Oct 292015
 
 October 29, 2015  Posted by at 10:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Harris&Ewing National Emergency War Garden Commission display, Wash. DC 1918

Fed Keeps Interest Rates Unchanged But Hints At December Rise (Guardian)
Fed Keeps December Rate Hike in Play (Hilsenrath)
The Death Of Monetary Policy In 1 Dismal Chart (Zero Hedge)
Inflation Fixated Central Banks Have Lost Their Way (Stephen Roach)
The Unnatural Rate Of Interest -Ultra Wonkish- (Steve Keen)
Britain Is Heading For Another 2008 Crash: Here’s Why (David Graeber)
Paris Climate Deal To Ignite A $90 Trillion Energy Revolution (AEP)
China Running Out Of Strategic Oil Reserve Space (Reuters)
Nigel Farage Rages At EU’s Modern Day “Brezhnev Doctrine” (Zero Hedge)
British Bookmaker Doubles Probability of Exit From EU (Bloomberg)
Putin Tests English Debt Law as Ukraine Feud Heads to London Court (Bloomberg)
European Parliament Opposes National Bans on GMO-Food Imports (Bloomberg)
Germany To Oblige Banks To Offer Accounts To Refugees (Reuters)
Inside Europe’s Migrant-Smuggling Rings (WSJ)
Three Migrants Drown Off Lesvos, Coastguard Rescues 242 As Boat Sinks (Reuters)
At Least Five Refugees, Including Four Children, Drown In Aegean (AP)
Dozens Of Refugees Missing After Boat Sinks Off Lesvos (AP)

December is Yellen’s final chance to restore credibility.

Fed Keeps Interest Rates Unchanged But Hints At December Rise (Guardian)

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday kept interest rates unchanged at their record low of near-zero, but raised the likelihood of a rate hike in December by dropping previous warnings about the fragility of the global economy. Following a two-day meeting in Washington, Fed policymakers voted to leave rates at 0-0.25% – where they have been for the seven years since the financial crisis. However, the bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets the rate, significantly raised the prospect of a historic rate rise at its next meeting in December by removing cautious statements about unstable international markets could adversely effect the US economy.

In September, following concerns about the health of the Chinese economy, the committee said: “Recent global economic and financial developments may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term.” This was modified on Wednesday to: “The committee continues to see the risks to the outlook for economic activity and the labor market as nearly balanced but is monitoring global economic and financial developments.” The committee specifically pointed towards the possibility of raising rates at its December meeting – the last of 2015.

“In determining whether it will be appropriate to raise [rates] at its next meeting, the committee will assess progress – both realized and expected – toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2% inflation,” it said in the statement. Nine out of 10 FOMC members voted to keep rates unchanged. That is the same proportion as in September with Jeffrey Lacker, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, being the only member to push for a 25 basis points increase.

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Does having a mouthpiece at the WSJ give the Fed more credibility?

Fed Keeps December Rate Hike in Play (Hilsenrath)

Federal Reserve officials explicitly said they might raise short-term interest rates in December, pushing back against investors who have bet that the central bank wouldn’t move this year. The message appeared to have the desired effect. Before the Fed released its policy statement Wednesday, traders in futures markets put about a 1-in-3 probability on a Fed rate increase this year; after the release, that probability rose to almost 1-in-2. While the Fed kept rates steady after its two-day meeting this week, investors appeared to welcome a vote of confidence in the economy from the central bank. Top Fed officials have been saying for months they believed the economy was nearly strong enough to tolerate an increase in the benchmark short-term rate from near zero, where it has been since December 2008. But they have hesitated to move.

The last instance was in September, when the Fed pointed to worries about turbulence in financial markets and uncertainties about growth overseas—particularly in China—as reasons to stay put. “They are trying to tell us that December is still their base case,” said Roberto Perli, an analyst at Cornerstone Macro, a research firm that advises investors. Market and international developments have turned in the Fed’s favor in recent weeks. The People’s Bank of China last week cut short-term lending rates in an effort to boost growth in the world’s second-largest economy. ECB President Mario Draghi suggested he might extend a bond-purchase program in an effort to stimulate his region’s economic growth rate. The moves sparked a global stock-market rally and could support world-wide growth.

The Dow is up 6% since the Fed met last month, a sign financial-market stress has dissipated. The Fed responded Wednesday by playing down its earlier-stated concerns. Officials struck from their policy statement a sentence introduced in September that pointed to market turbulence and global developments as potential restraints on U.S. economic activity. As those concerns recede, the Fed has fewer impediments standing in the way of a rate increase. Though not mentioned in their statement, officials likely took note in their meeting of the recent progress toward an agreement between Congress and the White House on a federal budget and raising the government’s borrowing limit.

If enacted, the budget and debt-limit resolution would reduce uncertainty about the fiscal outlook and boost government spending and short-term economic growth. Officials pointed specifically in the policy statement to their Dec. 15-16 meeting as a moment when they might act on rates. Individual officials have signaled before that they expected to move before year-end, but the Fed’s policy-making committee hadn’t previously pointed so explicitly in an official statement to the potential timing of a rate increase.

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Do keep this in mind: “..when the world is offering ‘money’ for free, one can only surmise its worth is also close to zero…”

The Death Of Monetary Policy In 1 Dismal Chart (Zero Hedge)

Perhaps “The Japanification of Monetary Policy” would have been a more appropriate title… “well it didn’t work for them, so we should all try more of it” appears to be the repost of policy-makers worldwide which, inevitably, will lead to the total collpase of their credibility (and th every ‘faith’ of the world’s investors shattered). As the old adage goes “you get what you pay for” and when the world is offering ‘money’ for free, one can only surmise its worth is also close to zero…

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TBTF banks like the Fed clueless.

Inflation Fixated Central Banks Have Lost Their Way (Stephen Roach)

Fixated on inflation targeting in a world without inflation, central banks have lost their way. With benchmark interest rates stuck at the dreaded zero bound, monetary policy has been transformed from an agent of price stability into an engine of financial instability. A new approach is desperately needed. The US Federal Reserve exemplifies this policy dilemma. After the Federal Open Market Committee decided in September to defer yet again the start of its long-awaited normalization of monetary policy, its inflation doves are openly campaigning for another delay. For the inflation-targeting purists, the argument seems impeccable. The headline consumer-price index (CPI) is near zero, and “core” or underlying inflation – the Fed’s favorite indicator – remains significantly below the seemingly sacrosanct 2% target.

With a long-anemic recovery looking shaky again, the doves contend that there is no reason to rush ahead with interest-rate hikes. Of course, there is more to it than that. Because monetary policy operates with lags, central banks must avoid fixating on the here and now, and instead use imperfect forecasts to anticipate the future effects of their decisions. In the Fed’s case, the presumption that the US will soon approach full employment has caused the so-called dual mandate to collapse into one target: getting inflation back to 2%. Here, the Fed is making a fatal mistake, as it relies heavily on a timeworn inflation-forecasting methodology that filters out the “special factors” driving the often volatile prices of goods like food and energy. The logic is that the price fluctuations will eventually subside, and headline price indicators will converge on the core rate of inflation.

This approach failed spectacularly when it was adopted in the 1970s, causing the Fed to underestimate virulent inflation. And it is failing today, leading the Fed consistently to overestimate underlying inflation. Indeed, with oil prices having plunged by 50% over the past year, the Fed stubbornly maintains that faster price growth – and the precious inflation rate of 2% – is just around the corner. Missing from this logic is an appreciation of the new and powerful global forces that are bearing down on inflation. According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest outlook, the price deflator for all advanced economies should increase by just 1.5% annually, on average, from now to 2020 – not much higher than the crisis-depressed 1.1% pace of the last six years.

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Steve vs Krugman redux.

The Unnatural Rate Of Interest -Ultra Wonkish- (Steve Keen)

Paul Krugman’s latest column—“Check Out Our Low, Low (Natural) Rates” (which he didn’t flag as “Wonkish”, even though it is so in spades)—noted that the “natural real rate of interest” was falling, and that this justified the low interest rate set by the Federal Reserve. And this made me think about Karl Marx. Why? Because the “natural real rate of interest” is an unobservable entity—in that it’s not a rate you’ll find charged by any bank, but a rate that has to be statistically derived. But more importantly, it is a fantasy: there is no such thing. However it is required as part of a theory in which the economy returns to equilibrium after it is hit by an “exogenous shock”. So Neoclassical economists—meaning both “New Classicals” and “New Keynesians”, as the two fractious clans in this economic tribe call themselves—have to go in search of this phantom.

Marx had an equally important unobservable fantasy at the heart of his attempt to produce a mathematical version of his own economics: the “Labor Theory of Value”. This is the proposition that all value—and hence all profit—emanates solely from labor. Machinery, Marx asserted, simply passed on the value that had been transferred to it by the labor expended in making it. It is mathematically impossible to reconcile this proposition with the Marxist belief that profit rates in different industries converge (for competitive reasons), when you acknowledge that different industries have different ratios of capital to labor. But Marxist economists have tied themselves up in logical (and illogical) knots over this fantasy for well over a century. However Marxists have something over Neoclassicals in this regard: at least they’re aware that there is an issue.

Even though they continue to cling to this belief, they don’t shy away from acknowledging the conundrum. Neoclassicals, on the other hand, don’t even realize that they might have a problem. Some Marxists attempted to circumvent their conundrum on statistical grounds, while making the dubious assumption that the actual wage corresponded to an important concept in Marxian economics, the “value of labor power” (which strictly speaking is a subsistence wage). The great British scholar Ronald Meek rightly derided this fudge, stating that he was “unconvinced by … redefining `the value of labour-power’ so that it becomes equivalent … to any wage which the workers happen to be getting” The real problem for Marxists was that their model of how the economy operated was simply wrong. Statistical work on this chimera wasn’t going to rescue them from that problem.

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Watch video at the link.

Britain Is Heading For Another 2008 Crash: Here’s Why (David Graeber)

British public life has always been riddled with taboos, and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of economics. You can say anything you like about sex nowadays, but the moment the topic turns to fiscal policy, there are endless things that everyone knows, that are even written up in textbooks and scholarly articles, but no one is supposed to talk about in public. It’s a real problem. Because of these taboos, it’s impossible to talk about the real reasons for the 2008 crash, and this makes it almost certain something like it will happen again. I’d like to talk today about the greatest taboo of all. Let’s call it the Peter-Paul principle: the less the government is in debt, the more everybody else is. I call it this because it’s based on very simple mathematics. Say there are 40 poker chips. Peter holds half, Paul the other. Obviously if Peter gets 10 more, Paul has 10 less. Now look at this: it’s a diagram of the balance between the public and private sectors in our economy:

Notice how the pattern is symmetrical? The top is an exact mirror of the bottom. This is what’s called an “accounting identity”. One goes up, the other must, necessarily, go down. What this means is that if the government declares “we must act responsibly and pay back the national debt” and runs a budget surplus, then it (the public sector) is taking more money in taxes out of the private sector than it’s paying back in. That money has to come from somewhere. So if the government runs a surplus, the private sector goes into deficit. If the government reduces its debt, everyone else has to go into debt in exactly that proportion in order to balance their own budgets. The chips are redistributed. This is not a theory. Just simple maths.

Now, obviously, the “private sector” includes everything from households and corner shops to giant corporations. If overall private debt goes up, that doesn’t hit everyone equally. But who gets hit has very little to do with fiscal responsibility. It’s mostly about power. The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down on to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on. The people running the government know this. But they’ve learned if you just keep repeating, “We’re just trying to behave responsibly! Families have to balance their books. Well, so do we,” people will just assume that the government running a surplus will somehow make it easier for all of us to do so too. But in fact the reality is precisely the opposite: if the government manages to balance its books, that means you can’t balance yours.

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Ambrose is techno-happy incorporated. ‘Save the world for profit!’ But we won’t have the money to do it even if we wanted to.

Paris Climate Deal To Ignite A $90 Trillion Energy Revolution (AEP)

The fossil fuel industry has taken a very cavalier bet that China, India and the developing world will continue to block any serious effort to curb greenhouse emissions, and that there is, in any case, no viable alternative to oil, gas or coal for decades to come. Both assumptions were still credible six years ago when the Copenhagen climate summit ended in acrimony, poisoned by a North-South split over CO2 legacy guilt and the allegedly prohibitive costs of green virtue. At that point the International Energy Agency (IEA) was still predicting that solar power would struggle to reach 20 gigawatts by now. Few could have foretold that it would in fact explode to 180 gigawatts – over three times Britain’s total power output – as costs plummeted, and that almost half of all new electricity installed in the US in 2013 and 2014 would come from solar.

Any suggestion that a quantum leap in the technology of energy storage might soon conquer the curse of wind and solar intermittency was dismissed as wishful thinking, if not fantasy. Six years later there can be no such excuses. As The Telegraph reported yesterday, 155 countries have submitted plans so far for the COP21 climate summit to be held by the United Nations in Paris this December. These already cover 88pc of global CO2 emissions and include the submissions of China and India. Taken together, they commit the world to a reduction in fossil fuel demand by 30pc to 40pc over the next 20 years, and this is just the start of a revolutionary shift to net zero emissions by 2080 or thereabouts. “It is unstoppable. No amount of lobbying at this point is going to change the direction,” said Christiana Figueres, the UN’s top climate official.

Yet the energy industry is still banking on ever-rising demand for its products as if nothing has changed. BP is projecting a 43pc increase in fossil fuel use by 2035, Exxon expects 35pc by 2040, Shell 43pc and Opec is clinging valiantly to 55pc. These are pure fiction.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may or may not be correct in arguing that we cannot safely burn more than 800bn tonnes of carbon (two-thirds has been used already) if we are to stop global temperatures rising two degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100. I take no view on the science. But this is the goal accepted by world leaders. It is solemnly enshrined in international accords, and while it might once have been possible for energy companies to dismiss these utterings as empty pieties, to persist now is to trifle with fate.

“This is a world apart from where we were going into Copenhagen. The centre of gravity has fundamentally and irreversibly shifted,” said Mark Kenber, head of the Climate Group. China switched sides several years ago, not least because it faces a middle class insurrection that has shaken the Communist Party to its core. An estimated 100m people viewed the anti-pollution video “Under the Dome” in just 24 hours before it was shut down by horrified officials in February. The IEA says China invested $80bn in renewable energy last year, as much as the US and the EU combined. It is blanketing chunks of the Gobi Desert with solar panels, necessary to absorb the massive surplus production of its own solar companies. The party’s Energy Research Institute has floated the idea of raising the renewable share of electricity to 86pc by 2050.

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What’s that going to do with prices? Deflation equals demand crash.

China Running Out Of Strategic Oil Reserve Space (Reuters)

About 4 million barrels of crude oil bought by a Chinese state trader for the country’s strategic reserves have been stranded in two tankers off an eastern port for nearly two months due to a lack of storage, two trade sources said. The delays will cost millions of dollars and indicate how China is struggling to import record amounts of crude if storage and port capacity at Qingdao, its largest oil import terminal, are unable to keep pace. Ocean Lily and Plata Glory, two very large crude carriers (VLCCs) carrying oil for Sinochem Corp, arrived at Huangdao, Qingdao’s main oil terminal, in early September, and both were still at anchor this week, waiting to unload. “They are both for SPR (strategic petroleum reserve), but no tank space is available to take that oil in,” said a senior trader familiar with Sinochem’s oil trading.

China’s crude oil imports rose nearly 9% in the first nine months of the year over a year earlier to 6.65 million bpd, driven partly by reserve building. China said late last year the first phase of the government’s emergency stockpile is storing about 90 million barrels of crude oil, with the construction of a second phase due by 2020, partly through private investment. Huangdao is the site of one of China’s first SPR tanks, with space for 20 million barrels of oil and also has plans for a second phase of similar size. A recent move to increase competition for oil imports by granting quotas to independent refineries has added to congestion at Huangdao, where operations were already hampered following a pipeline accident two years ago. “Storage and berths were not ready for such a quick market opening,” the trader said.

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“..for all of us that believe in democracy and want to see it reimplemented, the British referendum offers a golden opportunity.”

Nigel Farage Rages At EU’s Modern Day “Brezhnev Doctrine” (Zero Hedge)

Nigel Farage unleashes another of his must-watch rage-fests aimed at the collapse of democracy in Europe. Amid the stunning “democracy crisis” in Portugal, where, as we detailed here, the government has lost its majority but the anti-EU opposition is being prevented from attempting to form a coalition, Farage fumes “this is the modern day implementation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. This is exactly what happened to states living inside the USSR.” One of his best…

“This is the modern day implementation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. This is exactly what happened to states living inside the USSR . What is being made clear here with Greece and indeed with Portugal is that a country only has democratic rights if it’s in favour of the [European] project. If not, those rights are taken away. And perhaps none of this should surprises us as Mr. Juncker has told us before: there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties. And the German Finance Minister, Mr. Schäuble, has said: elections change nothing – there are rules.

I think for anyone that believes in democracy, Portugal should be the final straw. It should be the warning that this project, [in order to] to protect itself and all its failings, will destroy the individual rights of peoples and of nations. My country has always believed in parliamentary democracy so strongly that twice in the last century it risked everything to fight for parliamentary democracy, not just for Britain but for the rest of Europe too. And I actually believe that for all of us that believe in democracy and want to see it reimplemented, the British referendum offers a golden opportunity.”

The opposition in Portugal might be socialists, but the country is effectively suspending democracy to prevent Eurosceptics with a massive electoral mandate from taking power. As we concluded previously, note what’s happened here. The will of the people is now being characterized as a “false signal” to “financial institutions, investors, and markets.”

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Break it up! Break it down!

