participant in the Bitcoin network, not an observer.The disclosure that the military is conducting “operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol” suggests the command is moving beyond theoretical research and into active experimentation with Bitcoin’s cryptographic architecture as a defensive tool. As of early 2026, there are an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 publicly reachable full nodes on the Bitcoin network, though the actual number is likely higher since many nodes operate behind firewalls and are not publicly visible.

Read more …

I wanna know: How many of the EVs are European made? Is it all BYDs and Tesla’s?

• European Car Sales Jump 11% As Fuel Shock Drives EV Demand (ZH)

European auto sales posted their strongest monthly gain in almost two years in March, as robust demand emerged for fully electric and hybrid models. The surge in demand follows the US-Iran conflict, which disrupted energy flows through the Hormuz chokepoint. As a result, petrol and diesel prices at the pump in Europe soared. Another issue is China flooding the continent with cheap EVs, undercutting already struggling domestic automakers.


Bloomberg cited new-vehicle registration data for last month showing an 11% rise to 1.58 million, as demand for EVs and hybrids continued to strengthen. EV deliveries jumped 42%, with growth across all major markets, including a 66% increase in German EV sales, driven by subsidies and more affordable models.

March’s surge in demand offers relief for struggling European automakers facing a number of issues, including excess capacity, U.S. tariffs, and weak demand in the Chinese market. The problem with Europe is that Brussels had the grand idea of allowing Chinese brands such as BYD and Geely to flood the continent with cheap EVs, undercutting rivals such as VW, Porsche, and Mercedes. Data for the month also showed that BYD more than doubled its European sales in March to 37,580 vehicles and is preparing to start production at its new plant in Hungary later this quarter. This means China’s market share in Europe is increasingly growing.

Tesla also participated in last month’s surge, with March registrations up 84% to 52,600, leaving it just ahead of BYD year-to-date. While it is quite obvious that the surge in Brent crude prices into triple-digit territory in March influenced consumer behavior, driving EV purchases because of the fuel shock that unfolded at petrol stations, we take a look at a UBS note showing that, over the past four decades, oil price shocks have typically remained elevated for five months following prior military events. All of this suggests that, with elevated prices in Europe and elsewhere, EVs will regain consumer favor. Yet in the U.S., with federal subsidies eliminated, demand remains muted.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/MichaelDell/status/2047090542400430475?s=20 https://twitter.com/HungaryBased/status/2047050307021226374?s=20 https://twitter.com/DanielKral1/status/2046961944570069296?s=20

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 16 2017

Sep 162017
 
 September 16, 2017  Posted by at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Garcon à la Pipe 1905

 

• To Hell In A Bucket: America Is Going Broke At Mach 30 (Gordon)
• Down $20 Billion, Boeing Stuffs Pension Fund With Its Own Shares (BBG)
• Toys ‘R’ Us Mulls Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing (R.)
• Bitcoin Needs To Be Worth $1,000,000 To Be A Legitimate Currency (MW)
• Hillary Happened (Jeffrey St. Clair)
• Trump And The Democrats: What’s Next: A Deal With Bernie? (Salon)
• The OODA Loop Of Trump’s Insurgency Has Been Smashed (GG)
• A Flaw In US Foreign Policy That No One Wants To Talk About (TAM)
• This Isn’t Your Great-Grandad’s America (Jim Kunstler)
• Police In Catalonia Hunt For Hidden Ballot Boxes In Bid To Foil Referendum (R.)
• Spanish State Poised To Seize Catalan Finances (BBC)
• New York City Is Within Hurricane Jose’s 5-Day “Cone Of Uncertainty” (ZH)

 

 

$34,880 of new debt per second..

• To Hell In A Bucket: America Is Going Broke At Mach 30 (Gordon)

“You know as well I do how this crazy debt based fiat money system works. The debt must perpetually increase or the whole financial system breaks down. The best we can hope for is that the ongoing currency debasement merely leads to a subtle erosion of living standards. That’s the best-case scenario. “But, again, no one except maybe a handful of your readers’ gives a rip about the federal debt. Plus, if you’re gonna keep writing about it you need to use better terminology. “The federal debt has grown at such a rapid rate that standard dollar units no longer capture what’s going on. The debt numbers are so large it is difficult to distinguish between hundreds of billions and tens of trillions of dollars. “For better perspective, you need to describe the debt growth in astronomical terms.

You see, astronomers use light years to adjust for large distances. A light year, as its name suggests, is the distance light travels in one year. One light year converts to light traveling about 5.87 trillion miles per year, excluding leap year of course. “You noted that since President Obama took office in early 2009, at about the time the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed, the U.S. federal debt has increased from $10.6 trillion to nearly $20 trillion. Well, you were wrong. “In the several days since you wrote that article, did you see the federal debt jumped to over $20.1 trillion? “Apparently, after Congress suspended the debt limit last Friday, the Treasury went ahead and reported the $300 billion of off balance spending they’d run up over the last six months since hitting the debt ceiling in March.

This is what Treasury Secretary Mnuchin meant by resorting to ‘extraordinary measures’ to keep the government humming. Sounds like Enron accounting to us. “Anywho, over the last 104 months the federal debt has increased by $9.5 trillion – or at an annual rate of about $1.1 trillion. This equals a rate of increase that’s nearly 20% the speed of light. This also pencil’s out to $34,880 of new debt per second. Are you starting to grasp the enormity? “Still, if the speed of light example doesn’t do it for you, how about the speed of sound? When Chuck Yeager first outran sound he reached what was called Mach 1. That equals 767 miles per hour – or 1,125 feet per second. “So, at $34,880 of new debt per second, the federal government is running up the debt at a speed that’s over Mach 30. Yes, things have really gotten out of control!

Read more …

I’m sure it’s entirely legal.

• Down $20 Billion, Boeing Stuffs Pension Fund With Its Own Shares (BBG)

Like so many companies in America, Boeing has largely neglected the gaping deficit in its employee pension as it doled out lavish rewards to shareholders. What’s raising eyebrows is how it plans to shore up the retirement plan. Last month, Boeing made its largest pension contribution in over a decade. But rather than put up cash and lock in the funding, the planemaker transferred $3.5 billion of its own shares, including those it bought back in years past. (The administrator says it expects to sell them over the coming year.) It’s a bold move, and one cheered by many on Wall Street. Yet to pension experts, it isn’t worth the risk. After a record-setting, 58% rally this year, Boeing is betting it can keep producing the kind of earnings that push shares higher. If all goes well, not only will the pension benefit, but Boeing says it will be able to forgo contributions for the next four years.

But if anything goes awry, the $57 billion pension – which covers a majority of its workers and retirees – could easily end up worse off than before. “It’s an irresponsible thing to do certainly from the perspective of the plan participants,” said Daniel Bergstresser, a finance professor at the Brandeis International Business School. “Ideally, you would like to put assets in the pension plan that won’t fall in value at exactly the same time that the company is suffering.” Under CEO Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s pension shortfall has widened as the Chicago-based company stepped up share buybacks. The $20 billion gap is now wider than any S&P 500 company except General Electric. And relative to earnings, Boeing shares are already trading close to the highest levels in a decade, a sign there might be more downside than upside.

[..] At the end of 2016, its pension had $57 billion in assets and $77 billion in obligations – a funding ratio of 74%, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Boeing froze pensions for Seattle-area Machinist union members last year under a hard-fought contract amendment. It also switched non-union workers to a defined contribution plan. And the stock transfer last month, combined with a planned $500 million cash payment this year, would be equal to all the company’s contributions during the previous five years. Nevertheless, it still leaves Boeing with roughly $15 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, although the shortfall should gradually shrink over the next four years, according to Sanford C. Bernstein. To be clear, Boeing has the money. In the past three years, the company generated enough excess cash to buy back $30 billion of its own shares.

But using equity instead of cash does have its advantages. It allows Boeing to conserve its free cash flow – a key metric for investors – by transferring Treasury shares that were repurchased at far lower values than today’s prices. In addition, Boeing will get a $700 million tax benefit, which will offset the cost of its $500 million cash contribution.

Read more …

“The company has been saddled with debt since buyout firms KKR and Bain Capital, together with real estate investment trust Vornado Realty took Toys “R” Us private for $6.6 billion in 2005.”

• Toys ‘R’ Us Mulls Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing (R.)

Toys ‘R’ Us Inc could file for bankruptcy in the coming weeks as pressure from skittish suppliers intensifies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The company and its restructuring advisers are considering filing for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Virginia, according to the WSJ report. The privately-held toy retailer had previously said it was working with investment bank Lazard to help address its approximately $5 billion in debt, of which roughly $400 million comes due next year. The potential Chapter 11 filing could be a result of the company’s suppliers tightening trade terms, including holding back on shipments unless the toy retailer is able to make cash payments on delivery, the newspaper reported.