British Bookmaker Doubles Probability of Exit From EU (Bloomberg)

The chances of the U.K. leaving the EU have almost doubled in just three months, if the odds from Betfair’s gambling exchange are any indication of sentiment. The probability of a majority vote for leaving the EU has jumped to 36%, from 18.5% at the end of July, based on the odds given to bettors on the outcome of the referendum. While bettors are following the momentum of the polls, it would require a huge swing for so-called Brexit to become the favorite outcome. “A vote in favor of staying in the EU is still the firm favorite at 1.56 (4/7 or a 64% chance), in much the same way as the Scottish Referendum market was predicting a No to independence from very early on,” Betfair spokeswoman Naomi Totten said. “The price for a vote in favor of leaving the EU is the shortest it has been since June, currently trading at 2.76 (7/4 or a 36% chance), but in the context of the market it is still very much assumed that Britain will vote to remain within the EU.”

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The West cannot win this.

Putin Tests English Debt Law as Ukraine Feud Heads to London Court (Bloomberg)

Russia and Ukraine are about to test the boundaries of sovereign-debt litigation in a dispute that could have far-reaching implications for government bailouts the world over. The neighbors are vowing to fight each other in a London court over a $3 billion bond Vladimir Putin bought to reward his Ukrainian ally, Viktor Yanukovych, for rejecting closer trade ties with the European Union two years ago. That move fueled the protests in Kiev that led to Yanukovych’s ouster, Putin’s annexation of Crimea and an insurgency that’s killed 8,000 people. Ukraine’s government, on life support from the IMF, says Russia has until Oct. 29 to agree to the same writedown and extension that Franklin Templeton, which manages the largest U.S. overseas bond fund, and most other creditors accepted this month.

Russia’s Finance Ministry says it won’t negotiate and is shopping for a law firm to file suit as soon as Ukraine makes good on its threat to default when the bond comes due Dec. 20. “This issue will go to court, there’s no other way around it,” said Christopher Granville, a former U.K. diplomat in Moscow who runs Trusted Sources research group in London. “There’s no way Russia will remain under financial sanctions from the U.S. government and accept the same terms as Franklin Templeton.” The bond is unusual for a state-to-state loan. It was drafted as a commercial instrument under English law, meaning any dispute will be settled by a judge in the U.K. It also contains a clause designed to prevent Ukraine from offsetting its debt due to damages inflicted by Russia, such as the annexation of Crimea, which President Petro Poroshenko plans to seek compensation for.

Ukraine’s government, which accuses Yanukovych and his allies of stealing tens of billions of dollars before fleeing to Russia, says the bond should be considered commercial and treated the same as debt held by private investors. “This $3 billion was in reality a bribe from Russia, so that President Viktor Yanukovych would stop the association agreement with the EU,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told German newspaper Handelsblatt this week. Russia maintains the loan is official, a designation that would, if Ukraine doesn’t pay, force the IMF to either end its $17.5 billion bailout or alter its policy of not lending to any country that’s in arrears to another. The crisis lender has said it will only decide on the classification if Ukraine defaults.

Either way, the showdown is shaping up to be one of the most unique cases in memory, one followed closely by governments and scholars around the world, including Mitu Gulati, a law professor at Duke University who specializes in sovereign debt. “This kind of court case has never really happened before,” Gulati said. “To see the argument play out as to what Russia owes Ukraine because of its involvement in Crimea, to have that be in court in London would be fabulous.”

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“.. the European Commission proposed the draft law in April in a bid to give opponents of GMOs fewer grounds to hold up EU approvals urged by supporters of the technology.”

European Parliament Opposes National Bans on GMO-Food Imports (Bloomberg)

The European Parliament rejected a draft law that would give individual countries in Europe scope to ban imports of genetically modified food and animal feed, potentially killing an initiative that was greeted with widespread criticism. The EU assembly voted against granting EU governments a right to opt out of rules making the 28-nation bloc a single market for gene-altered food and feed. With Europe split over the safety of gene-modified organisms, the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory arm, proposed the draft law in April in a bid to give opponents of GMOs fewer grounds to hold up EU approvals urged by supporters of the technology.

The commission proposal was modeled on European legislation approved three months earlier – following more than four years of deliberations – that lets national governments go their own way on the cultivation of gene-modified crops. The EU Parliament’s rejection on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, of the food and feed measure reflects concerns it would have been a step too far in denting a free-trade tenet of the bloc. “Member states should shoulder their responsibilities and take a decision together at EU level, instead of introducing national bans,” said Giovanni La Via, an Italian who chairs the 751-seat assembly’s environment committee, which earlier this month recommended throwing out the draft legislation on GMO food and feed. The commission said it would pursue talks on the proposal with EU governments, which also have a say on the matter.

The moment it was unveiled six months ago, the commission proposal drew rebukes from anti- and pro-GMO groups as well as from the U.S. government. Environmental organization Greenpeace called the initiative “a farce,” saying the opt-out option wouldn’t stand up in court against EU free-market rules. The European Association for Bioindustries, whose members include GMO manufacturers, said the proposal would limit choice for livestock farmers, weaken the EU economy and rattle innovative companies’ confidence in the bloc’s approval procedures. The U.S. government said the draft legislation would enable EU nations to ignore “science-based safety and environmental determinations,” would fragment the European market and was inconsistent with current trans-Atlantic talks on a free-trade agreement.

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Not bad.

Germany To Oblige Banks To Offer Accounts To Refugees (Reuters)

Germany’s cabinet signed off on a draft law on Wednesday which will make it easier for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the country to set up bank accounts. Under the new rules, everyone will have the right to access basic banking services, including the homeless and people who fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention on Refugees. This means that migrants will be able to open accounts at any bank, enabling them to deposit and withdraw cash, carry out bank transfers, set up direct debits and make payments with cards. Germany expects between 800,000 to one million people, many fleeing war zones in the Middle East and Africa, to arrive this year, although not all of them will be given asylum.

Giving refugees access to current accounts is seen as a vital first step to help them integrate them into society. “Those who don’t have a bank account, don’t have good prospects on the labour market. Hunting for a flat is also a problem for many people without an account,” said Justice Minister Heiko Maas. In Germany, the number of people without a bank account is in the high six figures, according to estimates by the European Commission, and that figure is expected to rise due to the influx of refugees. Until now, only a few saving banks, which are publicly owned or controlled, have accepted refugees as customers. Asylum seekers were often turned away by other banks since they had no fixed address or lacked the necessary documents.

Under the draft law, which must be approved by parliament to go into effect, all banks that offer current accounts would be obliged to do so for a wider group of consumers. Last month, Germany’s financial watchdog Bafin said it was going to allow banks to accept a broader spectrum of documents, such as papers provided by Germany’s immigration authorities. The draft law also obliges banks to become more transparent about their charges and make it easier for customers to change bank accounts.

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Brought to you by Brussels.

Inside Europe’s Migrant-Smuggling Rings (WSJ)

The entry of established crime syndicates operating between the Middle East and Europe has brought a new level of organization and brutality to the people-smuggling game. In Sofia, many taxis from Lion’s Bridge drive northwest to Vidin, Bulgaria’s smuggling capital, where gangs move up to 500 migrants nightly across the Timok river into Serbia, Bulgarian officials say. On the town outskirts, smugglers store transiting refugees in pig farms and disused airport hangars. The money at stake has sparked a turf war between rival gangs. One public official seeking to crack down was attacked with a Molotov cocktail. Five hundred miles west, Bulgarian crime gangs have played a central role as industrial-scale migrant-smuggling expands into the heart of Europe.

In the case of 71 migrants found asphyxiated in a van in Austria in August, five of six men arrested, including the truck’s owner, are Bulgarian, Austrian police say, adding that five were arrested in Hungary and one in Bulgaria. The Hungarian prosecutor says it won’t release additional information until the men are charged and that the men aren’t reachable for interviews. Bulgaria’s prosecutor’s office says it has initiated criminal proceedings, declining to provide more information. “Our main focus now is the Balkans,” says Col. Gerald Tatzgern, Austria’s vice squad chief, who estimates the illicit transport generates more money in Europe than drug-running or weapons-trafficking. The mushrooming smuggling trade, he says, “has forced us to rethink everything we knew about the industry.”

Smugglers are positioned for another windfall: Hungary’s border-wall construction and increased checks on Austria and Germany’s normally open borders have the unintended effect of handing business to groups that skirt migrants across frontiers, says Wil van Gemert, Europol’s deputy director of operations. Closing borders “opens up new opportunities for criminals to benefit from smuggling,” he says. Smuggling “is becoming a big business in Balkan countries as they are sitting on the main migrant routes.”

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“..turning into a constant operation of locating and collecting drowned refugees..”

Three Migrants Drown Off Lesvos, Coastguard Rescues 242 As Boat Sinks (Reuters)

The Greek coastguard rescued 242 migrants when their wooden boat sank north of the island of Lesbos on Wednesday, but at least three drowned, including two small boys, authorities said. “We do not have a picture of how many people may be missing yet,” a coastguard spokeswoman said. A man and the two boys were found drowned and an extensive search was under way in the area after what was thought to be the largest maritime disaster off Greece in terms of numbers involved since a massive refugee influx began this year. More than 500,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece through its outlying islands since January, transiting on to central and northern Europe in what has become the biggest humanitarian crisis on the continent in decades.

Inflows have increased recently as refugees are trying to beat the onset of winter, crossing the narrow sea passages between Turkey and Greece on overcrowded small boats. “These praiseworthy attempts of the coastguard to save refugees at sea is at risk of now turning into a constant operation of locating and collecting drowned refugees,” Greek shipping minister Thodoris Dritsas said.

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11 confirmed drowned today so far, 39 missing, little hope of survivors

At Least Five Refugees, Including Four Children, Drown In Aegean (AP)

Greek authorities say at least five people, including four children, have drowned as thousands of refugees and economic migrants continued to head to the Aegean Sea islands in frail boats from Turkey, in worsening weather. The coast guard said Wednesday that two children and a man died off the coast of Samos, while 51 people from the same small boat were rescued. A 5-year-old girl also drowned in a separate incident off Samos. A 7-year-old boy died off Lesbos, where most migrants land, while a 12-month-old girl was in critical condition in hospital from the same boat accident.

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The ultimate disgrace that is the EU. Someone should send an army to start saving these people.

Dozens Of Refugees Missing After Boat Sinks Off Lesvos (AP)

Authorities on the Greek island of Lesvos say 38 people are believed still missing after a wooden boat carrying migrants sank. Three people are known to have died. At first light Thursday, a helicopter from the European border protection agency Frontex joined the search by Greek coast guard vessels off the northern coast of the island, hours after the dramatic rescue of 242 people. At least 11 people – mostly children – died in five separate incidents in the eastern Aegean Sea on Wednesday, as thousands of people continued to head to the Greek islands from Turkey in frail boats and stormy weather.

Lesvos has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis in Greece, with more than 300,000 reaching the island this year – and the number of daily arrivals recently peaking at 7,500. In a dramatic scene late Wednesday, dozens of paramedics and volunteers helped in the effort to assist the survivors, wrapping them in foil blankets and prioritizing ambulance transport. Eighteen children were hospitalized, three in serious condition, local authorities said.

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Oct 052015
 
 October 5, 2015  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Jack Delano Cars being precooled at the ice plant, San Bernardino, CA 1943

Germany Now Expects Up To 1.5 Million Asylum Seekers In 2015 (Reuters)
Baby’s Body Washes Up On Greek Island Kos (AFP)
Two Children Drown Off Kos In Latest Refugee Tragedy (Kath.)
Caution: More Commodity Price Weakness Ahead (A. Gary Shilling)
Emerging Market Turmoil Flashes Warning Lights For Global Economy (FT)
Junk Bond Market Like A ‘Slow-Moving Train Wreck’ (CNBC)
Saudi Arabia Cuts Oil Prices Amid OPEC Price War (WSJ)
Russia PM Medvedev: Oil Prices Will Stay Low For Quite Long (WSJ)
China’s Middle-Class Dreams in Peril (WSJ)
Senior China Official Proposes Punitive FX Restrictions (Chang)
Volkswagen’s ‘Uniquely Awful’ Governance At Fault In Emissions Scandal (FT)
You Can Print Money, So Long As It’s Not For The People (Guardian)
Forest Fires In Indonesia Choke Much Of South-East Asia (Guardian)
Majority Of EU Nations Seek Opt-Out From Growing GMO Crops (Reuters)
How Monsanto Mobilized Academics to Pen Articles Supporting GMOs (Bloomberg)
Greece’s Euro Area Ties Risk More Strain Amid Refugee Crisis (Bloomberg)
EU And Turkey To Discuss Plan To Stem Flow Of Migrants (Reuters)
Hamburg, Bremen To Seize Commercial Property To House Refugees (BBC)

The estimate just doubled in two weeks time.

Germany Now Expects Up To 1.5 Million Asylum Seekers In 2015 (Reuters)

German authorities expect up to 1.5 million asylum seekers to arrive in Germany this year, the Bild daily said in a report to be published on Monday, up from a previous estimate of 800,000 to 1 million. Germany’s top-selling newspaper cited an internal forecast from authorities that it said had been classed as confidential. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Europe to escape conflicts and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and beyond have said they are heading to Germany, Europe’s largest economy. Bild said the German authorities were concerned about the risk of a “breakdown of provisions” and that they were already struggling to procure enough living containers and sanitary facilities for the new arrivals. “Migratory pressures will increase further. We now expect seven to ten thousand illegal border crossings every day in the fourth quarter,” Bild cited the report as saying.

“This high number of asylum seekers runs the risk of becoming an extreme burden for the states and municipalities,” the report said. The authorities’ report also cited concerns that those who are granted asylum will bring their families over to Germany too, Bild said. Given family structures in the Middle East, this would mean each individual from that region who is granted asylum bringing an average of four to eight family members over to Germany in due course, Bild quoted the report as saying. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Sunday Europe needs to restrict the number of people coming to the continent. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said Germany would grant asylum to those fleeing Syria’s civil war, has recently seen her popularity ratings slump to a four-year low.

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Give this baby the Nobel Peace Prize, not Merkel, who let it drown.

Baby’s Body Washes Up On Greek Island Kos

The decomposed body of a baby has been found on the shore of Greece’s Kos island, which is on the frontline of the asylum seeker influx coming from Turkey. The body of the baby boy, estimated to be 6 to 12 months old, was found dressed in green trousers and a white t-shirt on the beach of a hotel, the Greek coast guard said. Authorities believe the child was a member of an asylum seeker family that tried to reach Kos in a dinghy, according to local media reports. The body was transferred to Kos General Hospital for an autopsy. The grim discovery recalls the case of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, whose body was found face down on a Turkish beach last month.

Pictures of the lifeless body of the Syrian toddler face down on a Turkish beach shocked the world and helped spur European nations to seek an effective response to the growing asylum seeker crisis. The Greek Coast Guard continues the grim job of recovering bodies from the sea and the shores of its islands, fearing that things will only get worse as winter approaches and the weather deteriorates. In September, at least 15 babies and children drowned when their overcrowded boat capsized in high winds off the Aegean island of Farmakonisi. [..] Nearly 3,000 others have died or disappeared during the crossing.

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Daily events.

Two Children Drown Off Kos In Latest Refugee Tragedy (Kath.)

The Greek coast guard has found the bodies of two children off the eastern Aegean island of Kos, which has been a main point of entry for refugees and migrants this year. Authorities said one of the dead children was aged between 6 and 12 months. The other is thought to be between three and five years old. Their nationalities were not immediately known. Last week the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that at least 102 people have died trying to reach Greece by sea this year. At least 3,000 have died in the Mediterranean as a whole. The UNHCR said on Friday that a total of 396,500 people have entered Greece by sea since January 1, more than 153,000 of them in September.

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“Prepare for further big declines.”

Caution: More Commodity Price Weakness Ahead (A. Gary Shilling)

It’s hard not to notice that commodity prices have been plummeting. It seems the price of everything that is grown or pulled out of the ground – from oil and gas to sugar and copper – has declined 46% since early 2011, causing bankruptcies and industry consolidation. Prepare for further big declines. Directly or indirectly, developed countries consume most commodities. Yet economic growth and demand for commodity-based products remain weak as North America and Europe continue to unwind their financial excesses. The earlier rapid expansion of debt, which helped fuel robust growth, is being reversed. US real GDP has risen at just a 2.2% annual rate since the business recovery began in mid-2009 – about half the rate you’d expect after a recession.

The euro area is limping along at a 1.2% annual growth rate, with recovery from the 2007-2009 recession interrupted by a mild downturn in 2011-2013. Economic gains in Japan’s stop-go economy have averaged only 1%. The world is now eight years into a deleveraging cycle. At this rate, it will probably take more than the historical average of 10 years to complete. Meanwhile, supplies of almost every commodity are huge and growing. China joined the World Trade Organization in late 2001 and, not by coincidence, commodity prices took off in early 2002. As manufacturing shifted from North America and Europe to China, it sucked up global commodity output. From 2000 to 2014, China’s share of global copper consumption leaped to 43% from 12%. China’s portion of iron ore purchases similarly zoomed to 43% from 16%, while aluminum went to 47% from 13%.

By the mid-2000s, industrial commodity producers were dazzled by China’s seemingly insatiable demand and made the same big mistake that always occurs in every economic cycle: They assumed surging demand from China would last indefinitely. Producers embarked on massive projects that often take a decade to complete. These included digging copper mines in Latin America, removing iron ore in Brazil and producing coal in Australia. All that new capacity began to come onstream in 2011, just as it became clear that the hoped-for post-recession return to rapid global economic growth wasn’t occurring. [..] But muted demand in North America and Europe for Chinese exports has slowed economic growth in China. Meanwhile, over-investment in ghost cities and building of excess infrastructure, in which China engaged to create jobs, has spawned huge debts. I estimate that the true rate of inflation-adjusted growth in China is about 3% to 4%, half the 7% official number.

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“The impotence of monetary policy in boosting growth and staving off deflationary pressures has become painfully apparent..”

Emerging Market Turmoil Flashes Warning Lights For Global Economy (FT)

Emerging economies risk “leading the world economy into a slump”, with lower growth and a rout in financial markets, according to the latest Brookings Institution-FT tracking index. Released ahead of the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Lima, Peru, the index paints a much more pessimistic outlook than the fund is likely to predict later this week. According to Eswar Prasad of Brookings, weak economic data across most poorer economies has created “a dangerous combination of divergent growth patterns, deficient demand, and deflationary risks”. Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, said last week that the global economic patterns were “disappointing and uneven” with weaker growth than last year and the forecasts published on Tuesday showing only a “modest acceleration expected in 2016”.

The fund’s reasonably sanguine view stems from an expectation that China will succeed in transforming its economy slowly from investment and manufacturing towards consumption and services. By contrast, the Brookings-FT index, which summarises the latest figures, suggests the downturn is more serious alongside “sharp divergences in growth prospects between the advanced economies and emerging markets, and within these groups as well”. The Tiger index — Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery — shows how measures of real activity, financial markets and investor confidence compare with their historical averages in the global economy and within each country.

The extreme weakness in the emerging market component of the Tiger growth index shows that data releases have been significantly weaker than their historic averages. Divergence is almost as important as a new trend highlighted in the index, however, with India emerging as a bright spot and commodity importers such as Brazil and Russia mired in recession. Because emerging economies are now much more important in the global economy and growth rates are still higher than their developed counterparts, global growth is still hovering around 3%, close to its long-term average. The concern, according to Mr Prasad is that the slump in emerging economies’ confidence will infect advanced economies in the months ahead.

[..] there are increasing concerns that monetary policy has become ineffective in providing the necessary boost, Mr Prasad said. “The impotence of monetary policy in boosting growth and staving off deflationary pressures has become painfully apparent, especially when it is acting in isolation and when a large number of countries are resorting to the same limited playbook”, he said.

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“Contopoulos contended that the problem is much bigger than retail cash leaving the junk bond market. “This is fundamentals, and that actually, I would argue, is much worse, because it takes it from a technical story to a fundamental story.”

Junk Bond Market Like A ‘Slow-Moving Train Wreck’ (CNBC)

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has long warned about the dangers of the high-yield market. Now, those sentiments are being echoed by a top strategist at a major bank who called the market for riskier bonds a “slow-moving train wreck.” In an interview on CNBC’s “Fast Money,” Michael Contopoulos, head of high-yield strategy at Bank of America, called high yield credit a “big, big problem,” and laid out the reasons why a turn in the credit cycle is currently underway. The dramatic rout of commodity prices is having a spillover effect on corporate bonds, especially those linked to energy. Last week, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said the speculative-grade corporate default rate jumped to 2.5% in September, its highest level since 2013.

That figure is expected to rise to nearly 3% by the middle of next year, S&P added. “You’re going to see defaults pick up,” Contopoulos said. “This isn’t just a commodity story, this isn’t just metals and mining and energy. It’s broader than that. And the fundamentals are as poor as we have seen them.” The iShares High Yield Corporate Bond ETF has dropped nearly 5% in the past month, and is down more than 10% so far this year. On Friday, the ETF hit a 52-week low on an intraday basis. The lower oil prices go, the more stress is being placed on the high-yield bond sector. Evidence is mounting that the outlook is unlikely to improve anytime soon. Last week, ratings firm Moody’s said its high-yield Liquidity Stress Index fell in September amid a rash of energy company downgrades.

Meanwhile, in a recent note, Contopoulos wrote that 50% of sectors in Bank of America’s high-yield index have had negative price returns for the past five months in a row. “That’s the longest such streak since late 2008,” he said. A large part of the weakness over that period, he said, can be attributed to the end of the Fed’s quantitative easing program. The excess liquidity from the Fed’s massive bond buying and super-low interest rates “have created an environment where high yield corporates have been able to gather funding at incredibly cheap levels,” Contopoulos said. “At some point, unless you have meaningful earnings, you can’t sustain incredibly high leverage indefinitely.”

Since the Fed started tapering its bond purchases, Contopoulos said about $30 billion has flowed out of the high yield bond market. “Many of the weak hands have already been flushed out to the market, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still have price loss,” he said. However, Contopoulos contended that the problem is much bigger than retail cash leaving the junk bond market. “This is fundamentals, and that actually, I would argue, is much worse, because it takes it from a technical story to a fundamental story.”

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Wars are expensive.

Saudi Arabia Cuts Oil Prices Amid OPEC Price War (WSJ)

Saudi Arabia on Sunday made deep reductions to the prices it charges for its oil, hard on the heels of cuts last month by rival producers in the Gulf. With U.S. production still increasing despite lower oil prices, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are battling to keep their share of the last growing markets in Asia. In a list of official prices sent to customers, state-oil company Saudi Aramco cut the price of its light-crude deliveries to Asia by $1.7 a barrel. As a result, it switched to a discount of $1.6 a barrel against the rival Dubai benchmark from a premium of 10 cents a barrel previously. The company also cut its prices for heavy oil by $2 a barrel to the Far East and by 30 cents a barrel to the U.S.

The move come as Iran, Iraq and other countries in the Middie East made deeper cuts in their official prices than Saudi Arabia last month. Saudi Arabia has vowed to keep pumping at high levels as it hopes lower oil prices will stimulate Asian demand and hit rival production in the U.S. that is expensive to produce. But while Chinese economic growth is slowing, U.S. production rose by about 68,000 barrels a day in July, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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Realism.

Russia PM Medvedev: Oil Prices Will Stay Low For Quite Long (WSJ)

Russia should seek alternative sources for economic growth as its previous driver, oil prices, will stay at low levels for a long time, the Russian Prime Minister said Friday. “Because of prices for oil, that are likely to stay close to current levels for quite a long time, we will need to refocus the economy from commodities to other growth drivers as soon as possible,” Dmitry Medvedev said. As Russia’s economy has slid into recession for the first time since 2009 due to a drop in oil prices and Western sanctions, Moscow has started looking for ways to limit the economic and financial crisis. The consensus is that Russia’s oil-dependent economy needs diversification, but the idea lacks real initiatives and tools.

Speaking to state officials and top businessmen at an investment forum in the Black Sea town of Sochi, Mr. Medvedev reiterated that Russia needs to improve its business climate and work on import substitution. “Russia’s business climate leaves much to be desired. And unless we change it drastically, we will lose investment, revenue, pace of economic growth and our intellectual potential,” Mr. Medvedev said. He also said there has already been some import substitution in particular investment projects, referring to Moscow’s ban on food from states that imposed sanctions against Russia. Mr. Medvedev added that Russia shouldn’t impose a total ban on imports as it would fuel inflation and result in lower competition on the domestic market.

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The model has died.

China’s Middle-Class Dreams in Peril (WSJ)

Xinxiang, China—In this city of almost 6 million people, a successful English-language school illustrates the aspirations of an emerging middle class. Deng Yi’ou, its 38-year-old owner, owns a house and car, and her school is flourishing as more parents pay 650 yuan (around $100) a month for afternoon English classes for their children. “Parents all over China have the same dream, even in smaller cities like Xinxiang. They want their children to have a good education, a better future, see them become richer than they are,” said Ms. Deng, who is saving to buy a second, larger house. Xinxiang, originally a small market town that traces its roots back more than 1,000 years, is one of 1,600 smaller cities on the cusp of the economic transformation China is attempting. If it is to succeed, the ability of people like Ms. Deng to spend is crucial.

On the one hand, Xinxiang embodies the promise and potential for growth that still propels the Chinese economy, even in slowdown, with the spending power of millions waiting to be unlocked. But the perils of previous excesses are also more evident here: There is too much debt, too many factories and too many vacant apartments. Like many Chinese cities, Xinxiang built industrial parks, ornate bridges and six-lane roads during China’s boom years. Another mark of its furious pace of growth: In the May, Xinxiang was ranked as the city with the most polluted air in Henan province. The idea, widely embraced, was that its growth would turn its residents into stronger consumers. “Smart home, enjoy life,” says one of the hundreds of billboards trying to sell real estate by evoking the good life with images of designer bags, gold coins and wine bottles.

Even outside China, investors are keeping an eye on lower-tier Chinese cities as markets in Beijing and Shanghai become saturated. A key focus for U.S. companies hoping to lift sales of everything from shampoo to cars are the more than 74 million households poised to earn more than 9,000 yuan a month, according to consultancy McKinsey & Co., many of them in cities like Xinxiang. And many here have indeed ramped up their consumption. Now, however, Xinxiang’s growth is slowing: The city’s economy expanded 5.1% in the first half of 2015, down from 9.8% a year earlier. Residential towers in various stages of construction spread out from its city center. A new development area has almost no traffic on roads abutting huge empty lots. Whether the city’s many empty industrial zones that have sprung up over the last dozen years, some the size of small airports, will ever be filled is now an open question.

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With present outflows, what options does Beijing have left?

Senior China Official Proposes Punitive FX Restrictions (Chang)

Yi Gang, writing in China Finance, has just proposed that China impose a Tobin tax, specifically, a punitive levy on forex trades and “handling” fees to discourage currency trading. Most analysts think Beijing will not adopt such draconian measures, but the call for them, by a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China in its official magazine, is bound to further shake confidence in China’s management of its currency and trigger even greater outflows of capital. Yi is obviously partial to the tax. He proposed its imposition about a year ago, when the renminbi appeared strong. Nobody, therefore, paid attention. Now, the currency is weak, and his endorsement of strict measures, in an article titled “Direction for the Reforms and Liberalization of Foreign-Exchange Management,” is significant.

At the moment, the Chinese currency, also informally known as the yuan, is on a troubled path. On August 11, Beijing shocked global markets by devaluating it 1.9% against the dollar. In August, it fell 2.9% in the domestic market. Since the end of that month, the currency has strengthened 0.5%. The renminbi has apparently stabilized. So why the need for a Tobin tax, among the worst ideas ever proposed by a Nobel laureate? The PBOC, the central bank, has been selling dollars at an unprecedented rate to support its money. The country’s foreign exchange reserves, as reported by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, fell by a record $93.9 billion in August. That number, as large as it is, could be an underreporting. Some had thought the reserves in fact fell by $150 billion that month.

In any event, China at one point was spending about $20 billion a day defending the yuan, and it is no surprise the burn rate was that high. Beijing was not only intervening in the onshore renminbi market—something it had been doing for decades—but for the first time was intervening in offshore markets. Assuming no inflows of cash, China will exhaust its foreign reserves in a year at the current rate of intervention. There will be inflows, but on the other side of the ledger burn rates skyrocket as crises progress. No one expects Beijing will allow the current crisis to exhaust its reserves, so it will undoubtedly impose measures to halt the outflow of cash. In fact, it has already started.

A month ago, the central bank required financial institutions to set aside a reserve, for a year at no interest, equal to 20% of renminbi forward and swap contracts as well as a 10% reserve for options. Moreover, just a little over a month ago SAFE, which Yi Gang heads, ordered banks to scrutinize currency trading. One result of the edict is that bank branches now must obtain approval from their Beijing headquarters for purchases of foreign currencies in amounts over $1 million. Last week, the central bank turned its attention to UnionPay cards, imposing limitations on withdrawals of cash outside China. Now, a cardholder can take out only a total of 50,000 yuan ($7,854) in the last three months of this year and 100,000 yuan next year. UnionPay processes virtually all card transactions in China..

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Time for Merkel to stand up. But she’s notoriously slow to do that.

Volkswagen’s ‘Uniquely Awful’ Governance At Fault In Emissions Scandal (FT)

Volkswagen’s decision to nominate a long-serving executive as chairman has once more highlighted the carmaker’s corporate governance and culture, which some experts argue were a root cause of the diesel-emissions scandal. Top directors on Thursday announced that Hans-Dieter Pötsch, VW’s chief financial officer since 2003, would become chairman in the coming weeks, filling the spot vacated by patriarch Ferdinand PiIch, who resigned in April. Hans-Christoph Hirt, a director of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, an adviser to pension fund investors in companies including VW, said the appointment created a “serious conflict of interest”. “[Potsch] was a key VW executive for more than a decade and under German law the management board has a collective responsibility … The lawyers will surely demand that he recuse himself from any supervisory board meetings when management’s role is discussed,” Mr Hirt said.

VW’s response has been compared with the way Siemens dealt with a huge bribery scandal in 2006. For the first time in its 150-year history the German engineering conglomerate appointed an outside chairman (Gerhard Cromme from ThyssenKrupp) and chief executive (Peter Loscher from Merck in the US). Together they transformed Siemens’ culture and Mr Cromme took legal action against former Siemens executives for not stopping the bribery. “How is Mr Pötsch supposed to do that?” said Mr Hirt. VW has admitted installing software in engines over several years so they passed laboratory emission tests but belched out dangerous nitrogen oxides when on the road. Martin Winterkorn resigned last month as chief executive, insisting he knew nothing of the cheating, which analysts fear could cost VW billions of euros in fines, lawsuits and recall costs.

[..] governance experts argue the cheating was predictable because of VW’s lax boardroom controls and peculiar corporate culture. “The scandal clearly also has to do with structural issues at VW …There have been warnings about VW’s corporate governance for years, but they didn’t take it to heart and now you see the result,” says Alexander Juschus, director at IVOX, the German proxy adviser. Even before the diesel scandal, VW’s shares traded at a discount to other carmakers partly because of governance concerns. A former chairman of a large German industrial company says “Germany has corporate governance problems but VW has long been uniquely awful”.

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“..we do have a magic money tree, it’s called the Bank of England”

You Can Print Money, So Long As It’s Not For The People (Guardian)

In its broadest sense, the phrase “there’s no magic money tree” is just a variation on “money doesn’t grow on trees”, a thing you say to children to indicate that wealth comes not from the beneficence of a magical universe, but from hard graft in a corporeal reality. The pedantic child might point to the discrepant amounts of work required to yield a given amount of money, and say that its value is a social construction. Over time, that loose, rather weak-minded meaning has ceded to a specific economic critique; Jeremy Corbyn – along with anyone who challenges the prevailing fiscal narrative – is dangerous and wrong, since he wants to print money. Money cannot be created from nowhere, because there’s no magic money tree. End of. The flaw in that argument is that all money is created from nowhere.

In normal circumstances, it is created from nowhere as credit, by private banks, and lent to us, usually (85% of the time) in the form of a mortgage on an existing residential property. Decades of credit extension have perverted the housing market to turn a mortgage into a lifetime’s bonded servitude. The economists Jordá, Schularick and Taylor argued convincingly last year that the causes of this economic crisis, the next and the one before are all, fundamentally, the extension of credit and its impact on house prices. So the magic money tree isn’t gushing cash in a socially responsible fashion (if it were used responsibly, it wouldn’t be magic) but the idea that we have a centrally planned, carefully stewarded monetary policy, with finite creation and demonstrable long-term aims, which some loonie leftie wants to come along and unravel, is simply wrong.

In abnormal circumstances, such as the ones we’ve lived through since the financial crisis, central banks are also magic money trees. In the bizarre construction of current economic orthodoxy, you’re not allowed to say so, even though the Bank of England has created £375bn in quantitative easing (QE); the Fed bought $1.25tn worth of mortgage-backed securities in its first round of QE; the ECB had as a core principle that it couldn’t create money until, suddenly, in awesome amounts, it could; the Bank of Korea has a stimulus package, as does the People’s Bank of China; and Japan started it. Central banks typically justify money creation on the basis that it’s temporary, it’s unfortunate, it’s driven by the crisis and it will ultimately get back to normal.

None of that alters the fact that no bank had that money in savings. I recently said out loud, “we do have a magic money tree, it’s called the Bank of England” in a Newsnight debate with a former adviser to Blair, John McTernan. He made a face like a politician accidentally talking to a member of the public but what the camera didn’t catch was Evan Davis, who stuck his tongue out, like a cat taking a pill. It was days ago, and people are still tweeting me pictures of the Zimbabwean dollar and the Weimar Republic, saying “is this what you want? IS IT?”

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Mankind at its best.

Forest Fires In Indonesia Choke Much Of South-East Asia (Guardian)

The illegal burning of forests and agricultural land across Indonesia has blanketed much of south-east Asia in an acrid haze, leading to one of the most severe regional shutdowns in years. Malaysian PM Najib Razak said Indonesia needs to convict plantation companies for the noxious smoke, created by the annual destruction of plants during the dry season. Burning the land is a quick way to ready the soil for new seed. “We want Indonesia to take action,” he was quoted as saying by the state news agency Bernama, adding the smog was affecting the economy. “Indonesia alone can gather evidence and convict the companies concerned.” In Singapore, races for the FINA swimming world cup were cancelled on Saturday. A marathon in Malaysia on Sunday was also abandoned and all schools were closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of people in Indonesia and Malaysia have sought medical treatment for respiratory problems. The annual burning is decades old and Indonesia has faced mounting pressure to end the practice. Scientists say the pollution could surpass 1997 levels when the haze created an environmental disaster that cost an estimated US$9 billion in damage. “If the forecasts for a longer dry season hold, this suggests 2015 will rank among the most severe events on record,” said Robert Field, a Columbia University scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In Singapore, news websites post near-hourly updates on the danger of being outside. Some shops were providing free masks for children and elderly people.

The National Environment Agency in Singapore said Monday’s haze will enter the “unhealthy range”. “Healthy persons should reduce prolonged or strenuous outdoor physical exertion … Persons who are not feeling well, especially the elderly and children, and those with chronic heart or lung conditions, should seek medical attention,” it said.

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Just make it EU-wide then. You’re talking 2/3 of all countries.

Majority Of EU Nations Seek Opt-Out From Growing GMO Crops (Reuters)

Nineteen EU member states have requested opt-outs for all or part of their territory from cultivation of a Monsanto genetically-modified crop, which is authorised to be grown in the EU, the European Commission said on Sunday. Under a law signed in March, individual countries can seek exclusion from any approval request for genetically modified cultivation across the 28-nation EU. The law was introduced to end years of stalemate as genetically modified crops divide opinion in Europe. Although widely grown in the Americas and Asia, public opposition is strong in Europe and environmentalists have raised concerns about the impact on biodiversity. Commission spokesman Enrico Brivio on Sunday confirmed in an email the Commission had received 19 opt-out requests following the expiry of a deadline on Saturday.