The move by Toys “R” Us to potentially file for bankruptcy comes at a time when more and more consumers increasingly make purchases from online retailers like Amazon.com and avoid visiting brick-and-mortar shops. There have been more than a dozen significant retail bankruptcies this year, but none for retailers as big as Toys “R” Us, which has more than 1,600 stores worldwide. Toys tapped restructuring attorneys from Kirkland & Ellis LLP, CNBC reported this month. The company has been saddled with debt since buyout firms KKR and Bain Capital, together with real estate investment trust Vornado Realty took Toys “R” Us private for $6.6 billion in 2005.

Read more …

Interesting take.

• Bitcoin Needs To Be Worth $1,000,000 To Be A Legitimate Currency (MW)

Think bitcoin is in bubble territory? You ain’t seen nothing yet, says one cryptocurrency expert, who believes its value needs to surge by about 300 times over the next several years to be considered a legitimate currency or risk retreating into obscurity and obsolescence. Bitcoin, the No. 1 cryptocurrency, has drawn outsize attention over its parabolic rise—and the recent, brutal plunge it has been enduring in recent trade. Some market participants, however, make the case that despite its roughly 260% year-to-date rise it has to clear a far more stratospheric value hurdle to evolve into a practical form of money alongside fiat units like the U.S. dollar, Europe’s euro or British pound. A single bitcoin was worth about $3,568 in recent trade, off lows of the past few days, according to data site Coindesk.com, amid regulatory headwinds in China and critical comments from Wall Street pros like J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

Still, a bitcoin would need to be worth a stunning $1,000,000 to be a bona fide monetary unit, says Iqbal Gandham, U.K managing director at eToro, a trading platform. In other words, the digital currency would need to see a 300 fold run-up from its current level. To be sure, Gandham isn’t making a prediction; though he believes the currency has the ability to scale such lofty levels, Gandham thinks that bitcoin needs to climb to such a level to be truly viable as a monetary unit. To understand why is to understand the tiniest component of bitcoin—the Satoshi. Named after the purported creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. A Satoshi is equal to 0.00000001 bitcoin. Put another way, one bitcoin contains 100 million Satoshis. Satoshi’s value in dollars equated to $0.0000356819 at last check. Gandham argues that a Satoshi needs to be equivalent to a single penny, which it would when one bitcoin is worth $1,000,000.

“It is the Satoshi with which people will buy a cup of coffee,” Gandham told MarketWatch. He said using bitcoin now to purchase goods and services, as one would with dollars, isn’t feasible because bitcoin hasn’t reached the necessary economies of scale. “People don’t use a bar of gold to buy things, they use subdivisions of gold,” he said, saying that using bitcoin now to purchase items is like using a bar of gold to purchase a beverage or a meal. Gandham also said bitcoin really needs to get to that million-dollar mark in the next few years. Some are already wagering that it will get close: John McAfee, founder of his namesake antivirus software company says bitcoin is headed to the $500,000 level within three years. “It needs to get there in the next few years if it is really going to work,” Gandham said. “People will only spend the subdivision of bitcoin—and you can only spend the subdivision—if they are of reasonable value,” he said.


An actual Satoshi note that is redeemable for real money

Read more …

“After 25 years of writing about her, my very last words on Hillary Clinton. Please shoot me if I violate this pledge..” Me too, this is it.

• Hillary Happened (Jeffrey St. Clair)

Unlike Bill, Hillary is a prolific, but graceless and transparent liar. She is also probably the nastiest political figure in America since Nixon. Yet she lacked Nixon’s Machiavellian genius for political manipulation. Hillary wears her menace on her face. She could never hide her aspiration for power; her desire to become a war criminal in the ranks of her mentor Henry Kissinger (symbolized by the laurels of a Nobel Peace Prize, naturally). Americans don’t mind politicians with a lust to spill blood, but they prefer them not to advertise it. Thus, Clinton was miscast from the beginning as a political candidate for elected office. Her skills and temperament were more suited to the role of political enforcer in the mode of Thomas Cromwell or John Erhlichman. But her ambition wouldn’t let her settle for the role of a backstage player.

“One thing I’ve learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around,” she fumes with Nixonian fury, “but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.” Hillary has tried to reinvent herself many times and does so yet again in this meretricious coda to her failed campaign. She made herself more domesticated for the southern electorate in Arkansas. She shifted the blame to her advisors after the disaster of her health care bill. She washed off the blood-spatter from the Ken Starr investigations by portraying herself as the target of a witch hunt. She exploited an addled Daniel Patrick Moynihan to justify running as an interloper for Senator in New York. She rationalized her votes for the Iraq War by saying she was duped by Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.

She manufactured a timely tear for the cameras after her loss to Obama. She assumed the mantle of unrepentant war-monger during her belligerent tenure as Secretary of State and transubstantiated into a white dove during her debates with Bernie Sanders. She has weeded and blurred inconvenient episodes from her resumé. She has gone on talking tours. She has appeared in town halls. She has reintroduced herself, again and again. She’s changed her name, hairstyles and fashion designers. She exchanged dresses for pantsuits. She shifted from drinking pinot noir to craft beers. She’s backed wars both before she opposed them and after she condemned them. But she remains the same Hillary Rodham Clinton Americans have known since 1992. Everybody sees this except her. Americans know Hillary better than she does herself.

All of her manufactured mirages are translucent to the very the people she wants to deceive. When Hillary looks in the mirror, she must see what might have been (should have been in her mind) and not what is. And that schism enrages her. “Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren’t?” she mopes. “They’ve cast votes of all kinds, including some they regret, just like me? What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.” This self-pitying book should prove a challenge for library cataloguers. Shall they shelve it as non-fiction or fiction?

Read more …

“..only Trump could cut a bipartisan deal protecting immigrant Dreamers, and maybe Trump is the only president who could cut a bipartisan deal on Medicare for All..”

• Trump And The Democrats: What’s Next: A Deal With Bernie? (Salon)

Meanwhile, it seems as though Trump has determined that he can cut deals with the congressional Democrats without any blowback — it’s the old “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” canard. He believes he’s invincible when it comes to the loyalty of his googly-eyed rally crowds. And he might be right. The same goes for Trump’s seemingly unwavering support among the congressional GOP, given how various Republicans have distanced themselves from him publicly only to vote for him last November or to vote with him on the Hill. If Trump is right and his base is stronger than we think, perhaps there’s a chance for the president to pull another Nixon-to-China maneuver.

Rewinding 45 years, Richard Nixon, with his notorious record of anti-communism, was perhaps the only living politician who could’ve reached out to Chinese leader Mao Zedong in 1972 without serious political repercussions. A Democrat or liberal Republican reaching out to China would’ve been pegged as soft on communism, but Nixon was pretty well immune from such an attack. Likewise, only Trump could cut a bipartisan deal protecting immigrant Dreamers, and maybe Trump is the only president who could cut a bipartisan deal on Medicare for All, especially now that fellow populist Bernie Sanders has introduced it in the Senate with the support of 15 other Democrats, including Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren.

Back in 2008, President Obama internally toyed with the idea, but moderate Democrats as well as Republicans would’ve balked, so Obama instead went with the framework for the Affordable Care Act, given its support among moderates on the Hill. If Trump were to back Sanders’ legislation, it’d be difficult for Republicans and moderates to walk away, knowing the loudness of Trump’s base. As with many legislative initiatives and issues, Republican voters tend to run away from anything that’s proposed by liberals and Democrats simply because liberals and Democrats, in their worldview, are weak and can’t be trusted. With a Republican president backing Medicare for All, GOP voters might be more inclined to support it. Politics aside, they’d absolutely benefit from such a program and its considerable savings over private health insurance.

Read more …

OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act).

• The OODA Loop Of Trump’s Insurgency Has Been Smashed (GG)

Trump is in the White House today because an open source insurgency put him there. I first wrote about Trump’s open source insurgency a year and a half ago (February 2016). At that point, it was already apparent Trump was very likely to win not just the primary, but the election. However, as prescient as my article was, I did get the plausible promise – the simple goal the effort that unites all of the disparate interests, the goal that animates an insurgency – wrong. At the time, I thought it was about representing forgotten interests (an error many writers are still making). Instead, the real uniting goal of Trump’s insurgency was “opposition to a failed establishment” That goal held the insurgency that put him in office together, despite gaffes, scandals, leaks, etc that would have ended the political career of any other candidate.

It was also a goal that allowed the insurgency to continue after winning the election. In most cases, once the goal has been accomplished (i.e. remove Mubarak), the insurgency evaporates. The reason it didn’t: the media. The media is the voice of establishment interests (social, economic, and national security). It locks establishment interests in place. It also explained away failure after failure (nutty Chinese trade policy, lie that led to Iraq war, unpunished financial crisis, etc.) of the US establishment, as if it never occurred. The media kept the insurgency alive through its overwhelming opposition to the Trump Presidency and Trump helped keep it alive by provoking the media at every turn. The alignment of this very public struggle with the plausible promise of the insurgency kept Trump’s support at about ~40% (and more than 50% in more than half of all Congressional districts nationally).