The requests are for opt-outs from the approval of Monsanto’s GM maize MON 810, the only crop commercially cultivated in the EU, or for pending applications, of which there are eight so far, the Commission said. The requests have been or are being communicated to the companies, which have a month to react. Under the new law, the European Commission is responsible for approvals, but requests to be excluded also have to be submitted to the company making the application. In response to the first exclusion requests in August from Latvia and Greece, Monsanto said it was abiding by them, even though it regarded them as unscientific.

The new EU law has critics from both sides. The industry has said it breaks rules on free movement, while environment campaigners say it is a weak compromise open to court challenges from biotech companies. The Commission spokesman said the number of requests proved that the new law provides “a necessary legal framework to a complex issue”. The 19 requests are from Austria, Belgium for the Wallonia region, Britain for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany (except for research), Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovenia.

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You don’t have to be smart to be a scientist.

How Monsanto Mobilized Academics to Pen Articles Supporting GMOs (Bloomberg)

Monsanto’s undisclosed recruitment of scientists from Harvard University, Cornell University and three other schools to write about the benefits of plant biotechnology is drawing fire from opponents. The company’s role isn’t noted in the series of articles published in December by the Genetic Literacy Project, a nonprofit group that says its mission is “to disentangle science from ideology.” The group said that such a disclosure isn’t necessary because the the company didn’t pay the authors and wasn’t involved in writing or editing the articles. Monsanto says it’s in regular contact with public-sector scientists as it tries to “elevate” public dialog on genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit group funded by the Organic Consumers Association that obtained e-mails under the Freedom of Information Act, says correspondence revealing Monsanto’s actions shows the “corporate control of science and how compliant some academics are.” The articles have become the latest flashpoint in an information war being waged over plant biotechnology by its supporters, who sometimes have corporate funding, and its opponents, some of whom are funded by the fast-growing organic food industry. The challenge for the pro-GMO lobby is the yawning gulf between scientific consensus and public perception. A Pew Research Center poll in January found 88% of scientists believed GMOs to be “generally safe” versus 37% of U.S. adults.

That gap was the widest among 13 questions asked by Pew, surpassing divides on climate change and evolution. The articles in question appeared on the Genetic Literacy Project’s website in a series called “GMO – Beyond the Science.” Eric Sachs, who leads Monsanto’s scientific outreach, wrote to eight scientists to pen a series of briefs aimed at influencing “public policy, GM crop regulation and consumer acceptance.” Five of them obliged. “I need to step aside so I don’t compromise the project,” Sachs said in an Aug. 8, 2013, e-mail obtained by U.S. Right to Know. He suggested specific topics for each scientist before turning the project over to CMA Consulting, a public relations firm paid by Monsanto. “I am keenly aware that your independence and reputations must be protected,” Sachs wrote.

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EU tries to blame refugee crisis on Greece too.

Greece’s Euro Area Ties Risk More Strain Amid Refugee Crisis (Bloomberg)

First overwhelmed by debt and now overwhelmed by refugees, Greece offers a tempting target for European leaders left to handle the fallout. With wounds only just healing after the euro area agreed to throw Greece another financial lifeline, the country’s inability to process tens of thousands of refugees turning up at its doorstep threatens to reopen them all over again. Local Greek authorities are inundated by some 3,000 arrivals a day, most of whom are allowed to head north through the Balkans toward Germany and Scandinavia, sewing political tensions as they go. Patience is already thin after years subsidizing the Greek economy and months of chaotic bailout talks this year, so EU leaders haven’t had far to look to find a scapegoat for their latest emergency.

The risk is that by vilifying the Greek authorities, EU officials may jeopardize the fragile political settlement that is the foundation for the country’s economic recovery and continued membership in the euro. “There are very low levels of trust and a lot of baggage,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. “It’s inevitable that when you have so many major crises going on at the same time with the same cast of characters you will get read-across from one crisis to the other.” Finance ministers of the euro area’s 19 economies gather in Luxembourg on Monday for the first time since Alexis Tsipras’s September election victory, and are due to pick over the 48 milestones Greece needs to meet to qualify for its next bailout payouts.

For all his railing against the European establishment, Tsipras is the first Greek leader to win re-election after signing a bailout deal. With all eyes on his Syriza-led government’s efforts to stick to the reform path, the unprecedented refugee crisis adds another layer of uncertainty. Greece finds itself the first EU port of call for people fleeing war and civil strife from countries such as Syria, many of whom pay traffickers to take them across the short sea passage from the Turkish coast to one of the Greek islands sprinkled throughout the Aegean Sea. Greece, which also shares a land border with Turkey, has seen almost 400,000 migrants arrive by sea in 2015 compared to 43,500 in the whole of 2014, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday.

The Syriza government’s inability to cope with the sheer numbers involved “will only provide further fodder to its critics, as well as increase the pressure for the government to deliver on reforms or die,” said Dimitrios Triantaphyllou, chairman of the department of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. “Greece’s image as a functioning state has already hit rock bottom.”

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Leave them all in Turkey? if they had wanted that, wouldn’t they have stayed to begin with?

EU And Turkey To Discuss Plan To Stem Flow Of Migrants (Reuters)

The European Commission has worked out an action plan with Turkey to stem the flow of refugees to Europe, a German newspaper cited sources in the Commission and the German government as saying on Sunday. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung said that according to the plan, Turkey would be obliged to better protect its border with Greece – a frontier that many migrants have crossed on perilous boat journeys. It said the Turkish and Greek coastguards would work together to patrol the eastern Aegean, coordinated by Frontex, the European Union’s border control agency, and send all refugees back to Turkey. In Turkey, six new refugee camps for up to two million people which would be set up, partly financed by the EU, the newspaper said.

The EU states would commit to taking some of the refugees so that up to half a million people could be relocated to Europe without having to use traffickers or take the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, the newspaper said. It said the Commission and representatives had agreed on this plan last week and that EC President Jean-Claude Juncker also coordinated on this with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is due to meet with Juncker on Monday.

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Most cities will do this; no choice.

Hamburg, Bremen To Seize Commercial Property To House Refugees (BBC)

Hamburg has become the first German city to pass a law allowing the seizure of empty commercial properties in order to house migrants. The influx of migrants has put pressure on the authorities of the northern city to find accommodation. Some migrants are sleeping rough outdoors. Hamburg’s law takes effect next week. In a separate development, prosecutors filed charges of inciting racial hatred against a co-founder of the anti-Islamic Pegida movement. The prosecutors in the eastern city of Dresden said they acted after Lutz Bachmann had on Facebook described asylum seekers “trash” and “animals”. Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) members have staged a number of rallies in recent months, attracting tens of thousands of people.

Meanwhile, a new survey by broadcaster ARD said 51% of people admitted the influx of migrants scared them. It suggests a four-year low in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s popularity. She has said Germany can accommodate migrants who have genuinely fled war or persecution – a humanitarian gesture towards the many thousands risking their lives to reach Europe this year. But many politicians – including her conservative Bavarian CSU allies and various EU partners – have criticised the open-door policy. Hamburg’s new law is described as a temporary, emergency measure. Owners of empty commercial properties will be compensated. The law does not include residential properties. The authorities in Bremen, a city just west of Hamburg, are considering passing a similar law. Germany expects to host at least 800,000 asylum seekers this year – about four times the number it had last year.

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Sep 202015
 
 September 20, 2015  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle September 20 2015


DPC Government Street, Mobile, Alabama 1906

Human Migration Will Be A Defining Issue Of This Century (Alexander Betts)
5-Year Old Child Drowns Off Greece, Others Paddle Across From Turkey (Reuters)
30 Refugees Missing In New Boat Sinking Off Greece On Sunday (AFP)
Europe Needs To Take Big Numbers Of Refugees. Until Then Chaos Reigns (Guardian)
Greece Is Making America Look Bad (Pittsburgh Post-Gazatte)
Thousands Of Refugees Pour Into Austria As European Crisis Intensifies (AFP)
Exhausted Migrants Left With Few Options on Slovenian Border (WSJ)
UN Warns European Unity At Risk As Borders Close To Refugees (Guardian)
Bank of Finland Governor Supports Opening Door to Migrants (WSJ)
Do China’s Ghost Cities Offer A Solution To Europe’s Migrant Crisis? (Reuters)
Xi Jinping: Does China Truly Love ‘Big Daddy Xi’ – Or Fear Him? (Guardian)
How China Decided To Redraw The Global Financial Map (Reuters)
The US Federal Reserve Has Got It Wrong (Andrew Sentance)
A Divided Fed Pits World’s Woes Against Domestic Growth (Reuters)
Stuck At Zero: Global Risks Have Tied The Fed’s Hands (Forbes)
US Oil Tumbles 4.7% To Settle At $44.68 A Barrel (Reuters)
Jim Chanos on What Lies Ahead for Greece (Lynn Parramore)
Catalonia Separatists: Spanish State Has Failed. We Can Change This (Guardian)
UK’s NHS To Collapse Within Two Years, Warns Former Health Minister (Guardian)

Certainly of this decade. A whole century is a bit much. A harbinger of things to come sounds about right.

Human Migration Will Be A Defining Issue Of This Century (Alexander Betts)

This is the first time in its history that the European Union has faced a mass influx of refugees from outside the region. Each year, as UNHCR announced record numbers of displaced people, the general assumption – until recently – was that this is a problem for other parts of the world. However, rising displacement that had mainly affected the Middle East and Africa has finally reached Europe’s shores in significant numbers. Many are beginning to ask whether the current crisis represents a temporary peak in displacement or presages a new, long-term trend. On what basis can we know? Will the dystopian images we see at the Hungarian-Serbian border of desperate families being beaten back by armed guards or the shocking image of Alan Kurdi become “the new normal”? The simple answer is: it depends.

It depends significantly on us, and the policies we, and our leaders, choose to adopt – nationally, regionally, and globally. Asylum numbers do fluctuate over time depending on the state of the world, and Europe has witnessed significant spikes in numbers before. In 1992, the EU received 672,000 asylum seekers, and numbers remained high during the Bosnia conflict. In 2001, numbers again peaked at 424,000 following the Kosovo crisis and with many arriving from Somalia and Afghanistan. This year, numbers are likely to exceed those figures but not dramatically, especially when one considers that in 1992 there were 15 EU member states and today there are 28. In general terms, the number of refugees in the world is broadly a function of the number of wars and human-rights-abusing dictatorships at any given time.

Today, there are a series of internal and regional armed conflicts around the world. Most of these are in two regions, the Middle East and Africa. There are humanitarian emergencies in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria and, closer to home, in Ukraine. The UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, has described a “world at war”. If we were able to address the root causes of those conflicts, the number of refugees in the world would decline significantly. However, there are also grounds to believe that refugees and displacement are likely to become a defining issue of the 21st century. Two global trends in particular suggest this: fragility and mobility. In both cases, the international community is struggling to come up with viable collective responses.

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Without photographs, the reaction is completely different.

5-Year Old Child Drowns Off Greece, Others Paddle Across From Turkey (Reuters)

A girl believed to be five years died on Saturday and 13 other migrants were feared lost overboard after their boat sank in choppy seas off the Greek island of Lesbos, the Greek coastguard said. A second, exhausted group of around 40 people reached the island in a small boat following a traumatic journey from Turkey, having paddled through the night with their hands across 10 kilometers (six miles) of ocean after their engine failed. “When we were on the sea … I didn’t have any hope … I said: I am dead right now, nobody can help me,” Mohammed Reza, 18, said after being pulled ashore from the boat by foreign volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved the short but precarious crossing from Turkey to Greece’s eastern islands this year, mainly in flimsy and overcrowded inflatable boats.

Reza, who fled from Afghanistan and left the rest of his family in Iran, told Reuters TV: “The water and fuel mixed up together … and we were on the sea for about seven or eight hours without any water or any food.” He said neither the Greek and Turkish coastguard had assisted the group of men, women and children. “At that moment, we, all of us, thought that we are useless, we are not human.” Greek coastguard spokesman Nikos Lagkadianos said 11 people were rescued from the boat that sank and a twelfth swam ashore in the early hours. The girl who died was found unconscious and was later declared dead in hospital, Lagkadianos said, adding that the coastguard and Greek navy were searching for survivors. Fifteen babies and children were among 34 refugees who died when their boat capsized off the small island of Farmakonisi last Sunday. Twenty-two others drowned and 200 were rescued two days later trying to reach Kos.

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To be continued.

30 Refugees Missing In New Boat Sinking Off Greece On Sunday (AFP)

Nearly 30 migrants were feared missing off the Greek island of Lesbos, the coastguard said Sunday, in the latest boat sinking in an ongoing Aegean Sea tragedy that has cost hundreds of lives. The coastguard said it had rescued 20 people spotted in the water by a helicopter from EU border agency Frontex, but the survivors said another 26 people had been in the boat. The state news agency ANA said there were children among those missing. On Saturday, a five-year-old Syrian girl died in another attempted crossing from Turkey to Greece, and there were no news on another dozen people who were in the boat with her. The accident again occurred east of the island of Lesbos, one of the Greek islands that has seen a heavy influx of refugees from war-torn Syria this year.

Many have perished trying to cross the Aegean Sea in search of a better future in Europe. Earlier this month, harrowing pictures of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose body was found washed up on a Turkish beach after the boat carrying his family to the Greek island of Kos sank, caused an outpouring of emotion around the world, pressuring European leaders to step up their response to the refugee crisis. The body of another four-year-old Syrian girl washed up on a beach in western Turkey on Friday. Migrants have in recent days turned to Turkey’s land borders with Greece and Bulgaria to avoid the sea voyage that has cost over 2,600 people their lives in the Mediterranean this year. Greece has seen over 300,000 refugees and migrants enter the country this year, most of them passing through to other European countries.

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Much as Europe is criminally negligent, this is a global issue, not a European one.

Europe Needs To Take Big Numbers Of Refugees. Until Then Chaos Reigns (Guardian)

Europe’s heads of government gather this week for a meeting billed as a last-ditch effort to resolve the refugee crisis sweeping the continent. But the pace of arrivals has accelerated so fast that the deal some are touting as a solution to the challenge is actually more of a stopgap measure to tackle an emergency. Politicians in Brussels have been arguing fiercely about where 120,000 refugees should be allowed to settle, even though tens of thousands more have already travelled into the continent. Borders are being sealed with bewildering speed, as columns of desperate people move from country to country in their attempt to find a haven. And winter is only likely to bring a pause, rather than an end, to the crisis.

The sea crossing from Turkey to Greece may soon be partly “sealed” by harsh weather, but migration groups have warned that many people will die in a desperate attempt to cross before the seas get too stormy. And when spring comes again, the exodus will almost certainly pick up. Claude Moraes, MEP and chair of the European parliament’s justice, civil liberties and home affairs committee, said: “My concern is that we have had this paralysis for so long that the numbers are now out of date. So even if we get [a deal] on Wednesday we are going to have to lift them again. The EU has worked hard on this. But these were figures for the start of the crisis, not now.” Countries from the Balkans to Denmark are sealing land borders, setting up a chain of obstacles that may eventually all but block passage for refugees to prosperous western European nations.

But the journeys from Turkey to Europe’s eastern edge will be almost impossible to stop. Franck Düvell, senior researcher at Oxford University’s migration observatory, said: “Along the sea border with Greece there are too many routes and beaches. [Turkish authorities] can launch operations like they are doing around Bodrum now, but people will find other routes and other beaches.” The long, irregular coastline will always be a challenge, and Turkish police and border guards have told Düvell they are stretched too thin by other emergencies to monitor it all now. “They are at the limits of what they can do, and at the moment their priority lies in the east, borders with Syria and Kurdish areas.” While sea crossings are possible, they will continue to be made.

The trip is relatively short, and although the odds of survival may seem terrifying to people watching from safety, many fleeing war or the endless suffocating limbo of refugee camps long ago decided that they are not unreasonable. “You can’t block the border with Turkey in any meaningful way,” said Leonard Doyle, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration. “There is the rise of expectation that you can do it, the push factor of people with Isis at their back, and the result is they put themselves at far greater risk than they would have before.” Only an unlikely peace, a moderation of the violence in Syria or far better conditions in regional refugee camps are likely to reduce the number of boats landing on Greek shores. Tighter border controls further north will only trap new arrivals in Greece, where they will still be a European responsibility.

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“If you scream about foreigners usurping the nation here, people might mistake you for a fascist. Back in America, you can be a frontrunner in a major political party.”

Greece Is Making America Look Bad (Pittsburgh Post-Gazatte)

More than 200,000 refugees fleeing mayhem in the Middle East already have worked their way this year from Turkey to Greece, site of the worst economic crisis to hit a developed country since World War II. About 100,000 illegal immigrants come each year from Mexico to the United States, which has 30 times as many people as Greece and a vastly more prosperous economy. So which country is witnessing the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant political figure? Hint: It’s not Greece. It’s America, of course, where Donald Trump has shot to the top of the Republican presidential fold on an astoundingly nativist platform: Put up a wall between the United States and Mexico, deport anyone who is in America illegally and deny birthright citizenship to their offspring.

And that’s not because waves of Mexicans have been sneaking across our borders to steal jobs and commit crimes, as Mr. Trump would have you believe. Illegal immigration declined with the recession of 2007-2009 and remains a relative trickle. As for Mr. Trump’s fear-mongering, undocumented workers are less likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born citizens. It’s been especially depressing to watch Mr. Trump’s ascent from here in Greece, which has an actual — rather than imagined — flood of newcomers on its hands. On the islands closest to Turkey, especially Kos and Lesbos, 33,000 migrants have arrived in the last month alone. Despite their own economic crisis, however, Greeks have aided the refugees in every way they can.