That insurgency is now over. Its OODA loop is smashed. Worried that Trump would end existing US spending/policies (largely, still geared to cold war priorities), the senior military staff running the Trump administration launched a counter-insurgency against the insurgency. They have been successful (if only they were half as good fighting against real world insurgencies). Here’s how: Former generals took control of key staff positions. They purged staff members that were part of the insurgency and tightly limited access to Trump. Finally, and most importantly, they took control of Trump’s information flow. That final step changed everything. General Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet. Further, staff members are now prevented from sneaking him stories from unapproved sources during the day (stories that might get him riled up and off the establishment message).

Read more …

Making things ‘personal’ works for a narrative. In practice, though, not so much.

• A Flaw In US Foreign Policy That No One Wants To Talk About (TAM)

In an interview with RT in 2015, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered perhaps one of his most intriguing statements since the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011. Assad stated: “Western propaganda has, from the very beginning, been about the cause of the problem being the president. Why? Because they want to portray the whole problem in Syria lies in one individual; and consequently the natural reaction for many people is that, if the problem lies in one individual, that individual should not be more important than the entire homeland. So let that individual go and things will be alright. That’s how they oversimplify things in the West.” He continued: “Notice what happened in the Western media since the coup in Ukraine. What happened? President Putin was transformed from a friend of the West to a foe and, yet again, he was characterized as a tsar…

This is Western propaganda. They say that if the president went things will get better.” Putting aside Assad’s vast and extensive list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Assad highlighted one of the major flaws in Western thinking regarding America’s hostile policies toward a number of independent states. Just look at the current to-and-fro-ing between North Korea and the United States to gather an accurate picture of what is being referred to here. The problem of North Korea is consistently portrayed in the media as caused by one person (current leader Kim Jong-un), a narrative that ultimately ignores the role America and its allies have played in this current crisis.[..] What the media is really advancing here – particularly when one talks about a military option as a response to dealing with North Korea’s rogue actions – is the notion that if the U.S. could only take out Kim Jong-un, the problem of North Korea would disappear.

[..] The fact that the U.S. evidently doesn’t want to solve any problems at all – that it merely seeks to overthrow leaders that don’t succumb to its wishes – is a topic for a separate article but is certainly worth mentioning here as well. The same can ultimately be said of Donald Trump. Since his election victory, many celebrities, media pundits, and members of the intelligence community have sought to unseat and discredit him. Yet Donald Trump is merely a horrifying symptom of America’s problems; to think he alone caused them and that by removing him from office the U.S. would suddenly become a safe-haven of freedom and liberty is nothing short of idiotic.

If you agree with the latter sentiment, you must also concede that the problems facing North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and elsewhere could never be solved by the U.S. forcibly removing their leaders. If Assad was removed from Syria, would extremism disappear or would it thrive in the political vacuum as it did in Iraq? Could Syria’s internal issues — which are much more extensive than the corporate media would have us believe — be solved by something as simple as removing its current leader? Can anyone name a country where this has been tried and tested as a true model for solving a sovereign nation’s internal crises? Anyone who truly believes a country’s problems can be solved in this facile way needs to do a bit more reading.

Read more …

Congress has left a lot of things alone that are their responsibility

• This Isn’t Your Great-Grandad’s America (Jim Kunstler)

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are so out of the news now that people not listening to the mold grow in their sweltering bedrooms probably think these events had something to do with the Confederate defeat. Both The New York Times and the WashPo are much more concerned this morning with doings on the planet Saturn, and the career moves of fashion icon Chelsea Manning, which is perhaps how things should be in Attention Deficit Nation. Standing by on developments there…. In the meantime, personally, I think it would be cruel to deport fully acculturated and Americanized young adults to Mexico and Central America. But there should be no question that it’s up to congress to figure out what to do about the DACA kids, and put it into coherent law. The Golden Golem of Greatness was correct to serve the ball into congress’s court.

The suave and charming Mr. Obama only punted the action on that problem, and rather cynically too, I suspect, since he knew the next president would be stuck with it. It’s hard to overcome the sentimental demagoguery this quandary fetches up. The so-called Dreamers are lately portrayed in the media as a monoculture of spectacularly earnest high-achievers, all potential Harvard grads, and future Silicon Valley millionaires working tirelessly to add value to the US economy. This, again personally, I doubt , and there’s also room to doubt that they are uniformly acculturated and Americanized as claimed by the journalists cherry-picking their stories to support the narrative that national borders and immigration laws are themselves cruel anachronisms that need to be opposed.

[..] It’s right and proper that congress should resolve the fate of the DACA kids by legislation, and that they should actively address reform of the 1965 immigration act, too. Things have changed. This isn’t your great-grandad’s America of burgeoning factories beckoning to the downtrodden abroad. This is a sunset industrial economy not really knowing where its headed, but indulging in grandiose fantasies of perpetual robotic leisure where actual work is obsolete but somehow everybody gets rich. Trump was also correct to set a six month deadline on for congress to act. It is clearly their responsibility to do so, and the deadline is exactly the sort of boundary in thought-and-act that this lazy-ass nation needs to begin accomplishing anything on its long and neglected to-do list of pressing issues.

Read more …

Where are the defenders of democracy? Where’s the EU?

• Police In Catalonia Hunt For Hidden Ballot Boxes In Bid To Foil Referendum (R.)

Armed police in Spain have raided several print works and newspaper offices in Catalonia in recent days in a hunt for voting papers, ballot boxes and leaflets to be used in an Oct. 1 independence referendum which Madrid vehemently opposes. The searches, which have so far yielded nothing, are part of a concerted effort by the government to prevent the ballot from going ahead, amid fears that a vote to break away could trigger a political crisis even if Spain does not recognize the outcome. On Friday, the government passed measures to tighten control over the region’s spending to stop it using state cash to pay for the ballot, and earlier this week Madrid summoned over 700 Catalan mayors for questioning over their support for the vote. “They’ve lost the plot,” said Albert Batet, mayor of the town of Valls and one of those summoned for questioning.

“They are persecuting mayors, the press, printers. They are stretching the limits of democracy.” Catalonia’s president Carles Puigdemont, who faces criminal charges for organizing the referendum, says he has over 6,000 ballot boxes ready to deploy next month, but their whereabouts are a secret. Toni Castejon, spokesman for the Catalan police force union, said it was like finding a needle in a haystack. “Right now, we have no idea where they are,” he said. [..] For some supporters of the independence movement, the search for the ballot boxes and voting papers has become a symbol of what they see as state repression. Images of the Catalan police force – the Mossos d‘Esquadra – seizing what for many are symbols of democracy would be highly inflammatory, police say.

The Mossos report to the Catalan regional government and are highly regarded by Catalans, particularly after their handling of the Islamist militant attacks in the region in August that killed 16. But Spanish state prosecutors have ordered all police – including the Catalan force – to act. “What no one wants is the image of the Mossos taking away the ballot boxes,” said Castejon of the police union. “That would lead to a lot of anger and even civil unrest.”

Read more …

Then again, this fits in quite well with how Brussels treats democracy, votes, referendums.

• Spanish State Poised To Seize Catalan Finances (BBC)

The Spanish government has given the regional government in Catalonia 48 hours to abandon “illegal” referendum plans or lose budgetary powers. Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro said a mechanism had been approved for the state to take control of the autonomous region’s finances. Madrid is seeking to stop the Catalan government spending public money on its planned independence referendum. The Catalans are defying a court order to suspend the 1 October vote. Catalan President Carles Puigdemont launched his campaign for a “Yes” vote on Thursday night in the town of Tarragona, telling a rally at a former bullring: “Vote, and in so doing bring light to darkness that has lasted for too many years.” The crowd shouted back, “Independence”, “We will vote” and “We’re not afraid”, AFP news agency reports.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was taking the unionist cause directly to Barcelona on Friday, addressing a meeting of his Popular Party in the Catalan capital. If the deadline is not met, the central government will take over the funding of most essential public services in the region, Mr Montoro said. “These measures are to guarantee that not one euro will go toward financing illegal acts,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency after a cabinet meeting in Madrid. The takeover would last as long as the “situation”, he explained. Public finances are a particularly sore point for Catalans who for years have contributed more to the state budget than they get back in spending on public services.

Read more …

Someone posted a similar cone for José on Twitter about ten days ago. The idea is not new.

• New York City Is Within Hurricane Jose’s 5-Day “Cone Of Uncertainty” (ZH)

In what were perhaps the two biggest news stories of the past month, Hurricanes Irma and Harvey devastated the American south, disrupting local industry, destroying homes and critical infrastructure and dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage onto city streets – leading to the most destructive beginning to hurricane season in years. Meanwhile, cosmopolitan Yankees looked on in horror (with perhaps a touch of smugness) as they watched their southern neighbors being paddled out of flooded Texas homes by national guardsmen, or marooned in the seemingly endless lines of traffic snaking out of southern Florida, northeasterners now have their own storm to worry about.