Greece dispatched 60 extra coast guard officials to register refugees on the island of Lesbos, where an estimated 20,000 people were sleeping in streets and parks awaiting travel permits. The government also provided special ferries to transport refugees to Athens, where most of them will continue toward other destinations in Europe. In the wake of the debt deal signed earlier this summer, however, the government’s capacities are obviously limited. So ordinary citizens have stepped into the breach. Spurred by photos of a drowned Syrian child who was trying to reach Greece, vacationers in speedboats have rescued people cast adrift on the sea. Waves of volunteers have been providing food and clothing for refugees when they get to shore.

To be sure, there have also been reports of young thugs beating refugees. And the far-right Golden Dawn party has tried to capitalize on the crisis, spreading a rumor earlier this summer that Muslim immigrants had defecated in churches on Lesbos. “We will do everything we can to protect the Greek homeland against immigrants,” the party declared in response to the defecation story, which was later exposed as a lie. As Greece braces for elections Sunday, however, Golden Dawn’s popularity has remained in single digits. Its leader has denied the Holocaust, which took the lives of an estimated 60,000 Greek Jews. Its symbol is a slightly modified swastika. And whereas Donald Trump wants to build a wall on America’s southern border, Golden Dawn advocates putting land mines around Greece to kill illegal immigrants.

But Golden Dawn also helps to stigmatize anti-immigrant sentiment in Greece, in ways that might surprise Americans. If you scream about foreigners usurping the nation here, people might mistake you for a fascist. Back in America, you can be a frontrunner in a major political party.

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“Around 13,000 people entered Austria on Saturday, according to the Red Cross, after being forced away from to Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia”

Thousands Of Refugees Pour Into Austria As European Crisis Intensifies (AFP)

Thousands of refugees have streamed into Austria after being shunted through Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia as Europe’s divided nations stepped up efforts to push the migrants into neighbouring countries. The continent’s biggest migratory flow since 1945 has opened a deep rift between western and eastern members of the European Union over how to distribute the refugees fairly, and raised questions over the fate of the Schengen agreement allowing borderless travel within the 28-nation bloc. Several countries have imposed border controls, as recent figures have shown nearly half a million people have braved perilous trips across the Mediterranean to reach Europe so far this year, while the EU has received almost a quarter of a million asylum requests in the three months to June.

In Austria, up to 13,000 people entered the country over the course of Saturday alone, the head of the Austrian Red Cross told the APA news agency. The figure was not immediately confirmed by local police, who had said earlier they were readying for an influx of around 10,000 refugees and migrants. Austrian police said Hungary had shipped at least 6,700 people to the border, with more expected in the Burgenland border region by the end of Saturday. Hungary’s rightwing government has faced international criticism over violent clashes with migrants and a hastily-erected fence along its frontier with Serbia, but in a shift late Friday, Hungarian authorities began transporting thousands of migrants straight to the border with Austria, an apparent bid to move them through and out of their territory as quickly as possible.

There was no let-up in the stream of people making the gruelling journey across the Balkans into western Europe, with Croatia saying 20,700 had entered the country since Wednesday. Zagreb, which initially said it would allow migrants to pass through freely, announced it was swamped on Friday and began transporting hundreds to the Hungarian border by bus and train – sparking a furious reaction from Budapest. Despite the row, Croatian and Hungarian authorities appeared to be coordinating on the ground. An AFP journalist along the frontier between the two countries saw migrants board Croatian buses that took them to the border, before disembarking and crossing on foot then boarding Hungarian buses that quickly departed.

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Shifting disasters.

Exhausted Migrants Left With Few Options on Slovenian Border (WSJ)

In this small Croatian village, an army tent has been set up to cater for the hundreds of migrants stranded at the border crossing with Slovenia. Volunteers with the local Red Cross and Caritas are sorting through donated clothes and pouring hot ratatouille into plastic bowls. A sturdy, tattooed man is piling the fresh meals onto a large tray. “We delivered 600 meals yesterday and today we’re prepared for 2,000,” says Joakim Nilsson, a student from Sweden who traveled to the Balkans to help out wherever he could. “This is a world crisis,” he says about the thousands of migrants and refugees who have streamed daily from Serbia into Croatia after Hungary sealed its border.

At the border crossing, where a two-lane bridge is sealed off and guarded by a dozen of Slovenian riot police, the crowd is exhausted and angry. Many refuse Mr. Nilsson’s meals or prefer instead to walk back into the village where there is shade and stretchers for them to rest. Eventually, however, his tray is empty. “Good luck,” he tells one of the refugees. “And see you in Sweden.” The migrants, a mix of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Africans, have been waiting for three days, and only on Saturday morning did two buses arrive to take some of them to a registration center in Slovenia. “When is a bus coming—when?” they repeatedly ask police officers wearing helmets, shields, batons and cans with pepper spray. But the officers remain silent.

At least one of those cans was used the night before, around midnight, when tensions flared as a group of migrants started pelting the police cordon with plastic bottles and sticks. A spokeswoman from the Slovenian Interior Ministry, Vesna Drole, maintained that only one officer used pepper spray against “a single protester” who was part of a larger group trying to break through the police cordon. “Pepper spray is one of the milder means of coercion that police may use to maintain public order and ensure people’s safety,” she added.

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Time for UN to act, not talk.

UN Warns European Unity At Risk As Borders Close To Refugees (Guardian)

Europe’s biggest refugee crisis in 70 years atomised into a chaotic series of border confrontations and diplomatic disputes this weekend, as crowds of refugees were blocked from passing through a number of crossings in central Europe, prompting the UN to warn that the concept of European unity was at risk. Hungary sent armoured vehicles to its border with Croatia, while Slovenian police sealed several crossings after Croatia attempted to offload tens of thousands of refugees who are using it as an alternative entry point to the European Union.

Croatian policemen accompanying hundreds of migrants into Hungary were disarmed by their Hungarian counterparts and turned away, while Slovenian police used pepper spray to ward off hundreds, mostly Syrians and Afghans, trying to cross to reach the countries of northern Europe. The chaos had been sparked by Hungary’s decision to shut off its southern border with Serbia, blocking a well-trodden refugee railroad that has brought more than 170,000 refugees into the EU since the start of the year. In response, refugees flooded instead into Croatia, which immediately tried to move them back into Hungary and Slovenia, prompting quasi-military manoeuvres from its neighbours.

Croatia’s prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, called Hungary’s actions “incomprehensible”, given that no refugee wanted to stay in Hungary, and said the situation was “the ugliest thing I have seen in Croatia since the [Balkans] war”. He also refused to seal Croatia’s border, because “even if that were possible under the constitution – and it is not – it means killing people”. In response, Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said Croatia had “lied in the face” of Hungary. He argued that Croatia had failed to show adequate solidarity with Hungary by sending refugees across their border, just days after the same refugees had rushed into Croatia after being blocked from crossing the Hungarian-Serbian border.

The UN warned that failure to agree on a united response to the crisis endangered the concept of European unity. Peter Sutherland, the UN’s special representative on international migration, said: “If there is no agreement to share refugees between the countries of the European Union, it risks undermining the very essence of the European project.” Sutherland was also surprised at how central and eastern European countries were undermining some of the EU’s key values so soon after joining its membership. “It’s amazing that this is the reaction of central and eastern Europe to the whole concept of solidarity, having only just joined,” Sutherland said.

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“..as new workers would help finance a generous set of welfare benefits..” Sure.

Bank of Finland Governor Supports Opening Door to Migrants (WSJ)

An influx of migrants into Finland could give the small Nordic nation’s shrinking economy a shot in the arm, as new workers would help finance a generous set of welfare benefits, Bank of Finland Governor Erkki Liikanen said Saturday. “More foreign workers would support our economic growth,” the central banker told Finnish television. Mr. Liikanen’s recommendation to open Finland’s doors to foreigners echo comments heard in Germany—where government and business leaders have said the large migrant stream into Europe represents an opportunity to rejuvenate a fast-aging population and boost the economy Finland has experienced three years of stagnation and is expecting gross domestic product growth of only 0.3% this year.

Although Mr. Liikanen cautioned the process of integrating refugees could be “difficult,” the central banker’s view contrasts sharply with the anti-immigration sentiment prevailing among Finns and the government they elected in June. Earlier on Saturday, the Finnish government introduced rules on processing asylum seekers in a bid to tighten Finland’s borders following an increasing number of refugees entering the country from Sweden through a northern checkpoint. The Finnish Interior Ministry said the new rules would see all refugees registered at the country’s border upon arrival. The Finnish Police and Immigration Service have tightened family reunification criteria, saying they aimed to make swift decisions on applications deemed unfounded.

Inside the government, the anti-immigrant camp is led by Timo Soini, leader of the populist Finns Party, who was named deputy prime minister and foreign minister in June. He serves in the government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, who has pledged to repair the country’s recession-choked economy through deep spending cuts.

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Bigger priority than stocks?! “A full 39% of individual wealth in China is kept in housing, and, according to Nomura, 21% of China’s urban households possess more than one home.”

Do China’s Ghost Cities Offer A Solution To Europe’s Migrant Crisis? (Reuters)

Nearly 150,000 Syrian refugees have already claimed asylum in Europe and tens of thousands more are flooding the borders in search of places to live. Meanwhile, in China, there are millions of new apartments sitting completely empty and entire sections of freshly constructed cities that are virtually uninhabited. This disparity between unmet housing need and oversupply has not been lost on many around the world, and after writing a book about China’s ghost cities, I’ve recently found my email inbox getting flooded with suggestions such as this: Do you think the Ghost Cities could be used, even as a temporary situation, to accommodate those displaced from Syria? It seems that many of the cities are just waiting for a community and here is a community that needs a city.

This sentiment is widespread across popular social media platforms, and on Twitter alone roughly 7 out of 10 results for searches pertaining to China’s ghost cities reveal tweets recommending the mass movement of Syrian refugees to these under-populated urban terrains. Realistically speaking, this suggestion isn’t worth analyzing with much depth. The political quagmire of relocating masses of people across the planet — not to mention the fact that refugees need more than just housing — means that this is a far greater ordeal than simply assuaging demand with supply. It does shed light, though, on the gulf that exists between the predominant international opinion on China’s so-called ghost cities and their present reality.

Even though there are between 20 and 45 million unoccupied homes across China, which account for roughly 600 million square meters of uninhabited floor space — enough to completely cover Madrid — these places are not the urban wastelands they are often posited to be. While many of China’s new cities and urban districts are deficient in people they are not deficient in owners. Nearly every apartment that goes on the market in China is quickly purchased, often at exorbitant prices that commonly range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Far from being unwanted infrastructure that could seamlessly be doled out to refugees, those arrays of vacant high-rises are actually the proud possessions of people who paid a lot of money for them.

So why would anyone spend incredible amounts of cash on houses they do not intent to use? All over the world, the value of property extends beyond the utilitarian function of being a place to live. Real estate is also a vital economic entity that presents an avenue for investment as well as a way of storing wealth — a use of property that is taken to the extreme in China. “Many Chinese investors are buying property based on expectations of appreciation, and that it is a solid, safe investment that they can easily understand,” said Mark Tanner, the founding director of China Skinny, a Shanghai based marketing research firm.

A full 39% of individual wealth in China is kept in housing, and, according to Nomura, 21% of China’s urban households possess more than one home. The reasons for this desire to invest in housing often results from a lack of better options. China’s banks pay negative interest and are becoming even more unattractive with the recent wave of currency devaluation. Wealth management products are not fully developed and are highly regulated by the government, and the stock market is viewed to be about as secure as a casino.

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Curious travel itinerary. Pope and XI are in US at the same time. Xi is due in Washington on Thursday, just two days after the Pope?!

Xi Jinping: Does China Truly Love ‘Big Daddy Xi’ – Or Fear Him? (Guardian)

[..] spin doctors have set about building a cult of personality around their leader with books, cartoons, pop songs and even dance routines celebrating Xi Dada’s rule. Earlier this month, thousands of troops goose-stepped through Tiananmen Square as part of a massive military parade proclaiming Xi’s unassailable position at the party’s helm. “There is this aristocratic flair which has now become more apparent, particularly after the military parade,” said Lam. “The word demi-god would be an exaggeration but after the military parade he looked like an emperor.” Many ordinary Chinese appear enamoured with their 21st century emperor. “He has the backing of the whole country,” claimed Zhang Jingchuan, the songwriter from Sichuan province, describing his leader as an approachable man of ideas.

Human rights activists, liberals and dissidents – some of whom will gather in the United States this week to protest the Chinese president’s visit – have been less impressed. Since Xi came to power, there has been a concerted effort to obliterate civil society in China, with moderate and once-tolerated critics including human rights lawyers, feminists, religious leaders and social activists harassed or thrown in prison. More than 200 lawyers have been detained or interrogated as part of a sweeping crackdown on their trade that began in July. At least 20 remain in detention or are missing, prompting calls for Barack Obama to cancel Xi’s visit to the US. “We had hoped for something different,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. “We are surprised by just how bad it is.”

MacFarquhar blamed the dramatic tightening on Xi’s obsession with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at reform. “When he first came in he exhibited how much the Gorbachev phenomenon had spooked him. He is very conscious of long-term threats – and maybe he doesn’t see it as long-term. If he is only thinking in terms of 10 years, now is the time to solidify the country and he thinks he knows how to do it.” Yet for all Xi’s apparent muscle – one academic has dubbed him the Chairman of Everything – not everyone is convinced by the growing legend of Xi Dada. “I never bought the powerful leader narrative at all. But now it’s publicly displayed to be a fiction,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, a respected observer of the Chinese economy and politics, who believes the recent stock market debacle and deadly Tianjin explosions exposed a president far weaker than many had thought.

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AIIB.

How China Decided To Redraw The Global Financial Map (Reuters)

Plans for China’s new development bank, one of Beijing’s biggest global policy successes, were almost shelved two years ago due to doubts among senior Chinese policymakers. From worries it wouldn’t raise enough funds to concerns other nations wouldn’t back it, Beijing was plagued by self-doubt when it first considered setting up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in early 2013, two sources with knowledge of internal discussions said. But promises by some Middle East governments to stump up cash and the support of key European nations – to Beijing’s surprise and despite U.S. opposition – became a turning point in China’s plans to alter the global financial architecture.

The overseas affirmation, combined with the endorsement of stalwart supporters, including a former Chinese vice premier and incoming AIIB President Jin Liqun, a former head of sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp, enabled China to bring the bank from an idea to its imminent inception. The bank’s successful establishment is likely to bolster Beijing’s confidence that it can play a leading role in supranational financial institutions, despite the economic headwinds it is facing at home. “At the start, China wasn’t very confident,” one of the sources said in reference to Beijing’s AIIB plans. “The worry was that there was no money for this.”

A Finance Ministry delegation that called on Southeast Asian nations to gauge interest in the AIIB was not encouraging, the source said. Governments backed the idea, but were too poor to contribute heavily to the bank’s funding. But subsequent visits to the Middle East helped to win the day as regional governments informed China they needed new infrastructure and, crucially, were able to pay for it, a source said. “They are all oil-producing countries, they have foreign currencies, they were very enthusiastic, and they could shell out the cash,” he said. “That was when we thought ‘Ah, this can be done.'”

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“The key debate then should be around the pace and extent of this rise, not whether it should take place at all.”

The US Federal Reserve Has Got It Wrong (Andrew Sentance)

The US Federal Reserve decided not to raise the key policy rate in the US this week. That would be an understandable decision if rates were at or close to a normal level. But they are not. Interest rates of 0.5% in the UK and 0-0.25% in the US are the lowest recorded levels in history. Seven years into a recovery, central bankers need to explain why the interest rate playing field is still so heavily tilted to borrowers. Continuing with such low interest rates in the UK and the US, when unemployment rates are back to 5-5.5% and our economies are growing well, raises some more profound questions about monetary policy in the west. First, how independent are central banks? Since the 1990s, the Fed and the Bank of England have pursued policies similar to the ones any well-meaning government official would have chosen.

They have cut interest rates very readily, but when they have raised them (in 1994-5 and 2005-7) they have been behind the curve. Independent central banks were established precisely to avoid this “behind the curve” interest rate policy. But it has not worked. Once again, they are at serious risk of lagging behind in their interest rate decisions as the major western economies climb out of the post-crisis recession. Second, if interest rates cannot rise now, when will they increase? In the case of the US, growth has averaged over 2% for more than six years since the recovery started in mid-2009. Unemployment has halved from around 10% to 5% over roughly the same period. Yet interest rates remain stuck — close to zero. A similar position prevails in the UK.

A multitude of reasons have been advanced for delaying the first rate rise: sluggish growth in all the major western economies in 2011-12; the euro crisis in 2013-14; and now the Fed is citing weak economic growth in China and the impact this has on financial markets. If you look around hard enough, there can always be a reason for not raising interest rates. But that highlights the key problem. Monetary policymakers are very timid at the moment. They are lions who have lost their roar. The third problem is that central bankers appear to lack a clear strategy for monetary policy. Their implicit strategy is that interest rates will remain at current excessively low levels — until sufficient evidence accumulates to raise them. But a more realistic approach to keeping monetary policy on a steady and neutral course would involve a gradual rise in interest rates over the next few years. The key debate then should be around the pace and extent of this rise, not whether it should take place at all.

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Liar, liar, economy on fire.

A Divided Fed Pits World’s Woes Against Domestic Growth (Reuters)

Federal Reserve policymakers appeared deeply divided on Saturday over how seriously problems in the world economy will effect the U.S., a fracture that may be difficult for Fed Chair Janet Yellen to mend as she guides the central bank’s debate over whether to hike interest rates. Though last week’s decision to again delay an interest rate increase was near-unanimous, drawing only one dissent, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard called the session “pressure-packed” as members debated whether global uncertainty or the continued strength of the U.S. economy deserved more attention. In the end the committee felt that tepid global demand, a possible weakening of inflation measures, and recent market volatility warranted waiting to see how that might impact the U.S.

Bullard, who does not have a vote this year on the Fed’s main policy-setting committee, said he would have joined Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker’s dissent, and worried the central bank had paid too much attention to recent financial market gyrations. Markets sold off sharply this summer over concerns about a slowdown in China and weak world growth, leaving Fed officials to vet whether that reflected a short-term correction or more fundamental problems on the horizon. “Financial markets tend to wax and wane, sometimes suddenly. Monetary policy needs to be more stable,” said Bullard, who in prepared remarks here to the Community Bankers Association of Illinois said he did not think the Fed “provided a satisfactory answer” to why rates should stay near zero.

The economy is near full employment, and inflation will almost certainly rise, Bullard said, leaving the Fed’s near seven-year stay at near zero rates out of line with the broad economic picture. In a statement Lacker said he felt the current low rates “are unlikely to be appropriate for an economy with persistently strong consumption growth and tightening labor markets.”

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“Some people call this stealing economic activity from the future..”

Stuck At Zero: Global Risks Have Tied The Fed’s Hands (Forbes)

On the seventh anniversary of the implosion of Lehman Brothers, an event that rocked the global economy, it’s more than ironic that the main topic of global financial discussion has been a rate hike by the Federal Reserve, which just announced that it would leave rates unchanged yet again. Behind the scenes, more interesting is the growing list of risks which may be tying the FOMC’s hands behind their back. The Fed should have hiked rates in 2012, but every day they put off the rate raise, Lehman-like systemic risk is lurking and rising. It’s a Colossal Failure of Common Sense all over again. With all the debate about what exactly the Federal Reserve should do with short-term interest rates, historical perspective is something that’s being left behind.

The U.S. has had near zero short-term interest rates before. The period of 1932 to 1953 was defined by rates that were between zero and 2.1%. The last time we hit the zero bound, we stayed very close to it for upwards of 21 years. This is not something you hear often from economists these days. The main reason central banks raise and lower rates is to shift consumption around and smooth out periods of stagnation. The Fed’s dual mandate of non-accelerating inflation and full employment defines the characteristics of the smoothing that society wants to see. Low rates pull consumption and investment forward and allow projects to be undertaken that otherwise would have to wait. Some people call this stealing economic activity from the future, but we must keep our eye on the incentives created by Fed policy.

On the other hand, higher rates make debt more expensive and push consumption and investment out. This year, most economist have felt the Fed is looking to “tap the brakes” on the improving U.S. economy. The other pressing issue is high debt levels. The Fed is in no hurry to hike rates with debt levels so high in the post-Lehman era. The U.S. hit its debt ceiling in March, at $18.1 trillion, but the devil is in the details, or what’s called interest costs as a%age of federal spending. As you can see below, net interest outlays are on course to more than double by 2017 from 2005 levels. Interest costs on the staggering U.S. debt load, added together with government entitlement spending, is nearing 71% of Federal spending, compared to 26% in the early 1960s. Is this sustainable?

There’s a price to pay for six years of a zero interest rate policy, it’s not free. As the world’s most influential central bank has kept interest rates so low for so long, debt has piled up in all kinds of global pockets, especially in emerging markets. According to the Bank of International Settlements, emerging markets’ total debt to GDP ratio has surged to nearly 170%, up from 100% just before Lehman’s failure. Even more disturbing, according to Bloomberg data: there’s a strong correlation between the surge in emerging market debt levels and the cost of credit default protection. Investors wanting to insure themselves against the risk of EM defaults are paying up for the privilege these days.

U.S. Government Net Interest Outlays
2005: $150 billion
2009: $190 billion
2017: $335 billion
*Data from CBO

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The lower the price, the more producers will pump.

US Oil Tumbles 4.7% To Settle At $44.68 A Barrel (Reuters)

U.S. oil prices fell about 5% on Friday after U.S. energy firms cut oil rigs for a third week in a row this week, data showed on Friday, a sign the latest crude price weakness was causing drillers to put on hold plans announced several months ago to return to the well pad. The drop comes amid increased concerns about the outlook for energy demand. The U.S. central bank warned of the health of the global economy and bearish signs persisted that the world’s biggest crude producers would keep pumping at high levels. Drillers removed eight rigs in the week ended Sept. 18, bringing the total rig count down to 644, after cutting 23 rigs over the prior two weeks, oil services company Baker Hughes said in its closely followed report. Those reductions cut into the 47 oil rigs energy firms added in July and August after some drillers followed through on plans to add rigs announced in May and June when U.S. crude futures averaged $60 a barrel.

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“Can you imagine what would happen in the U.S. if you cut spending by 20 or 30% and cut Social Security? You’d have riots in the streets, more so than we ever saw in Greece.”

Jim Chanos on What Lies Ahead for Greece (Lynn Parramore)

Jim Chanos, the well-known hedge fund manager and president and founder of Kynikos Associates, is half Greek on his father’s side. He has been traveling to the country since 1970 and has also been active in the Greek community in the United States. A long-time observer of Greece, he became more involved in 2010 when he was part of a group that met with then-prime minister Papandreou to offer some pro bono advice. Since then, he has been watching closely from the sidelines with increasing levels of concern. In the following interview, he discusses how Greece reached this point of crisis, the upcoming elections, and what lies ahead.

LP: You’ve recently returned from a trip to Greece to visit family and friends. How did you find the mood in the country?

JC: It was grim — away from the vacation spots, of course, which are more international than domestic locations. I’d gotten there just after they’d finally agreed to sign the third memorandum. There was a general sense of resignation and not knowing what else they can do. The feeling of the people I spoke to — whether high level or people in restaurants and tavernas — was that they [the Troika] have them by the short hairs because of the banking system. And I think that was pretty clear. Really, there was no sense of any chance of this working out with an alternative currency. To this day we’re really not quite sure whether they had that planned — various reports differed as to whether they could have even done it — but I think that there’s just this general level of resignation coupled with despair amongst people worried about the long-term growth of the country and its well-being. People are worried about their kids, as they should be.

LP: I think pretty much everybody agrees that the negotiations with the Troika have been a fiasco. How do you assess what’s happened? Who is to blame?

JC: It’s important to understand that while Syriza may have botched the negotiations —and I do I think there’s a general consensus that they did or at least didn’t play it as well for their country as they could have — they didn’t cause this mess. When the first memorandum was signed and then agreed to by PASOK and Papandreou, and then the follow-on was agreed to by Samaras and New Democracy to the right, in effect they were the same types of understandings. But they couldn’t work from the get-go because, as we now know, there was no net new money in any meaningful way coming into Greece. Whatever new capital was coming in was just a way to keep the banks current. It was going in the front door and out the back door.

Greece really did a decent job from an austerity point of view. They brought down spending, they raised taxes. I know there’s this belief that the Greeks are just world-class tax evaders, but in fact, in terms of taxes collected as a%age of GDP, they’re now quite a bit higher than a number of European countries because a lot of the taxes are indirect: the Greeks couldn’t evade them if they wanted to. They also cut spending dramatically. Can you imagine what would happen in the U.S. if you cut spending by 20 or 30% and cut Social Security? You’d have riots in the streets, more so than we ever saw in Greece.

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This weekend Greece, next weekend Catalunya.

Catalonia Separatists: Spanish State Has Failed. We Can Change This (Guardian)

At the port of Tarragona recently, with the sun shining on the harbour, it became clear that Junts pel Sí (Together for Yes), the Catalan independence coalition which hopes to score a significant victory next weekend, is a pretty big tent. Asked about a controversial megacomplex of hotels, casinos and theme parks in the works, candidate Germà Bel was confident that the project would create wealth and jobs for the area. But Raül Romeva, charismatic leader of the Together for Yes list, doubted whether the project would actually go ahead. “It’s not a done deal,” he hedged. Spanish media seized on the moment as evidence of the uneasy bedfellows that had joined together for Catalonia’s forthcoming regional elections.

But Romeva, who leads the Junts pel Sí ticket, sees the unwieldy coalition backed by the conservative Democratic Convergence party, the leftwing Catalan Republican Left and grassroots independence activists, as a sign of the extraordinary moment Catalonia is experiencing. “This is a movement that goes from left to right, spanning conservatives, liberals, ecologists, sociologists and many others,” he told the Observer. “It’s a consequence of necessity.” For the past decade, he argued, the Spanish state has failed to represent the plurality of the country: “What we have is the opportunity to change all this.” His coalition seeks to turn the 27 September ballot into a de facto referendum on independence, segregating parties by their stance on the question and launching the region’s most ambitious move in recent years in the push to break away from Spain.

“If there is a majority, we will have to manage that result. If there is not a majority, we will have to accept that and move on.” Polls suggest that pro-independence parties could win a slim majority in the 135-seat regional parliament. If so, Catalan leader Artur Mas has pledged to lead a transitional government, lasting no longer than 18 months, which will begin drafting a Catalan constitution and work towards negotiating secession with the central government in Madrid. A leftist who dresses in jeans and wears bright yellow glasses, Romeva comes across as a bridge between the diverse groups that make up Junts pel Sí. Born in Madrid and raised in Catalonia, he said his position on independence was cemented in 2010, when Spain’s constitutional court ruled that Catalonia’s status and powers could not be considered tantamount to nationhood.

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Channel Greece: “The system will crash. Elderly people won’t get the care they need, and it will be people with mental ill health who suffer most, because that is where the squeeze always comes.”

UK’s NHS To Collapse Within Two Years, Warns Former Health Minister (Guardian)

The National Health Service will crash within two years with catastrophic consequences unless the government orders an immediate multibillion pound cash injection, the former minister in charge of care services says. The stark assessment from Norman Lamb, minister of state at the Department of Health until May’s general election, comes as fears mount among senior NHS officials, care providers and local authorities that NHS and care services are approaching breaking point. In an interview with the Observer, Lamb, a Liberal Democrat who was at the heart of policymaking during the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, accuses the government of dishonesty in failing to admit the scale of the problems.

He says that an increasing number of private companies and other organisations contracted to provide care by local authorities are refusing to tender again because cash-starved councils, already hit by budget cuts of more than 40% since 2010, cannot pay enough to let them run adequate services. Lamb says the result is that more elderly people in particular will end up in already overstretched hospitals, compounding the crisis. Pre-election promises by the Tories to provide an additional £8bn for the health service by 2020, on top of £2bn extra pledged at the end of last year, are insufficient and too vague to reassure anyone, he argues.

“If the investment is not made upfront and in the early period of this parliament, you could see serious failures in the system,” he said. “The system will crash. Elderly people won’t get the care they need, and it will be people with mental ill health who suffer most, because that is where the squeeze always comes.” While the promised extra money would help, it was nowhere near enough. “I don’t think anyone in the NHS believes that is enough. The government talks very vaguely about an extra £8bn by 2020, but it is needed now. If it comes in 2019-20, the system will have crashed by then. I think the next two years will make or break the NHS and the care system.”

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 September 3, 2015  Posted by at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Jack Delano Family of Dennis Decosta, Portuguese Farm Security Administration client Dec 1940

Syrians are the Famine Irish of the 21st Century (Glavin)
Shocking Images Of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight Of Refugees (Guardian)
Family Of Drowned Syrian Boy Had Been Rejected By Canada For Refugee Status (NP)
Germany Targets Billions in Refugee Aid by Late September (Bloomberg)
Italy Revives Border Checks (Deutsche Welle)
European Police ‘Scarier Than ISIS Terrorists’ (Finian Cunningham)
The End Of A Flawed Globalisation (Guardian)
Devaluation Strengthens China’s Hand at IMF (WSJ)
Wall Street Surges As Turbulence Becomes The Norm (Reuters)
We Are In A Great Transition Period (Ron Paul)
Wall Street and the Military are Draining Americans High and Dry (Edstrom)
The Chinese Bubble (Beppe Grillo)
Why The Federal Reserve Should Be Audited (John Crudele)
Marc Faber Warns “There Are No Safe Assets Anymore” (ZH)
Giant US Pension Fund To Sell 12% Of Stocks In Fear Of “Another Downturn” (WSJ)
Pimco Assets Drop Below $100 Billion For The First Time Since ’07 (Reuters)
House Sales Plunge In Calgary As Energy Sector Job Losses Mount (Globe and Mail)
Tens Of Thousands Of Greek Companies Fear Closure In Coming Months (Kath.)
Lucky Britain To Win 21st Century Jackpot From Carbon Capture (AEP)
Two More European Countries Ban Monsanto GMO Crops (EcoWatch)

“This Is What It’s Come To: Letting Syria Die, Watching Syrians Drown..”

Syrians are the Famine Irish of the 21st Century (Glavin)

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.” There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow. Bashar Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are ascendant almost everywhere else.

The one thing the democratic opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going home now. But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the western countries, the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”

Drowning in the sea: a little boy in a red t-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The boy was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.

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Europe is comfortably Teflon coated.

Shocking Images Of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight Of Refugees (Guardian)

The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west. The picture, taken on Wednesday morning, depicted the dark-haired toddler, wearing a bright-red T-shirt and shorts, washed up on a beach, lying face down in the surf not far from Turkey’s fashionable resort town of Bodrum. A second image portrays a grim-faced policeman carrying the tiny body away. Within hours it had gone viral becoming the top trending picture on Twitter under the hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik (humanity washed ashore).

Greek authorities, coping with what has become the biggest migration crisis in living memory, said the boy was among a group of refugees escaping Islamic State in Syria. Turkish officials, corroborating the reports, said 12 people died after two boats carrying a total of 23 people, capsized after setting off separately from the Akyarlar area of the Bodrum peninsula. Among the dead were five children and a woman. Seven others were rescued and two reached the shore in lifejackets but hopes were fading of saving the two people still missing. The casualties were among thousands of people, mostly Syrians, fleeing war and the brutal occupation by Islamic fundamentalists in their homeland.

Kos, facing Turkey’s Aegean coast, has become a magnet for people determined to reach Europe. An estimated 2,500 refugees, also believed to be from Syria, landed on Lesbos on Wednesday in what local officials described as more than 60 dinghies and other “unseaworthy” vessels. Some 15,000 refugees are in Lesbos awaiting passage by cruise ship to Athens’ port of Piraeus before continuing their journey northwards to Macedonia and up through Serbia to Hungary and Germany. Wednesday’s dead were part of a grim toll of some 2,500 people who have died this summer attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

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“The frustration of waiting and the inaction has been terrible.”

Family Of Drowned Syrian Boy Had Been Rejected By Canada For Refugee Status (NP)

The drowned child washed up on a Turkish beach captured in a photograph that went around the world Wednesday was three-year-old Aylan Kurdi. He died, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehan, in a desperate attempt to reach Canada. The Syrian-Kurds from Kobane died along with eight other refugees early Wednesday. The father of the two boys, Abdullah, survived. The father’s family says his only wish now is to return to Kobane with his dead wife and children, bury them, and be buried alongside them. “I heard the news at five o’clock in this morning,” Teema Kurdi, Abdullah’s sister, said Wednesday. She learned of the drowning through a telephone call from Ghuson Kurdi, the wife of another brother, Mohammad. “She had got a call from Abdullah, and all he said was, my wife and two boys are dead.”

Teema, a Vancouver hairdresser who emigrated to Canada more than 20 years ago, said Abdullah and Rehan Kurdi and their two boys were the subject of a “G5” privately sponsored refugee application that the ministry of citizenship and immigration rejected in June, owing to the complexities involved in refugee applications from Turkey. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander could not be reached for comment, but Port Moody – Coquitlam NDP MP Fin Donnelly said he’d hand-delivered the Kurdis’ file to Alexander earlier this year. Alexander said he’d look into it, Donnelly said, but the Kurdis’ application was rejected in June. “This is horrific and heartbreaking news,” Donnelly said. “The frustration of waiting and the inaction has been terrible.”

The family had two strikes against it — like thousands of other Syrian-Kurdish refugees in Turkey, the United Nations would not register them as refugees, and the Turkish government would not grant them exit visas. “I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbours who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat. I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there,” Teema said.

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That’s 4 weeks?! Clearly Germany does not see a crisis, nor an emergency. They don’t care if people drown.

Germany Targets Billions in Refugee Aid by Late September (Bloomberg)

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is facing up to the cost of caring for refugees pouring into Germany as estimates of the budget impact from Europe’s biggest migrant crisis since World War II increase. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Wednesday he’ll present a package of measures within three weeks to help fund municipalities, ease building rules and streamline bureaucracy for housing and registering refugees. “We need clarity quickly on financial assistance,” Maiziere told reporters in Berlin. Deputy Finance Minister Jens Spahn, asked in a Bloomberg Television interview in Frankfurt about the price tag of aid to refugees, said, “it will be billions, we’re still calculating.”

As migrants seeking refuge from war and poverty squeeze onto trains to Germany, Merkel says her country may see as many as 800,000 arrivals this year, about four times the level in 2014. That means federal support payments for asylum seekers this year will increase by as much as €3.3 billion, Labor Minister Andrea Nahles told reporters Tuesday. Party leaders of Merkel’s governing coalition will discuss the measures on Sunday and probably complete the legislation by Sept. 24 when Merkel and leaders of Germany’s 16 states meet, de Maiziere said. The measures could be approved by the lower house in October, he said.

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And so it starts.

Italy Revives Border Checks (Deutsche Welle)

Italy has temporarily reinstated border patrols at the frontier with Austria. The move follows an appeal from the southern German state of Bavaria. Following a request from Germany to help stem the flow of refugees, Italy reimposed identification checks in its northern region of South Tyrol on Wednesday. The bilingual province on the border with Austria is the last stop in Italy for migrants who arrive in the country from northern Africa, hoping to travel on other nations in Europe. The regional capital Bolzano said it was ready to “reactivate” controls at the Alpine town of Brennero just as it did for the G7 summit in June, but that it was “a temporary measure to allow Bavaria to reorganize and face the emergency.”

Bavaria registered around 2,500 new refugees on Tuesday, with a total of almost 4,300 new arrivals in the week so far. South Tyrol also agreed to take in 300-400 migrants who had arrived in Munich “for a few days” to take some pressure off the southern German state whose facilities are swamped by migrants arriving not only from the Middle East and Africa, but some Balkan nations as well. Although Italy, Germany, and Austria belong to the Schengen Zone, which largely abolished border controls between signatory countries beginning in the 1990s, its provisions may be lifted in exceptional situations. When Rome suspended Schengen for the G7 in June it caused serious overcrowding in South Tyrol as migrants were forced to postpone their journeys.