And now, according to the National Weather Service, those same onlookers might be forced to endure similar hardships thanks to Hurricane Jose, already on its way to becoming a category one storm. Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center say a wide stretch of the eastern and northeastern US, from Maryland up through Cape Cod, is within Jose’s five-day “cone of uncertainty” – meaning that a fully fledged hurricane could make landfall in or around New York City, potentially dealing another crushing blow to the city’s infrastructure after the city’s subway system has not yet finished repairing the damage from Superstorm Sandy, which took place five years ago.

Read more …

Debt Rattle September 14 2017

Sep 142017
 
 September 14, 2017  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Edward Hopper Chop Suey 1929

 

• Top Democrats Announce Deal With Trump To Protect ‘Dreamers’ (MW)
• Fed Balance Sheet Reduction Will Reduce Funds Sent To Treasury (BI)
• “You Should Take the Fed at Their Word” (WS)
• “Markets Have Always Been Wrong” – Jamie Dimon (ZH)
• 10% of Global GDP Is Stashed In Tax Havens (BI)
• Did You Know Housing Gets Counted Twice In GDP? (Murray)
• The Real Earnings of Men (WS)
• China’s Steel Mills Run at Full Tilt as Output Hits New Peak (BBG)
• China’s Economy Cools Again (BBG)
• US Senate Rejects Bid To Repeal War Authorizations (R.)
• Has the NYT Gone Collectively Mad? (Robert Parry)
• Crisis Brings Sea Change To Greek Housing Market (K.)
• More Austerity May Be Ahead (K.)

 

 

They dine together, close a deal, and then can’t wait to tell entirely different stories to the press. But Trump has forced them into action.

• Top Democrats Announce Deal With Trump To Protect ‘Dreamers’ (MW)

Top Democratic leaders said Wednesday night that they had reached a compromise agreement with President Donald Trump to enact protections for the children of undocumented immigrants in exchange for increased border security measures that do not include funding for a wall — which the White House then disputed. “We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the president,” read a joint statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “The discussions focused on DACA. We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.” But shortly after that statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disputed that border-wall funding was off the table. “Excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to,” she said.

Schumer, of New York, and Pelosi, of California, had dinner with Trump at the White House on Wednesday night. It was apparently the second bipartisan agreement between Democrats and Trump in the past week, after last week’s surprise deal that provided funding for Hurricane Harvey relief and extended the debt ceiling for three months, much to Republicans’ chagrin. Extending protections for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which were rescinded by the Trump administration last week, is a top priority for Democrats and many Republican lawmakers. Without new legislation, the 690,000 children of undocumented immigrants — so-called “Dreamers” — enrolled in the program could face deportation as their status expires over the next two years. Trump had said he may “revisit” the issue of Dreamers in six months if Congress didn’t act.

Read more …

It’s like driving into a dark and wet dead end alley.

• Fed Balance Sheet Reduction Will Reduce Funds Sent To Treasury (BI)

The Federal Reserve is not expected to raise interest rates again until at least December, and even that increase is now in doubt given low inflation and high political uncertainty in the United States. That doesn’t mean the central bank has no plans to tighten monetary policy, however. Officials are widely expected to announce the start of a gradual reduction of the Fed’s $4.4 trillion balance sheet, which more than quintupled in response to the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007-2009. Policymakers are hoping the shrinkage, which they intend to accomplish by ceasing reinvestments of maturing bonds back into the central bank’s portfolio, will have minimal market impact. But a previous episode in 2013 known as the “taper tantrum,” when bond yields spiked sharply higher at the mere mention of a possible end to the Fed’s bond-buying program, offers a cautionary tale.

Regardless of immediate market impact, there will be a longer term effect on the government budget, currently the subject of heated debate, that most investors and politicians are ignoring. That’s because the Fed’s bond-buying program, in addition to lowering the government’s borrowing costs at a time when weak economic activity called for bigger budget deficits, created a stream of yearly returns of nearly $100 billion for the Federal Reserve which it then siphoned back to the Treasury. Sometimes these are referred to as the Fed’s “profits,” but that is a deceptive way of describing what is in effect an intra-government transaction. “As assets under management drop, so too will revenue on that portfolio. This will be a lost revenue source for the Treasury that will raise deficits and add to the Treasury’s financing” costs, writes Societe Generale Economist Stephen Gallagher in a research note to clients.

Read more …

Downward volatility.

• “You Should Take the Fed at Their Word” (WS)

The markets have been brushing off the Fed and have done the opposite of what the Fed has set out to accomplish. The Fed wants to tighten financial conditions. It’s worried about asset prices. It’s worried that these inflated assets which are used as collateral by the banks, pose a danger to financial stability. It has mentioned several inflated asset classes by name, including commercial real estate, which backs $4 trillion in loans heavily concentrated at regional banks. And yet, markets have loosened financial conditions since the Fed started its tightening cycle in earnest last December. Markets are hiding behind “low” inflation, when the Fed is focused on asset prices. So longer-term yields have been falling even as short-term yields have moved up in line with the Fed’s target rate, and thus the yield curve has flattened.

The dollar has been falling. Equities have been soaring to new highs. And companies, if they’re big enough, are able to get funding for the riskiest projects at stunningly low rates. “I think there is maybe too much confidence that the Fed is not really going to do too much more on interest rates, that we’ll have one or two more rate hikes and that’s it,” Brian Coulton, chief economist for Fitch Ratings, told Reuters on Tuesday. Market participants are expecting “just one or two interest rate increases a year” despite the Fed’s stated expectation of seeing long-run interest rates at around 3.0%. “When the Fed says they’re going to engage in a gradual rate of interest rate increases, they mean three or four rate hikes every year and we think that’s what they’re going to do,” Coulton said. “We think that you should take them at their word and it may even be a little faster than that.”

This disconnect between market expectations and the Fed’s stated intentions could create volatility in fixed-income markets when markets finally catch up, he said. Volatility, when it’s used in this sense, always means downward volatility: a sudden downward adjustment in prices and spiking yields – a painful experience for the coddled bond market with big consequences for the stock market. “We think they’re going to be … getting more worried about some of the negative consequences of QE, the fact that it encourages risk taking and may create some issues for the banks,” he said. And he expects – this is “more of a personal view,” he said – that the Fed will continue with the rate hikes, or even accelerate them, even if consumer price inflation remains low.

Read more …

“There’s low volatility until they’re highly volatile.” Sounds like Minsky.

• “Markets Have Always Been Wrong” – Jamie Dimon (ZH)

Oh, listen, markets are markets. There’s low volatility until they’re highly volatile. The stock market is high until it goes low. Markets therefore have always been wrong. And I think people are making mistakes. I can give you reasons why it might be low. We’ve had this fairly consistent, coherent, consistent growth. But forget the geopolitical noise and stuff like that. We’re chugging along, 2%. Europe is doing 2%. Russia – I mean, Japan is doing 1.5%, China’s doing their 6%. You know, earnings are doing okay. We’ve had a fairly benign economic environment. That’s a reason. I can give you another reason is that the Central Banks of the world that bought $12 trillion of securities. 12 trillion. Since they started doing QE. And that’s only just the U.S. That’s an awful lot of security purchases that might – in all things be equal, and remember things are never all equal – can reduce volatility.

And there may be other sides that are known. And once other sides happen, watch out. Then volatility goes way up. They’ll say they’re a genius, they figured out when it’s going to happened. I don’t guess on which kind of volatility. Like I said, we do a business. And we have to manage the volatility.” [..] The hurricanes are irrelevant. I wouldn’t have any policy matter as a function of hurricanes. Going to reduce GDP in the short run, they’ll probably increase it after that. I’ll let the economists figure it out. But almost a $20 trillion economy, that isn’t a reason to change monetary policy. It will create a lot of noise in the numbers, but I wouldn’t overreact to that. Advice, it’s very sympathetic. We’re doing – just so you know, we’re going to do a lot for affordable housing, get these people in these states 20,000 people in Florida, 6,000 in Houston. Most of the banks are waiving fees, delaying loan payments, offering special services for your employees and stuff like that.”

Read more …

Saw the graph before. Greece is the big one here.

• 10% of Global GDP Is Stashed In Tax Havens (BI)

The Panama Papers and other major leaks from offshore tax havens have helped shed light on just how much money the world’s wealthiest people are parking in untaxed obscurity, away from the authorities and, importantly, economic researchers. This new evidence has helped economists gain greater insight into just how steep disparities between the rich and the poor have become, because having actual data on offshore holdings tends to widen wealth gaps considerably. Three of these researchers have teamed up on two important papers that offer a more in-depth look at what the world’s worst tax-evading and -avoiding nations are, and they find that the existence of tax havens makes inequality much worse than it appears with standard, publicly available economic data.

“The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few % of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies,” Annette Alstadsæter at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen, and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley write in the first of the two articles. Global gross domestic product is about $75.6 trillion, according to World Bank figures. They then apply these estimates to build revised series of top wealth shares in 10 countries accounting for nearly half of world GDP. “Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively,” the authors write. “It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.”