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Well, not all of them. But still.

European Police ‘Scarier Than ISIS Terrorists’ (Finian Cunningham)

In what is being described as the worse refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War, tens of thousands of desperate migrants are streaming across EU borders. They have risked their lives to get there, only to be then attacked by EU «border police», or else targeted by racist street mobs. Welcome to Europe! Destitute and carrying their worldly possessions in nothing but a haversack, men, women and young children are having to outwit truncheon-wielding police ranks in order to try to reach safety. This is in the European Union, whose treaties proclaim to the rest of the world the sanctity of human rights and dignity. Hungary, Romania and Greece have emerged as the new crisis points, replacing Italy as the formerly main refugee route. Crying mothers run with petrified children jostled on their backs into forests or ditches just to escape from teargas-firing riot police.

One distraught woman told a France 24 news crew how she had become separated from her family in the melee. She didn’t know how she would ever find them because she was stranded on the other side of the police cordon. Her missing children and husband had to run away before they were captured by the cops. One young boy from Syria told CNN reporter Awra Damon that his family and many others were forced back by a phalanx of helmet-clad police officers as they attempted to cross the Hungarian border. The little boy said his family fled an area in Syria that is under control of the Islamic State (or ISIS) terror group – the cult jihadist militia notorious for beheading civilians. (The CNN reporter didn’t seem to notice the irony that her TV channel has previously made heaps of news stories out of accusing the Syrian government as being the one who is terrorising its people.)

What does that say about the Hungarian border police when beleaguered refugees are cowering before them? It’s a graphic condemnation of the EU’s border controls being scarier than blood-thirsty terrorists. Last month alone, more than 100,000 migrants crossed EU borders. This is a humanitarian crisis on a scale that evokes the harrowing grainy footage showing wandering masses in the aftermath of World War Two. The vast majority of the refugees to the EU are from war-torn Syria, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration. Up to 12 million of Syria’s population – half the total – have been displaced by more than four years of conflict in that country. A war that has been fuelled covertly by the United States, Britain and France seeking regime change against President Bashar al Assad. Also fuelling the war in Syria are Western allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Israel.

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“..the debacle in Asia’s number one economy has blown a hole in a string of hitherto long-held beliefs.”

The End Of A Flawed Globalisation (Guardian)

Clad as it is in jargon and technicalities, financial meltdowns can often seem like an elaborate spectacle taking place in a foreign country. So it is with the trillions wiped off shares since 24 August’s “Black Monday”. Obviously it’s a huge deal, but beyond the numbers on Bloomberg terminals it’s hard to put into perspective. Yet one way to think about what has happened in China over the past couple of weeks is the drawing to a close of an entire system for running the world economy. Over the past two decades, globalisation has fired on two engines: the belief that Americans would always buy the world’s goods, of which the Chinese would make the lion’s share – and lend their income to the Americans to buy more.

That policy regime was made explicit during the Asian crisis of the late 90s, when Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan slashed US borrowing rates, making it cheaper for Americans to buy imports. And it was talked about throughout the noughties by central bankers fretting about the “Great Wall of Cash” flooding out of China and into western assets. The first big blow to that system came with the banking crisis of 2008, which made plain that the US could no longer afford to continue as the world’s backstop consumer. The latest dent has been made over the past couple of weeks in China. Because the debacle in Asia’s number one economy has blown a hole in a string of hitherto long-held beliefs.

First, it exploded the assumption that China can keep racking up double-digit growth rates forever. Stock markets are only the aggregate of investors’ estimates of the future profitability of the companies listed on them. The crash on the Shanghai Composite suggests that shareholders are no longer so confident of the prospects for Chinese businesses – and with reason: data shows that China’s manufacturing, investment and demand for commodities are all on the slide. More importantly, the last few weeks have shattered faith in the Beijing politburo as technocrats with an incomparably sure touch. Whatever doubts economists might have had over the sustainability of China’s dirty-tech, investment-heavy economic model, they would normally be quelled with the thought that Beijing’s “super-elite” had a textbook for every occasion.

But that was before the shock devaluation of the yuan on 11 August, followed by a jittery press conference called by the People’s Bank of China – after which it spent hundreds of billions buying yuan to keep it strong, effectively reversing the devaluation. Couple all this with the national government’s cack-handed attempts to shore up the stock market and this week’s bizarre and reprehensible “confession” on state TV from a journalist for talking down the stock market – and a picture emerges of a state government unsure how to deal with financial jitters and lashing out at any convenient target.

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Or not.

Devaluation Strengthens China’s Hand at IMF (WSJ)

China’s sudden decision last month to devalue its currency riled neighbors and fueled investors’ fears about a sharp slowdown in the world’s No. 2 economy. But the move has won over the IMF and even secured restrained praise from the U.S. Treasury Department. The currency maneuver has positioned the Chinese government to press for a greater international role for the yuan during visits to a series of Group of 20 meetings starting this week and a visit to Washington later this month. For more than a decade, the U.S. and other countries castigated China for its currency policy, saying the yuan’s level gave the country’s exporters an unfair advantage at the expense of its trading partners.

The Aug. 11 depreciation initially spurred worries in global financial markets as investors saw it as a signal that Beijing was reverting to its old policy playbook in a desperate effort to revive a flagging economy. A number of China experts and Western officials close to the matter say China likely isn’t regressing. “If they wanted to revert to their mercantilist trade policies, they would have moved sooner and they would have moved by a much bigger amount,” said Nick Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Instead, economists are generally viewing the depreciation as China presented it: as a move to make the country’s exchange rate more market-determined.

Combined with Beijing’s careful management of the currency since then, it is bolstering China’s bid to get the yuan included in the IMF’s basket of reserve currencies after the IMF board’s vote in November, according to people familiar with the matter. They and other experts say China is holding to its currency commitments for now despite discord in its financial markets and deepening international worries about the Chinese economy. Contrary to initial expectations, China’s depreciation of the yuan might actually help mitigate long-simmering tensions between the U.S. and China over the country’s currency policy ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington in late September.

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Volatility.

Wall Street Surges As Turbulence Becomes The Norm (Reuters)

Wall Street stocks jumped almost 2% on Wednesday in the latest volatile session as investors weighed the impact of a stumbling Chinese economy and global market turmoil on the Federal Reserve’s impending decision about when to raise interest rates. U.S. investors have weathered over two weeks of unusually wide-swinging trade that has left the S&P 500 with its worst monthly drop in three years and a loss of 8.5% from an all-time high in May. “What we’re seeing today is not a recovery. It’s market volatility, it’s nervousness, it’s an inability to call the direction of the market,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Through now and October we’re going to see a lot more of this, a lot of volatility.”

U.S. labor markets were tight enough to fuel small wage gains in some professions in recent weeks, though some companies already felt a chill from an economic slowdown in China, the Fed said. The combination of more demand for workers and worries about Chinese economic growth underscores the challenge faced by the Fed at a Sept 16-17 meeting where it may decide to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 1.82% to end at 16,351.31 points. The S&P 500 climbed 1.83% to 1,948.85 and the Nasdaq Composite surged 2.46% to 4,749.98. The CBOE Volatility index .VIX, Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” dipped 11% but stayed in territory not seen since 2011 after Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating on the United States for the first time.

The recent turbulence has left the S&P 500’s valuation at 15.1 times expected earnings, inexpensive compared to around 17 for much of 2015, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine data. But investors fear that the outlook for earnings may darken as China’s economy loses steam.

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“The big danger is if the results of this failure are total poverty for more and more nations and total war.”

We Are In A Great Transition Period (Ron Paul)

It’s a shame to see what has happened so far in this new century. The last century ended with a victory over defeated communism. I think that was the greatest victory of the 20th century. Events showed that communism did not work. Unfortunately, we jumped to the conclusion that we had an Empire to defend, and that Keynesian economics would solve all of our problems. Printing money, spending money, and debt wouldn’t matter, and we would bring peace to the world and make everyone good democrats. Right now, the refugee crisis that we see in Europe is a failure of government policies and a failure of central banking. In some ways, I think we are in a great transition period. This cannot continue. The big danger is if the results of this failure are total poverty for more and more nations and total war. Or, hopefully, we can wise up and say that these policies have failed.

The American people should lead the charge on this. The policies are lousy, and yet government is always adding more and more of the same. The worse the economy gets, the more we’re starting to hear about socialism and authoritarianism as the cures. So we live in an age in which the policies of the past are coming to an end. The Keynesian model does not work, and our Empire does not work. This total failure has to change, and we need to present the alternative. For me, the alternative is free markets, free society, civil liberties, and a foreign policy where we mind our own business. The alternative is peace and prosperity. We were told about these things in our early years, but it seems they’ve been forgotten. We’d be much better off in this country with such a policy and we could set a standard for the rest of the world.

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Nice set of numbers.

Wall Street and the Military are Draining Americans High and Dry (Edstrom)

The US government often cites $18 trillion as the amount of money that they owe, but their actual debts are higher. Much higher. The government in the USA owes $13.2 trillion in US Treasury Bonds, $5 trillion in money borrowed by the US Federal government from Federal government trust funds like the Social Security trust fund, $0.7 trillion for state bonds issued by the 50 states, $3.7 trillion for the municipal bond market (US towns, cities and counties), $1.97 trillion still owing by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, mostly for bad mortgages in years gone by, $6.23 trillion owed by US government authorities other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $1.04 trillion in loans taken out by the US Federal government (e.g. government credit card balances, short term loans) and $0.63 trillion in loans owed by government authorities (e.g. their government credit card balances, short term loans).

As of April 1, 2015, according to the Federal Reserve Bank’s Financial Accounts of the US report, the government in the USA has $32.77 trillion in debt excluding unfunded government pension debts and unfunded government healthcare costs Debt is money that has to be paid. The government in the USA also has to pay $6.62 trillion for unfunded pension liabilities, as of April 1, 2015. There are thousands of government pension plans in the USA. The Federal Employees Pension Plan is now short $1.9 trillion according to the Fed’s March 2015 statement plus $4.7 trillion in unfunded state and municipal pension liabilities according to State Budget Solutions which calculates on actual pension returns (approx. 2.5% per year from 2009 to 2014, instead of the fantasy ‘assumption’ of an 8% return used by the Fed to guesstimate pension fund money).

The largest governmental pension fund in Puerto Rico ran out money (became insolvent) in 2012 and the government now has to pay $20.5 billion for that. Pension contributions into government pension plans have been less than what these pension plans pay out to retirees which is why the government was short by $6.62 trillion for government pensions as of April 1, 2015. The DJIA has gone down 9.5% since the Spring. $6.3 trillion in governmental pension plan money was invested in Wall Street as of April 1st. Additional government pension plan losses have been, so far this year, $0.6 trillion. As of August 29, 2015, the government in the US owes $7.2 trillion for pensions. Every additional 10% the DJIA drops is another $0.6 trillion in unfunded pension costs that the government has to pay.

The Federal government owed $1.95 trillion in unfunded entitlements for the Federal Employees Pension Fund as of April 1, 2015. Unfunded entitlements are health care benefits for retirees above and beyond Medicare benefits. States, municipalities and governmental authorities owe an additional $4.2 trillion for retiree health benefits. Medicare and Medicaid costs, about $0.83 trillion in 2014, escalate 6% a year and Obamacare adds $0.18 trillion a year in governmental health costs, mostly for subsidies. Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare costs will escalate to $1.28 trillion in 2018. Bottom line, as of August 29, 2015, the government in the USA owes $46.1 trillion (bonds, unfunded pension costs, unfunded healthcare costs, credit card balances and loans).

Footprints. The US government has paid Wall Street’s way when Wall Street can’t pay it’s own way. Wall Street has promised to pay more than the US government has promised to pay. $0.5 trillion in margin loans and $3.95 trillion in repurchase agreements pale in comparison to $21 trillion in open credit default swaps, a type of derivative. Bankruptcy legislation in 2005 gave derivatives “super priority” status to be paid first when banks go bankrupt. According to BIS, there were $630 trillion in outstanding derivatives earlier this year, about half in the USA. Since wall street doesn’t have $315 trillion to pay their derivatives, who will pay this amount? And how? Even if only 15% of US derivatives go bad, that’s $47 trillion. How would the US government pay for that? The derivative liabilities arising, due to ongoing Wall Street instability, is an elephant in the room.

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“Since 2008, all the advanced economies have entered a phase of credit contraction (deleverage), whereas China has been moving in the opposite direction..”

The Chinese Bubble (Beppe Grillo)

The devaluation of the currency decided by China’s Central Bank has surprised financial markets. After anchoring the yuan to the dollar within a minimum margin of oscillation, after the Lehman crisis, the Chinese authorities have progressively broadened the oscillation zone and in 2014, they altered it from 1% to 2%. The decision in August to disconnect the yuan from the dollar has made it possible for the market to stabilise fluctuations in the currency and China did not intervene to correct the oscillation in the value of the yuan and thus it allowed the currency to devalue. Why?

Reasons for the devaluation An initial response can be found in the 8% annual fall in Chinese exports reported in the month of July. Connecting the yuan to the dollar after the crisis in 2008, eliminated the exchange rate risk and it facilitated the flow of foreign investments but it also brought about a devaluation of the yuan that penalised the balance of trade. In fact the real Chinese exchange rate increased by 30% between 2008 and 2014, most of which was in that last year following on from expectations of the rise in USA interest rates and the relative increase in the value of the dollar. The result saw a decline in exports to such an extent that it now needs explaining – now at no more than 20% of China’s GDP as compared to 40% a few years ago. Devalue to maintain growth is thus the first and most obvious way of looking at this new mercantilist spirit on the part of the Chinese monetary authorities.

The Chinese property bubble 2008 was the start of the Chinese property bubble. The de facto regime of fixed exchange rates with the dollar and the enormous reserves in foreign currencies have guaranteed the convertibility of the yuan and this has facilitated the flow of capital and the disproportionate expansion of credit to families. Since 2008, all the advanced economies have entered a phase of credit contraction (deleverage), whereas China has been moving in the opposite direction: from 2008 to 2014 private debt in China as a%age of GDP, has gone from 100% to 180% (of this, corporate debt as a%age of GDP has gone from 85% to 140% and for families it has gone up by a bit less than a multiple of three: – from 15% in 2008 to 40% today). This means that the ratio of private debt to GDP in China reached and went beyond the levels that Japan and the United States recorded in a 17 year period: from 1993 to 2010.

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More reasons than we have time to mention.

Why The Federal Reserve Should Be Audited (John Crudele)

It is time for a comprehensive audit of Janet Yellen ’s Federal Reserve — and not just for the reasons presidential candidate Rand Paul and others have given. The Fed needs to be audited to see if its ruling body has broken the law by manipulating financial markets that are outside its jurisdiction. A thorough investigation of the Fed will show once and for all if its former chief Ben Bernanke and current Chairwoman Yellen should go to jail. I know, that’s a bold statement coming as it does on Sept. 1, 2015, with Wall Street still in half-bloom. But it won’t be so preposterous some day in the future if the stock market suffers a full-blown economy-busting collapse and Congress and everyone else are looking for scalps.

The Fed should be audited as a brokerage firm would be — its financial holdings, its transactions, market orders, emails and phone calls. Special attention should be given to what is called the “trade blotter” at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which handles all market transactions for the Fed. The Fed’s dealing with foreign central banks — especially at times of market stress — should be given special attention. Trades in the wee hours of the morning should be in the spotlight. Not surprisingly, the Fed is strongly opposed to an audit and sees it as an intrusion into its autonomy. Washington shouldn’t be intimidated. Autonomy? Hah! That ended when the central bank started playing footsie with Wall Street.

Let’s look at what happened to the stock market last week, and it’ll explain what I think those who audit the Fed need to look for. As you probably remember, stocks were headed for oblivion on Monday, Aug. 24. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 1,089 points early in the day before the index rallied for a close that was “only” 588 points lower. China’s problems. Weak US economic growth. Greece. The possibility of an interest-rate hike. Those and other issues were the root causes of last Monday’s woe. But Wall Street’s real problem is that there is a bubble in stock prices created by years of risky monetary policy by the Fed. Quantitative easing, or QE — the experiment in money printing that has kept interest rates super-low — hasn’t helped the economy (and even the Fed of St. Louis concluded that). But QE did force savers into the stock market whether they wanted to take the risk or not.

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“..we have precise statistics who actually benefited from the stock market boom post-2009. This is not even 1% of the population. It’s 0.01%.”

Marc Faber Warns “There Are No Safe Assets Anymore” (ZH)

Markets have “reached some kind of a tipping point,” warns Marc Faber in a brief Bloomberg TV interview. Simply put, he explains, “because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks – there is no safe asset anymore.” The purchasing power of money is going down, and Faber “would rather focus on precious metals because they do not depend on the industrial demand as much as base metals or industrial commodities,” as it’s now “obvious that the Chinese economy is growing at nowhere near what the Ministry of Truth is publishing.” Faber explains more… “I have to laugh when someone like you tries to lecture me what creates prosperity” Some key exceprts…

On what central banks hath wrought… I think that because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks there is no safe asset anymore. When I grew up in the ’50s it was safe to put your money in the bank on deposit. The yields were low, but it was safe. But nowadays, you don’t know what will happen next in terms of purchasing power of money. What we know is that it’s going down.

On the idiocy of QE…..in my humble book of economics, wealth is being created through, essentially, a mixture of capital spending, and land and labor. And if these three production factors are used efficiently, it then creates a prosperous society, as America became prosperous from its humble beginnings in 1800, or thereabout, to the 1960s, ’70s. But it’s ludicrous to believe that you will create prosperity in a system by printing money. That is economic sophism at its best.

On the causes of iunequality… ..unfortunately the money that was made in U.S. stocks wasn’t distributed evenly. And we have precise statistics, by the way published by the Federal Reserve, who actually benefited from the stock market boom post-2009. This is not even 1% of the population. It’s 0.01%. They took the bulk. And the majority of Americans, roughly 50%, they don’t own any shares anyway. And in other countries, 90% of the population do not own any shares. So the printing of money has a very limited impact on creating wealth.

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Scream.

Giant US Pension Fund To Sell 12% Of Stocks In Fear Of “Another Downturn” (WSJ)

The nation’s second-largest pension fund is considering a significant shift away from some stocks and bonds, one of the most aggressive moves yet by a major retirement system to protect itself against another downturn. Top investment officers of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System have discussed moving as much as 12% of the fund’s portfolio—or more than $20 billion—into U.S. Treasurys, hedge funds and other complex investments that they hope will perform well if markets tumble, according to public documents and people close to the fund. Its holdings of U.S. stocks and other bonds would likely decline to make room for the new investments. The board of the $191 billion fund, which is known by its abbreviation Calstrs, discussed the proposal at a meeting Wednesday. A final decision won’t be made until November.

A wave of deep selloffs over the past two weeks has shattered years of steady gains for U.S. stocks. Calstrs isn’t reacting directly to those sharp price swings, but they are a reminder of the volatility in stocks and how exposed Calstrs is when markets swoon. “There’s no question,” Calstrs Chief Investment Officer Christopher Ailman said in an interview. The recent market volatility “has been painful.” Calstrs currently has about 55% of its portfolio in stocks. The fund’s investment officers began discussing the new tactic—called “Risk-Mitigating Strategies” in Calstrs documents—several months ago as they prepared for a regular three-year review of how Calstrs invests assets for nearly 880,000 active and retired school employees. Mr. Ailman, who has been chief investment officer at the fund since 2000, said he hopes a move away from certain stocks and bonds could help stub out heavy losses during future gyrations. This could include moving out of some U.S. stocks as well as investment-grade bonds.

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“..leaving it with about a third of the money it managed at its 2013 peak..”

Pimco Assets Drop Below $100 Billion For The First Time Since ’07 (Reuters)

Pacific Investment Management Co’s flagship fund dropped below $100 billion in assets for the first time in more than eight years, leaving it with about a third of the money it managed at its 2013 peak. Investors pulled $1.8 billion in assets from the Pimco Total Return Fund in August, down from $2.5 billion the previous month, according to the Newport Beach, California-based firm on Wednesday. After 28 consecutive months of outflows, assets plunged to $98.5 billion as of Aug. 31 from a peak of $293 billion in April 2013, when the mutual fund was the world’s largest and run by Pimco co-founder Bill Gross.

Gross, the bond market’s most renowned investor and long known as the “Bond King,” shocked the investment world nearly a year ago when he quit Pimco for distant rival Janus Capital Group. This is the first time that Total Return assets had less than $100 billion since January 2007, before strong risk-adjusted returns during the financial crisis attracted monstrous inflows of cash from investors seeking the relative safety of bonds. Assets were $99.86 billion in January 2007, according to Morningstar data. Investors have withdrawn record amounts of money since April 2013 because of erratic performance exacerbated by last year’s departures by Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the former chief executive officer of Pimco and Gross’ heir apparent.

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Sales down 27%, prices down 2%. Next step is obvious.

House Sales Plunge In Calgary As Energy Sector Job Losses Mount (Globe and Mail)

Calgary’s housing market is showing signs of fracturing amid a fresh wave of layoffs announced by major energy companies in the city. Home sales plunged 27% in August from a year earlier, while the benchmark and average resale prices both fell, the Calgary real estate board said Tuesday. The benchmark price slipped 0.09% to $456,300. The average resale price in the city tumbled nearly 2% to $466,570. On a year-to-date basis, average prices fell roughly 1.7% while benchmark prices rose about 2.4% as the number of new listings eased. But overall inventories are swollen at 44% above the same period in 2014 so far this year, pointing to more weakness ahead as job losses in the oil and gas sector mount. Total sales so far this year are down 25%.

“While we’ve managed to come through the spring market with not a lot of change, because there is further expectations of softness in the employment market, these things will start weighing on the housing market as we move into the end of the year,” said Ann-Marie Lurie, chief economist with the board. The weakening housing market is another symptom of oil’s collapse to under $50 a barrel from more than $100 (U.S.) last year – a sharp drop that has forced the city’s energy industry into survival mode. ConocoPhillips and Penn West Petroleum on Tuesday shed a combined 900 positions, adding to thousands of job losses that have piled up as companies dial back spending and halt drilling projects. Alberta’s oil-dependent economy is now expected to contract by 0.6% this year and its deficit could top $6.5-billion (Canadian) as the downturn intensifies, the province’s NDP government said this week.

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The price of a bailout.

Tens Of Thousands Of Greek Companies Fear Closure In Coming Months (Kath.)

Many of the country’s very small enterprises believe the returning recession and the capital controls are likely to finally put them out of business, with about 30% of them facing the threat of closure in the next six months, a survey by the Small Enterprises’ Institute of the Hellenic Confederation of Professionals, Craftsmen and Merchants has shown. It is estimated that the number of enterprises in Greece will drop by about 63,000 in the next six months, and the toll will be higher for very small companies. Indications that appeared in the second half of last year suggesting that the country was finally emerging from its recession have been eclipsed in the last couple of months.

According to the study’s baseline scenario, business closures will lead to some 138,000 people losing their jobs (including employers, the self-employed and salary workers), of whom about 55,000 will be salary workers. In the first half of the year, total job losses in small and very small enterprises amounted to 25,000, of which 15,000 concerned salary workers. The marginal decline in the jobless rate, which came to 25% in May according to the latest ELSTAT figures, seems unlikely to be reproduced in the second half of the year: The survey showed that over 20% of enterprises consider it probable they will have to lay off staff in the next six months. This rate is considerably greater (40.2%) among enterprises employing more than five people.

Three in every seven businesses (43%) are facing difficulties in making salary payments, while one in every four reduced its employees’ salaries during the first half of the year. Over two in five enterprises (41.1%) say they are likely to cut salaries or working hours during the latter half of the year.

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This can only go wrong, as technohappy does: “Access to storage will be much more valuable than the fossil fuels themselves.”[..] “..Coal producers now see carbon capture as their saviour.”

Lucky Britain To Win 21st Century Jackpot From Carbon Capture (AEP)

The energy sheikhs of the next generation will not be those who control vast reserves of oil, gas or coal. Sweeping climate rules are about to turn the calculus upside-down. Greater riches will accrue to those best able to capture carbon as it is burned, and are then able to transport it through a network of pipelines and store it cheaply a mile or more underground. As it happens, Britain is perfectly placed to win the jackpot of the 21st century. China and the US – the twin CO2 giants – have already reached a far-reaching deal to curb greenhouse gases. China has pledged to cap total emissions by 2030. Mexico has vowed to cut gases by 40pc within 15 years, and Gabon by even more. The poisonous North-South conflict that doomed the Copenhagen summit in 2009 has given way to a more subtle mosaic of interests.

There is a high likelihood that 40,000 delegates from 200 countries will agree to legally-binding rules at the COP 21 climate talks in Paris in December. As a matter of pure economics, it makes no difference whether or not you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming. The political argument has been settled by the world’s dominant powers. The messy compromise will fall far short of capping carbon emissions at 3,000 gigatonnes, the outer limit deemed necessary by scientists to stop temperatures rising by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. (We have used up two-thirds) But it will probably usher in some sort of regime that puts a “non-trivial” price on burning carbon, the first of several escalating accords. Eventually it will be draconian.

“I don’t think people have fully realised that there is a finite budget, and when it’s used up, that’s it,” said Professor Jon Gibbins from Edinburgh University. “We will have to go negative and capture carbon from the air, which will be very expensive.” A new report by Cititgroup – “Energy Darwinism” – says an ambitious COP 21 implies that a third of global oil reserves, half the gas and 80pc of coal reserves cannot be burned, unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) comes to the rescue. It is precisely this prospect of “fossil-dämmerung” that is at last concentrating the mind. The fossil industry itself is embracing the CCS revolution because its own survival depends on it in a “two degree” political world.

Carbon capture has long been dismissed as a pipe-dream. But as so often with technology, the facts on the ground are rapidly pulling ahead of a stale narrative. The Canadian utility SaskPower has already retro-fitted a filtering system onto a 110 megawatt (MW) coal-fired plant at Boundary Dam, extracting 90pc of the CO2 at a tolerable cost. It used Cansolv technology from Shell. “We didn’t intend to build the first one in the world, but everybody else quit,” said Mike Monea, the head of the project. “We have learned so much from the design flaws that we could cut 30pc off the cost of the next plant, but it is already as competitive as gas in Asia,” he said. The capture process uses up 18pc of the power – a cost known as the “parasitic load” – but it is less than the 21pc expected.

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Greece and Latvia.

Two More European Countries Ban Monsanto GMO Crops (EcoWatch)

Two more European countries are rejecting genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Lativia and Greece have specifically said no to growing Monsanto‘s genetically modified maize, or MON810, that’s widely grown in America and Asia but is the only variety grown in Europe. Latvia and Greece have chosen the “opt-out” clause of a European Union rule passed in March that allows member countries to abstain from growing GM crops, even if they are authorized by the EU. Scotland and Germany also made headlines in recent weeks for seeking a similar ban on GMOs. According to Reuters, in many European countries, there is widespread criticism against the agribusiness giant’s pest-resistant crops, claiming that GM-cultivation threatens biodiversity.

Monsanto said it would abide by Latvia’s and Greece’s request to not grow the crops. The company, however, accused the two countries of ignoring science and refusing GMOs out of “arbitrary political grounds.” In a statement, Monsanto said that the move from the two countries “contradicts and undermines the scientific consensus on the safety of MON810.” Monsanto also told Reuters that since the growth of GM-crops in Europe is so small, the opt-outs will not affect their business. “Nevertheless,” the company continued, “we regret that some countries are deviating from a science-based approach to innovation in agriculture and have elected to prohibit the cultivation of a successful GM product on arbitrary political grounds.”

According to NewsWire, the EU’s opt-out clause “directly confronts U.S. free trade deal supported by EU, under which the Union should open its doors widely for the US GM industry.” In a statement on Thursday, the European Commission confirmed its zero-tolerance policy against non-authorized GM products. The commission said that it’s also consulting with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in order to answer “a scientific question” on GMO crops that’s unrelated to trade negotiations with the U.S. The EFSA announced that it would release a scientific opinion on the question by the end of 2017.

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Apr 212015
 
 April 21, 2015  Posted by at 6:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Alfred Palmer Women as engine mechanics, Douglas Aircraft, Long Beach, CA 1942

That Europe let almost 1000 people die in the Mediterranean in one night shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, at least not to those who are still occasionally awake. The Club Med migrant crisis has been going on for a long time, and the EU’s only reaction to it has been to slash its budget and operations in the area, not to expand them.

So when the New York Times opens with “European leaders were confronted on Monday with a humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean..”, they’re a mile and a half less than honest. Brussels has known what was going on for years, and decided to do less than nothing.

The onus was put on Italy, Malta, Greece and a handful of private compassionate activists to handle the situation, as if it was some sort of local, or even tourist, issue, while Europe’s finest went back to festive gala openings of their €1 billion+ ‘official’ edifices, and back to forcing more austerity on member nations. Somebody has to pay for those buildings.

The EU took over rescue operations from Italy late last year and promptly cut the budget by two-thirds. Saving migrant lives was deemed just too expensive. You don’t survive in European politics if you don’t get your priorities straight.

On March 8, I wrote ‘Europe, The Morally Bankrupt Union’, and things have only deteriorated from there. If the international press, and various world leaders, wouldn’t have called them out over the weekend, the Brussels class would still not do a thing about the migrant drama, and would still feel comfortable hiding behind the factoid that most migrants drown outside European waters.

In their meeting on Monday, a bunch of EU interior and foreign ministers once again didn’t reach any meaningful conclusions; it’ll be up to presidents and prime ministers to do this on Thursday. One might almost hope for another huge tragedy before that date, just so the cynical hypocrisy that rules Europe would be exposed once again for all to see. From my March 8 piece:

To its south, the EU faces perhaps its most shameful -or should that be ‘shameless’? – problem, because it doesn’t do anything about it: the thousands of migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe but far too often perish in the process. The Italians spend themselves poor, trying to save as many migrants as they can (170,000 last year!), and there are private citizens – Americans even – pouring in millions of dollars, but the EU itself has zero comprehensive policy as people keep dying on its doorstep all the time. The official line out of Brussels is that the EU polices only the European coastline, but the drownings mostly take place off the Lybian coast. At least Italy and others do sail there to alleviate the human misery.

And now the problem threatens to expand into a whole new and additional dimension, with Muslim extremists like ISIS set to travel alongside the migrants to gain entry into Europe with the aim of launching terror attacks. Having turned a blind eye to the issue for years, Europe will now find itself woefully unprepared for this new development. Still, expect more bluster and brute force where there was never any reason or need for it. That the EU’s MO today.

And whaddaya know: brute force it is.

EU To Launch Military Operations Against Migrant-Smugglers In Libya

The EU is to launch military operations against the networks of smugglers in Libya deemed culpable of sending thousands of people to their deaths in the Mediterranean. An emergency meeting of EU interior and foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, held in response to the reported deaths of several hundred migrants in a packed fishing trawler off the Libyan coast at the weekend, also decided to bolster maritime patrols in the Mediterranean and give their modest naval mission a broader search-and-rescue mandate for saving lives. A summit of EU leaders is to take place in Brussels on Thursday to hammer out the details of the measures hurriedly agreed on Monday. [..]

The meeting “identified some actions” aimed at combatting the trafficking gangs mainly in Libya, such as “destroying ships”, Mogherini said. Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration issues, said the operation would be “civil-military” modelled on previous military action in the Horn of Africa to combat Somali piracy. The military action would require a UN mandate. No detail was supplied on the scale and range of the proposed operation, nor of who would take part in it. But European leaders from David Cameron to Angela Merkel and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, were emphatic on Monday in singling out the fight against the migrant traffickers as the top priority in the attempt to rein in a crisis that is spiralling out of control.

That not everyone on this planet has completely lost their sense of moral values doesn’t count for much if those who have none left are time and again ‘elected’ to the highest posts. But still:

[..] Save the Children accused the EU of dithering as children drowned, after they failed to agree immediate action to set up a European search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean. Save the Children CEO Justin Forsyth said: “What we needed from EU foreign ministers today was life-saving action, but they dithered. The emergency summit on Thursday is now a matter of life and death. “With each day we delay we lose more innocent lives and Europe slips further into an immoral abyss. Right now, people desperately seeking a better life are drowning in politics. We have to restart the rescue – and now.”

That is very true. But drowning in politics is precisely what the EU elite, as well as Cameron, Merkel and Renzi have made a career of. They would like nothing better than to drown everyone around them in it too, and they certainly would feel no qualm about a few nameless and faceless poor sods their voters may not have enough sympathy for to give them a slice of moldy bread.

Ironic, since, as Patrick Boyle rightly remarks today: “We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.” But that may never be recognized.

Instead of making sanity heard, Europe’s leaders grow more wary by the day of the potential electoral losses that may result from the growing xenophobia spreading around the continent. Politics is a calculated game ruled exclusively by the lowest common denominator. Not by morals.

But of course, they still know how to talk the talk, as the BBC reports :

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the 10-point package set out at talks in Luxembourg was a “strong reaction from the EU to the tragedies” and “shows a new sense of urgency and political will”. “We are developing a truly European sense of solidarity in fighting human trafficking – finally so.” [..]

That Europe has the guts to say such things says a lot about who their audience is: the vast majority are people who are not paying any attention, who don’t give a damn, or who think the fewer Africans make it to Europe, the better.

In a functioning democratic system, you would say throw out those who failed, let them as it used to be called “face the consequences of their actions”, but Brussels has no such system. Mogherini should obviously be put out by the curb, since the final political responsibility for the tragedy is hers, but she won’t go.

And there is certainly no mechanism for throwing out the leaders of the various member governments. Other, perhaps, than elections that are mostly years away, by which time their disgraceful behavior will have either long been forgotten or overshadowed by ‘more important’ issues like road building, gasoline taxes and pension cuts.

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said Sunday’s disaster off Libya was “a game changer”, adding: “If Europe doesn’t work together history will judge it very badly.”

No worries, Mr. Muscat, history will judge the EU very badly regardless of what it does from here on in, and for many reasons. Homicidal negligence is but one of many.

Meanwhile Martin Schulz, apparently not the fastest cookie in the jar, volunteers to indict himself:

Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, expressed dismay at what he characterized as European apathy over the migration crisis. “How many more people will have to drown until we finally act in Europe?” he asked in a statement. “How many times more do we want to express our dismay, only to then move on to our daily routine?”

Indeed, Mr. Schulz, how many more times will you? I’m thinking, if given a chance, you will do just that a lot more times. And I don’t hear anyone calling for your resignation, so you would seem to be off the hook too. If, on the other hand, you’d like to claim that even the president of the European Parliament doesn’t have the power to save human lives, you have us wondering why such a parliament exists, and has a president, in the first place.

You either have the power or you don’t. And if you do have the power, you have the responsibility too. That’s how politics used to be structured, and for good reason. If and when people die because of what you either do or neglect to do, you “face the consequences”. The fact that such a mechanism doesn’t even begin to exist in the EU speaks volumes about how poorly and badly it was constructed in the first place.

And neither does the EU just fail spectacularly in the waters of the Mediterranean. It fails as badly in Greece, where it keeps pushing demands for more austerity on people going hungry, and in Ukraine, where the EU is an accomplice, through a ‘government’ it supports, to the loss of what German intelligence claims are as many as 50,000 human lives.

The body count is rising, and Brussels itself will never call it quits. It really is high time to halt this unholy union.