About 60% of the wealth of Russia’s richest households is held offshore, the economists estimate. “More broadly, offshore wealth is likely to have major implications for the concentration of wealth in many of the world’s developing countries, hence for the world distribution of income and wealth.” “These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world,” they continue. They say that despite lip service to transparency, “very little has been achieved” in recent years. “With the exception of Switzerland, no major financial center publishes 18 comprehensive statistics on the amount of foreign wealth managed by its banks.”

Read more …

GDP is a lousy measure.

• Did You Know Housing Gets Counted Twice In GDP? (Murray)

Your car gets counted once in GDP when it is built, not when it is driven. Your clothes, your bicycle, your furniture, all get counted once when they are manufactured, and not again when they are worn, ridden, or sat on. But homes are counted twice: Once when they are constructed, and again when they are occupied. The argument to include both housing construction (as a new capital investment good) and housing occupancy (as a consumption good) arises from a conceptual trick at the heart of national accounting. That trick is to separate out two types of ‘final’ goods when adding up the ‘value-added’ in the economy, which is what GDP does. One good is a consumption good. These are goods (and services) that households consume, like clothes, food, entertainment, and so forth. All the value added at intermediate stages in the production chain of these goods can be captured by looking only at the final retail value of the goods.

That value represents the total value-added across the economy to produce that good. The other type of good is an investment good. This is a good that lasts a long time and contributes to future production. A new rail line, for example, is classified a new investment good, and the value of its production is counted in GDP, even though households don’t get any value from it until it is used to run trains. Once the rail line is being used to run trains, the value of those travel services is also counted in GDP as a consumption good, which will include within it the value contribution of the rail line itself. Thus there is a type of double-counting when it comes to investment goods — you count them when they are made, and you count them again when they are used to make consumption goods.

This is intentional. The production of investment goods is a large share of GDP — between 20 and 40% in most countries. By ignoring this production, which is also the more volatile part of production over the business cycle, GDP loses much of its value as a measure of how economically active a country is. The construction of new homes is, therefore, an investment good, which gets counted in GDP. But then the occupancy of these same homes gets counted gain as a consumption ‘home rental’ good each period after. This applies to the 70% of households (in Australia at least) who own their own home, not just the renters. Although they don’t pay themselves rent to occupy their home, GDP is calculated as if they do by ‘imputing’ the rent that homeowners would have to pay themselves if they instead rented their home.

Read more …

” On this inflation-adjusted basis, men had earned more than that in 1972″
..

• The Real Earnings of Men (WS)

For women who were working full-time year-round, median earnings (income obtained only from working) rose 0.7% on an inflation-adjusted basis from a year ago to $48,328, continuing well-deserved increases over the data series going back to 1960. The female-to-male earnings ratio hit a new record of 80.5%, after steady increases, up from the 60%-range, where it had been between 1960 and 1982. And while that may still be inadequate, and while more progress needs to be made for women in the workforce, it was nevertheless the good news.

Men in the workforce haven’t been so lucky. They have experienced the brunt of the wage repression over the past four decades, obtained in part via inflation, where wages inch up, but not quite enough to keep up with the Fed-engineered loss of purchasing power of the dollar. Median earnings for men who worked full-time year-round fell 0.4% in 2016, adjusted for inflation, to $51,640. On this inflation-adjusted basis, men had earned more than that in 1972 ($52,361). And it’s down 4.4% from the earnings peak in 1973 ($54,030). This translates into 44 years of real earnings decline:

Read more …

Just in time for the Party Congress. What a lucky coincidence!

• China’s Steel Mills Run at Full Tilt as Output Hits New Peak (BBG)

Steel production in China chalked up a fresh monthly record as mills in the world’s top supplier increase output to profit from a rally in prices to six-year highs before government-ordered pollution curbs are implemented. Crude steel output climbed to 74.59 million metric tons last month, surpassing the previous peak of 74.02 million in July, and up from 68.57 million in August 2016, according to the statistics bureau Thursday. While that’s an all-time high for the month, daily output was less than the record in June. Production surged 5.6% to 566.4 million tons in the first eight months, also a record. Steel prices have been supercharged this year in the country that accounts for half of global output. A crackdown on illegal mills shuttered some supply, boosting the remaining producers, while demand has been underpinned by significant state-backed stimulus.

Investors are also eyeing signals that the government will press ahead with anti-pollution curbs over winter. “Steel mills have boosted output as profit margins are good,” said Helen Lau at Argonaut Securities in Hong Kong. “Production cuts won’t set in until September or October, so steelmakers are churning out as much as they can in the meantime.” Spot reinforcement bar in China, a benchmark product used in construction, hit 4,396 yuan a ton early this month, the highest level since October 2011. Prices have gained 30% this year. Steel output may drop in coming months as Asia’s top economy presses ahead with supply-side reforms. Hebei province, the center of China’s mammoth steel industry, has plans that’ll allow for winter output cuts of as much as 50% to reduce pollution. Citigroup Inc. has estimated daily production could shrink 8% because of the environmental crackdown.

Read more …

But wait! Same source, same day, opposite views.

• China’s Economy Cools Again (BBG)

The pace of China’s economic expansion unexpectedly cooled further last month after a lackluster July, as factory output, investment and retail sales all slowed. • Industrial output rose 6.0% from a year earlier in August, versus a median projection of 6.6% and July’s 6.4%. That’s the slowest pace this year • Retail sales expanded 10.1% from a year earlier, versus a projection of 10.5% and 10.4% in July, also the slowest reading in 2017 • Fixed-asset investment in urban areas rose 7.8% in the first eight months of the year over the same period in 2016, compared with a forecast 8.2% rise. That’s the slowest since 1999.

The continued cooling of the world’s second-largest economy suggests that efforts to rein in credit expansion and reduce excess capacity are hitting home ahead of the key 19th Party Congress in October. Still, producer-price inflation and a manufacturing sentiment gauge both exceeded estimates earlier this month, signaling some resilience. The Shanghai Composite Index reversed earlier gains to fall 0.4%. “Today’s data shows that the economy clearly already peaked in the first half of this year,” said Larry Hu at Macquarie in Hong Kong. “Recently both property and exports are slowing down and that’s why the whole economy is slowing.” “Regulatory tightening in the financial sector is putting a squeeze on highly indebted firms reliant on shadow bank financing,” said Frederic Neumann at HSBC in Hong Kong.

“And officials are unlikely to take their foot off the regulatory brakes any time soon. Growth therefore looks set to weaken further into year end, as regulators step up their campaign to rein in shadow banking.” “That’s still on track to a gradual moderation,” Chang Jian, chief China economist at Barclays in Hong Kong, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The government has been closing capacity, especially those that don’t meet environmental standards, and enforcement this year has been much stricter in the run-up to the 19th Party Congress.”

Read more …

An empire built on war.

• US Senate Rejects Bid To Repeal War Authorizations (R.)

The U.S. Senate rejected an amendment on Wednesday that would have forced the repeal of war resolutions used as the legal basis for U.S. military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and against extremists in Syria and other countries. The Senate voted 61 to 36 to kill the measure, which six months after it became law would have put an end to authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF) passed in 2001 and 2002. The legislation was offered by Republican Senator Rand Paul as an amendment to a must-pass annual defense policy bill, which lawmakers are using as a vehicle to gain a greater say in national security policy. Paul’s measure was aimed at asserting the constitutional right of Congress to approve military action, rather than the president.

Some of the other amendments address issues such as sanctions on North Korea and President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the military. Many members of Congress are concerned the 2001 AUMF, passed days after the Sept. 11 attacks to authorize the fight against al Qaeda and affiliates, has been used too broadly as the legal basis for a wide range of military action in too many countries. The majority of support for the amendment came from Democrats, who joined Paul in arguing that it is long past time for Congress to debate a new authorization for the use of force. “We should oppose unauthorized, undeclared, unconstitutional war. At this particular time, there are no limits on war,” Paul said.

Read more …

Not really. They’re just chasing illusions.

• Has the NYT Gone Collectively Mad? (Robert Parry)

For those of us who have taught journalism or worked as editors, a sign that an article is the product of sloppy or dishonest journalism is that a key point will be declared as flat fact when it is unproven or a point in serious dispute – and it then becomes the foundation for other claims, building a story like a high-rise constructed on sand. This use of speculation as fact is something to guard against particularly in the work of inexperienced or opinionated reporters. But what happens when this sort of unprofessional work tops page one of The New York Times one day as a major “investigative” article and reemerges the next day in even more strident form as a major Times editorial? Are we dealing then with an inept journalist who got carried away with his thesis or are we facing institutional corruption or even a collective madness driven by ideological fervor?

What is stunning about the lede story in last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers no real evidence to support its provocative claim that – as the headline states – “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook, Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.” In the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s “newspaper of record.” In this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities, but he ties none of them to the Russian government.

Acting like he has minimal familiarity with the Internet – yes, a lot of people do use fake identities – Shane builds his case on the assumption that accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin. For instance, Shane cites the fake identity of “Melvin Redick,” who suggested on June 8, 2016, that people visit DCLeaks which, a few days earlier, had posted some emails from prominent Americans, which Shane states as fact – not allegation – were “stolen … by Russian hackers.” Shane then adds, also as flat fact, that “The site’s phony promoters were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

Read more …

See my article yesterday.

• Crisis Brings Sea Change To Greek Housing Market (K.)

“What we are experiencing is the end of the era of home ownership in Greece as households can no longer save to buy property,” says Nikos Hatzitsolis, chief executive at real estate firm CB Richard Ellis-Axies, underscoring the fundamental changes that the crisis has triggered in the Greek property market. This change, the experts explain, is not just evident in the case of those just flying the nest who wouldn’t be in any position to own their home anyway unless it was given to them by their family, but also existing homeowners who are opting to leave their property and rent it out or sell it. “Around 70% of homeowners are becoming renters because they choose to sell their property to pay off debts such as mortgages, late taxes or credit card debt,” says Lefteris Potamianos, vice president of the Athens-Attica Estate Agents Association.

“If any money is left over from the transaction, it is not reinvested in another property, as was the case in the past, but used to rent another home. Basically, the dream of ownership that drove past generations has come to an end.” A significant%age of homeowners choosing to rent out their home and lease a different property for themselves also consists of young people who see their accommodation requirements increasing, due to the birth of a child for example, or want to live in an area with better schools or security. “We are seeing more and more such cases in the property market,” says Potamianos. “Given that sales prices are very low and it is hard to find a buyer, many owners prefer to rent out their property and then rent another for themselves, as getting bank funding for a purchase is incredibly difficult. Some even move around to see which area suits them best. Renting has this flexibility, allowing you to relocate if you’re not happy.”

For the overwhelming majority, however, renting is the only option, as buying is seen as bringing no advantages whatsoever anymore. “Even from a purely economic perspective, it’s not worth owning a home today. In contrast, people who rent avoid all the additional tax costs and are not exposed to the instability of the tax framework for real estate assets, which has become a tool of politics and results in no taxpayer knowing what tomorrow will bring,” explains Hatzitsolis. “Previous generations believed that buying houses was a form of investment. This is no longer the case, as we’re seeing a completely different mentality in younger people.”

The expert also draws attention to the cases of people who are stuck with their properties. “I know an owner who inherited a house in [the upscale Athenian suburb of] Ekali and has to pay 80,000 euros a year in property tax,” he recounts. “At best, the house could fetch 50,000 euros a year in rent, which means that this man has to cover losses of 30,000 euros every year, something that is a complete dead end.” This owner has little choice but to sell, says Hatzitsolis, adding that such cases also explain why an increasing number of people are refusing their inheritances.

Read more …

Europe won’t rest until they have created their very own Somalia.

• More Austerity May Be Ahead (K.)

Greek authorities will honor their commitments as laid out in the latest loan deal with international creditors, even if this results in the need for additional austerity measures next year, a top government official indicated Wednesday. In an unusual show of honesty and realism, the same official suggested that there might not be a “clean exit” for Greece after its third bailout expires next summer but something more restrictive. There are a range of possible scenarios between that of a clean exit, which Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has heralded, and the prospect of a credit line for Greece, the official said. On the prospect of more austerity next year, the official said he believed that there would not be a big divergence in fiscal targets next year. “If there is, we’ll see what happens, but were are committed to a target of 3.5% of GDP,” the official said, referring to the primary surplus goal set by creditors.

The official also noted that, once a primary surplus target is reached, residual revenue will go toward boosting the Social Solidarity Income program for 2017 for Greeks who have been hardest hit by austerity but also toward paying off state debts to the private sector and to growth programs. Decisions on these matters are expected to be taken following talks with the mission chiefs representing Greece’s foreign lenders, who are expected to travel to Athens next month and to assess the progress of authorities in boosting tax collection and curbing spending. Although Greek officials have underlined the importance of completing the next bailout review by the end of the year, sources suggest that the process might drag into January.

The most important thing, the official noted, is “that we are not part of the problem” when important discussions about the future of the Greek program get under way in the first quarter of next year, touching on the participation (or not) of the IMF in Greece’s third bailout and relief for the country’s debt burden. Greek authorities are concerned about the IMF’s stance opposite Athens. Apart from the Fund’s traditionally tough position on fiscal matters, there are concerns too about its demands for a further recapitalization of Greek banks. The official, however, assumed the stance of the ECB on this issue, noting that there is no need for Greek banks to receive further capital. The official said that Greece planned to tap international bond markets in the next 6-9 months following a successful return in July.

Read more …

Debt Rattle September 6 2017

Sep 062017
 
 September 6, 2017  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Edward Hopper Summer evening 1947

 

• Irma Becomes Most Powerful Hurricane Ever Recorded In Atlantic (G.)
• Australia: Classic Mortgage Ponzi Finance Model (News)
• The World Is Becoming Desperate About Deflation (Katsenelson)
• Mario Draghi Is Running Out Of Bonds To Buy (BBG)
• Banks Moving Jobs From London Post-Brexit Need To Act Fast – Bundesbank (CNBC)
• UK PM May in Double Brexit Trouble (BBG)
• Trump: I Will ‘Revisit’ DACA If Congress Can’t Legalize It (CNBC)
• Putin Warns of Planetary Catastrophe over North Korea (G.)
• Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again (N.)
• The Bad Guys Are The Ones Invading Sovereign Nations (M.)
• Neoliberalism is a Form of Fascism (Cadelli)
• European Top Court Dismisses Eastern States’ Challenge To Refugee Quota (DW)
• Plastic Film Covering 12% of China’s Farmland Contaminates Soil (BBG)

 

 

Tropical storm José is close behind, and the next one, Katia, is forming in the Gulf. Prayers. The Saffir-Simpson scale doesn’t go to 6, or Irma would be that. 5++ for now.

• Irma Becomes Most Powerful Hurricane Ever Recorded In Atlantic (G.)

The most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history bore down on the islands of the north-east Caribbean on Tuesday night local time, following a path predicted to then rake Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba before possibly heading for Florida over the weekend. At the far north-eastern edge of the Caribbean, authorities on the Leeward Islands of Antigua and Barbuda cut power and urged residents to shelter indoors as they braced for Hurricane Irma’s first contact with land early on Wednesday. Officials warned people to seek protection from Irma’s “onslaught” in a statement that closed with: “May God protect us all.” The category 5 storm had maximum sustained winds of 185mph (295kph) by early Tuesday evening, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami.

Category 5 hurricanes are rare and are capable of inflicting life-threatening winds, storm surges and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey, which last week devastated Houston, was category 4. Other islands in the path of the storm included the US and British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, a small, low-lying British island territory of about 15,000 people. US president Donald Trump declared emergencies in Florida, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Warm water is fuel for hurricanes and Irma is over water that is one degree celsius (1.8F) warmer than normal. The 26C (79F) water that hurricanes need goes about 250 feet deep (80m), said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private forecasting service Weather Underground.

Four other storms have had winds as strong in the overall Atlantic region but they were in the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, which are usually home to warmer waters that fuel cyclones. Hurricane Allen hit 190mph in 1980, while 2005’s Wilma, 1988’s Gilbert and a 1935 great Florida Key storm all had 185mph winds.

Read more …

‘piss in a fancy bottle scam’

• Australia: Classic Mortgage Ponzi Finance Model (News)

The Australian mortgage market has “ballooned” due to banks issuing new loans against unrealised capital gains of existing investment properties, creating a $1.7 trillion “house of cards”, a new report warns. The report, “The Big Rort”, by LF Economics founder Lindsay David, argues Australian banks’ use of “combined loan to value ratio” — less common in other countries — makes it easy for investors to accumulate “multiple properties in a relatively short period of time despite high house prices relative to income”. “The use of unrealised capital gain (equity) of one property to secure financing to purchase another property in Australia is extreme,” the report says. “This approach allows lenders to report the cross-collateral security of one property which is then used as collateral against the total loan size to purchase another property. This approach substitutes as a cash deposit.

“This has exacerbated risks in the housing market as little to no cash deposits are used.” The report describes the system as a “classic mortgage Ponzi finance model”, with newly purchased properties often generating net rental income losses, adversely impacting upon cash flows. “Profitability is therefore predicated upon ever-rising housing prices,” the report says. “When house prices have fallen in a local market, many borrowers were unable to service the principal on their mortgages when the interest only period expires or are unable to roll over the interest-only period.” LF Economics argues that while international money markets have until now provided “remarkably affordable funding” enabling Australian banks to issue “large and risky loans”, there is a growing risk the wholesale lending community will walk away from the Australian banking system.

“[Many] international wholesale lenders … may find out the hard way that they have invested into nothing more than a $1.7 trillion ‘piss in a fancy bottle scam’,” the report says. The report largely sheets the blame home to Australia’s financial regulators, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. “ASIC and APRA have failed to protect borrowers from predatory and illegal lending practices,” it says. “Although ASIC has no official ‘duty of care’, APRA does, and will have some serious questions to answer in relation to systemic criminality within the mortgage market committed by the financial institutions they regulate. The evidence strongly suggests the regulators have done nothing to combat white-collar criminality in the mortgage market.”

Read more …

Because the world doesn’t know what it is.

• The World Is Becoming Desperate About Deflation (Katsenelson)

The Great Recession may be over, but eight years later we can still see the deep scars and unhealed wounds it left on the global economy. In an attempt to prevent an unpleasant revisit to the Stone Age, global governments have bailed out banks and the private sector. These bailouts and subsequent stimuli swelled global government debt, which jumped 75%, to $58 trillion in 2014 from $33 trillion in 2007. (These numbers, from McKinsey, are the latest, but it’s fair to say they have not shrunk since.) There’s a lot about today’s environment that doesn’t fit neatly into economic theory. Ballooning government debt should have brought higher – much higher – interest rates. But central banks bought the bonds of their respective governments and corporations, driving interest rates down to the point at which a quarter of global government debt now “pays” negative interest.

The concept of positive interest rates is straightforward. You take your savings, which you amass by forgoing current consumption — not buying a newer car or making fewer trips to fancy restaurants — and lend it to someone. In exchange for your sacrifice, you receive interest payments. With negative interest rates, something quite different happens: You lend $100 to your neighbor. A year later the neighbor knocks on your door and, with a smile on his face, repays that $100 loan by writing you a check for $95. You had to pay $5 for forgoing your consumption of $100 for a year. The key takeaway: negative and near-zero interest rates show central banks’ desperation to avoid deflation. More important, they highlight the bleak state of the global economy. In theory, low- and negative interest rates were supposed to reduce savings and stimulate spending.

In practice, the opposite has happened: The savings rate has gone up. As interest rates on their deposits declined, consumers felt that now they had to save more to earn the same income. Go figure. Some countries resort to negative interest rates because they want to devalue their currencies. This strategy suffers from what economists call the fallacy of composition: the mistaken assumption that what is true of one member of a group is true for the group as a whole. As a country adopts negative interest rates, its currency will decline against others — arguably stimulating its export sector (at the expense of other countries). But there is absolutely nothing proprietary about this strategy: Other governments will do the same, and in the end all will experience lowered consumption and a higher savings rate.

Read more …

Draghi seeks to protect Europe’s biggest banks, but he can’t. Not anymore.

• Mario Draghi Is Running Out Of Bonds To Buy (BBG)

The European Central Bank may not have as much flexibility left in its bond-buying program as Mario Draghi insists. As the Governing Council kicks off discussion about the future of its asset purchases, the question that will loom large is how much wiggle room policy makers have to extend their 2.3 trillion-euro program ($2.7 trillion). Not much, according to two economists. They believe the ECB’s decision to wind down bond buying next year will be a matter of necessity rather a choice. “Bond scarcity is increasing in more and more countries,” says Louis Harreau, an ECB strategist at Credit Agricole CIB in Paris. “The ECB will be forced to reduce its QE regardless of economic conditions, simply because it has no more bonds to purchase.”

But working out how much space the central bank still has is fiendishly hard. That’s because the asset-purchase program is like a three-dimensional game of chess spread over bonds from 18 euro-area states. The 19th member, Greece, is excluded from the program. The first rule the ECB could trip over is the one that prohibits the accumulation of more than 33% of debt from a single country. Germany could hit this mark as early as spring if the current pace of purchases is maintained, says Commerzbank Chief Economist Joerg Kraemer. It’s long been a red line for Draghi and revisiting it now when the program is awaiting a review at the European Union’s highest court could be particularly tricky.

Yet some rules of the program are more malleable, giving the ECB potential leeway. The euro-area central banks have quotas to meet in buying each nation’s debt based on the size of their economies. But they can deviate from those capital-key guidelines and have done so for months now. A good example is Germany, where debt-buying last month hit the lowest level since the program started more than two years ago. According to Harreau, the ECB could deviate from the capital key by a total of €5 billion a month, twice the amount they do now. That could ease the strain for some countries, but would still require the program to be wound down by the end of next year, he says.

Read more …

By the time Brexit is reality, they’ll need to lay them off anyway.

• Banks Moving Jobs From London Post-Brexit Need To Act Fast – Bundesbank (CNBC)

Frankfurt and Dublin are emerging as the clear favorites for post-Brexit relocation among U.K.-based banks, according to a top official at Germany’s central bank. “From the discussions I have, it is my clear impression that Dublin and Frankfurt are the two cities where there is most interest (from City lenders). We have received quite a number of applications,” Andreas Dombret, an executive board member at the German Bundesbank, told CNBC on Tuesday. “We encourage the banks to finalize their thinking, especially the ones that have not done so, and to really think where they want to move and how they want to move … Let’s all not try to walk through the same narrow door in the 11th hour,” he added. Britain’s financial services industry has been quietly preparing for Brexit given that it’s likely to lose its EU passporting rights – these are special licenses that allow U.K.-based banks to sell their services across the whole of the EU.

The negotiations between London and Brussels are still ongoing and it remains unclear how many employees will have to be moved from London to other European cities. At the moment, the disruption appears to be minimal compared to the overall size of the industry. But there are clear winners from the exit of some jobs from London with Frankfurt and Dublin perceived to be the top destinations for institutions that wish to continue working with clients across the EU. When asked whether vulnerable European banks could trigger a systemic crisis across the continent, Dombret said that such a prospect “doesn’t keep me up at night.” “I’m not that worried about a systemic crisis at all. There are regions, there are sectors and there are certain banks in certain countries which are more exposed than others but it is not a system wide or country wide issue,” he said.

Read more …

An event that shapes an entire nation is negotiated by just one segment of its population. Not even a majority at that.

• UK PM May in Double Brexit Trouble (BBG)

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit planning suffered a double blow as a top European Union official doubted that trade talks will start next month and the opposition Labour Party prepared to challenge key legislation. The EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, told German lawmakers that she’s skeptical officials will be able to begin discussing a trade deal in October, as they had hoped, according to two people present at the briefing. Her warning emerged as Labour announced it will seek to block May’s plan for a post-Brexit legal regime in London. May also has to contend with a leak of a draft plan for new immigration rules, which would end the free movement of workers on the day Britain leaves the EU, and impose restrictions on all but highly skilled workers from the region.

The 82-page document, obtained by The Guardian, said immigration should not just benefit the migrants, but “make existing residents better off.” The fresh trouble at home and abroad exposes how hard May is finding it to extricate the U.K. from the EU just days after the latest round of negotiations ended in acrimony with the two sides at odds over how much Britain should pay when it quits the bloc. [..] The EU has said it will not shift to discussing the sweeping new free-trade agreement that the U.K. wants until “sufficient progress” has been made on divorce issues – including the financial settlement, the rights of citizens and the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Labour is challenging the government’s argument that with a shrinking amount of time available, ministers should be handed the power to revise aspects of EU law without full parliamentary scrutiny. As May has no majority in Parliament, she’d be vulnerable to rebels from her own Conservative side, and some Tories, including former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, have already expressed reservations about this aspect of the bill. If amendments to the bill mean ministers have to get parliamentary approval for each regulation, they risk being held up by constant roadblocks.

Read more …

In the hands of Congress now.

• Trump: I Will ‘Revisit’ DACA If Congress Can’t Legalize It (CNBC)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night said he would “revisit” the Obama-era policy shielding hundreds of thousands of young people from deportation in six months if Congress cannot legalize it. It is unclear what action Trump would take if he decided to again address Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that he said he would end Tuesday with a six-month delay. However, his tweeted comment appears to cloud his view on the issue after a day in which he and his administration vehemently criticized President Barack Obama’s authority to implement the policy. Trump’s decision set up a potential rush for lawmakers to pass a bill protecting so-called dreamers before the Trump administration’s deadline. It is unclear if the GOP-led Congress, members of which voted to sink similar legislation in the past, can do so in the near future as it faces multiple crucial deadlines to approve legislation.

In a statement earlier Tuesday, Trump said he looks forward “to working with Republicans and Democrats in Congress to finally address all of these issues in a manner that puts the hardworking citizens of our country first.” “As I’ve said before, we will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion — but through the lawful democratic process — while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve. We must also have heart and compassion for unemployed, struggling, and forgotten Americans,” Trump said. Trump allies like Attorney General Jeff Sessions urged him to end DACA, arguing it will be difficult to defend in court. “Simply put, if we are to further our goal of strengthening the constitutional order and rule of law in America, the Department of Justice cannot defend this overreach,” Sessions said Tuesday in announcing the move.

Read more …

“They will eat grass but will not stop their [nuclear] programme as long as they do not feel safe.”

• Putin Warns of Planetary Catastrophe over North Korea (G.)

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has warned that the escalating North Korean crisis could cause a “planetary catastrophe” and huge loss of life, and described US proposals for further sanctions on Pyongyang as “useless”. “Ramping up military hysteria in such conditions is senseless; it’s a dead end,” he told reporters in China. “It could lead to a global, planetary catastrophe and a huge loss of human life. There is no other way to solve the North Korean nuclear issue, save that of peaceful dialogue.” On Sunday, North Korea carried out its sixth and by far its most powerful nuclear test to date. The underground blast triggered a magnitude-6.3 earthquake and was more powerful than the bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the second world war. Putin was attending the Brics summit, bringing together the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Speaking on Tuesday, the final day of the summit in Xiamen, China, he said Russia condemned North Korea’s provocations but said further sanctions would be useless and ineffective, describing the measures as a “road to nowhere”. Foreign interventions in Iraq and Libya had convinced the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that he needed nuclear weapons to survive, Putin said. “We all remember what happened with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. His children were killed, I think his grandson was shot, the whole country was destroyed and Saddam Hussein was hanged … We all know how this happened and people in North Korea remember well what happened in Iraq. “They will eat grass but will not stop their [nuclear] programme as long as they do not feel safe.”

Read more …

History does talk. Jimmy Carter was replaced with “We came, we saw, he died.”

• Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again (N.)

The 1994 agreement was the United States’ response to a regional political crisis that began that year when North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear states to agree never to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Although it had no nuclear weapon, North Korea was producing plutonium, an action that almost led the United States to launch a pre-emptive strike against its plutonium facility. That war was averted when Jimmy Carter made a surprise trip to Pyongyang and met with North Korea’s founder and leader at the time, Kim Il-sung (he died a few months later, and his power was inherited by his son, Kim Jong-il). The framework was signed in October 1994, ending “three years of on and off vilification, stalemates, brinkmanship, saber-rattling, threats of force, and intense negotiations,” Park Kun-young, a professor of international relations at Korea Catholic University, wrote in a 2009 history of the negotiations.

In addition to shutting its one operating reactor, Yongbyon, the North also stopped construction of two large reactors “that together were capable of generating 30 bombs’ worth of plutonium a year,” according to Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who helped negotiate the 1994 framework and directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Most important for the United States, it remained in the NPT. In exchange for North Korea’s concessions, the United States agreed to provide 500,000 tons a year of heavy fuel oil to North Korea as well two commercial light-water reactors considered more “proliferation resistant” than the Soviet-era heavy-water facility the North was using. The new reactors were to be built in 2003 by a US/Japanese/South Korean consortium called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO. (The reactors, however, were never completed).

[..] First, the Agreed Framework led North Korea to halt its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program for over a decade, forgoing enough enrichment to make over 100 nuclear bombs. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissible material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” says Sigal. (The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in 1994 that the North had ceased production of plutonium three years earlier.) “A lot of this history” about North Korea, Sigal adds with a sigh, “is in the land of make-believe.” Second, the framework remained in effect well into the Bush administration. In 1998, the State Department’s Rust Deming testified to Congress that “there is no fundamental violation of any aspect of the framework agreement”; four years later, a similar pledge was made by Bush’s then–Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Read more …

“Americans are saturated in lies about their country from birth..”

• The Bad Guys Are The Ones Invading Sovereign Nations (M.)

These are not the bad guys. The bad guys are the ones refusing to respect the sovereignty of North Korea or any other nation under the sun. The bad guys are the ones invading sovereign nations at will and slaughtering civilians with explosives dropped from flying killing machines. The fact that something so simple and so obvious is not universally known in America speaks to the phenomenal efficacy of its corporate media propaganda machine. Because of that propaganda machine, Americans sincerely think that the bad guys are the tiny little nations that America bullies in proxy conflicts to maintain global hegemony. They’re watching Star Wars and cheering for the stormtroopers.

Because of the neoconservative American supremacist doctrine that the US power establishment has espoused, America has given itself the authority to intervene in any government’s affairs at any time and for any reason. This doctrine of American supremacy is founded on the belief that the United States was selected by destiny to lead the world when it won the Cold War, a divine right of sorts to dominion over the entire planet. This is the real evil. The North Koreans aren’t the bad guys, and the South Koreans want to get along with them. They’re sick of being in a constant state of war, they want dialogue and diplomacy with North Korea by a nearly four to one margin, and they staged large protests against America’s missile defense system which at one point mobilized 8,000 riot police to remove protesters from a South Korean THAAD site.

These are the people who are actually putting their lives on the line with Seoul’s close proximity to the DMZ, and they want peace and de-escalation. They should be allowed to have that, but their US-backed government is talking about bringing American tactical nukes back to the Korean Peninsula. [..] Americans are saturated in lies about their country from birth, throughout their schooling and by every screen they interact with throughout their day; it’s a testament to their good will that the elites are forced to put on this Scooby Doo haunted house song and dance every time.

Read more …

The Mussolini kind.

• Neoliberalism is a Form of Fascism (Cadelli)

The time for rhetorical reservations is over. Things have to be called by their name to make it possible for a co-ordinated democratic reaction to be initiated, above all in the public services. Liberalism was a doctrine derived from the philosophy of Enlightenment, at once political and economic, which aimed at imposing on the state the necessary distance for ensuring respect for liberties and the coming of democratic emancipation. It was the motor for the arrival, and the continuing progress, of Western democracies. Neoliberalism is a form of economism in our day that strikes at every moment and every sector of our community. It is a form of extremism. Fascism may be defined as the subordination of every part of the State to a totalitarian and nihilistic ideology.

I argue that neoliberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also every aspect of our thought. The state is now at the disposal of the economy and of finance, which treat it as a subordinate and lord over it to an extent that puts the common good in jeopardy. The austerity that is demanded by the financial milieu has become a supreme value, replacing politics. Saving money precludes pursuing any other public objective. It is reaching the point where claims are being made that the principle of budgetary orthodoxy should be included in state constitutions. A mockery is being made of the notion of public service. The nihilism that results from this makes possible the dismissal of universalism and the most evident humanistic values: solidarity, fraternity, integration and respect for all and for differences.

There is no place any more even for classical economic theory: work was formerly an element in demand, and to that extent there was respect for workers; international finance has made of it a mere adjustment variable. Every totalitarianism starts as distortion of language, as depicted accurately in George Orwell’s 1984. Neoliberalism has its Newspeak and strategies of communication that enable it to deform reality. In this spirit, every budgetary cut is represented as an instance of modernisation of the sectors concerned. If some of the most deprived are no longer reimbursed for medical expenses and so stop visiting the dentist, this is modernisation of social security in action.

Read more …

The EU seeks to forcefully redefine ‘sovereignty’, like it did in Greece. That will not end well. Even if these countries gave in and admitted refugees, how would they be treated?

• European Top Court Dismisses Eastern States’ Challenge To Refugee Quota (DW)

The EU’s top court on Wednesday dismissed a challenge by eastern European members over the bloc’s mandatory refugee quota program. The ruling means that Hungary and Slovakia could face fines if they refuse to abide by the quota system. The ruling is a victory for EU immigration policy, which has divided the bloc as nearly 1.7 million people arrived from the Middle East and Africa since 2014. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary argue the mandatory quota system violates their sovereignty and threatens their societies. The legal challenge was also backed by Poland, which alongside Hungary has not taken in any asylum seekers. Slovakia and the Czech Republic have only taken in a few dozen asylum seekers. Only 24,000 of 160,000 refugees from frontline Mediterranean states like Greece and Italy have been transferred to other states under the EU’s refugee burden sharing policy agreed to in 2015.

Read more …

Because they have farmland to spare?

• Plastic Film Covering 12% of China’s Farmland Contaminates Soil (BBG)

China will expand its agricultural use of environment-damaging plastic film to boost crop production even as authorities try to curb soil pollution, a government scientist said. Some 1.45 million metric tons of polyethylene are spread in razor-thin sheets across 20 million hectares (49 million acres) — an area about half the size of California — of farmland in China. Use of the translucent material may exceed 2 million tons by 2024 and cover 22 million hectares, according to Yan Changrong, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The plastic sheets, used as mulch over 12% of China’s farmland, are growing in popularity because they trap moisture and heat, and prevent weeds and pests. Those features can bolster cotton, maize and wheat yields, while enabling crops to be grown across a wider area.

“The technology can boost yields by 30%, so you can image how much extra production we can get — it can solve the problems of producing sufficient food and fiber,” Yan said in an interview at his office at the academy’s Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture. The downside is that polypropylene film isn’t biodegradable and often not recycled. Potentially cancer-causing toxins can be released into the soil from the plastic residue, known locally as “white pollution,” which is present at levels of 60-to-300 kilograms (132-to-661 pounds) per hectare in some provinces. [..] Regrettably, there are no viable alternatives to polyethylene that possess the same agronomic advantages. That means farmers are compelled to keep using it to boost production and income, said Yan, as he flicked through slides showing pollution in the northwest region of Xinjiang.

The material enables crops to be grown in both drier and colder environments. In Xinjiang, which accounts for almost 70% of the country’s cotton output, plastic mulch is used on all cotton farms; and across 93% of the country’s tobacco fields, he said. The film reduces water demand by 20-to-30%.

Read more …