Aug 062022
 


Odilon Redon Peyrelebade landscape 1880

 

Russia Explains Why It Won’t Use Nukes In Ukraine (RT)
The Decline and Fall of the Western Empire (Batiushka)
NATO Chief: Russia Must Not Win Its War In Ukraine (OP)
Lavrov Speaks Out On US Effort To Dominate World (RT)
Germany Risks Facing ‘Winter Of Anger’ (RT)
Zelenskyy Lashes Out At EU Aid Delay (Pol.eu)
Two EU Members Reject Gas Rationing Plan (RT)
Russia Connects USAID’s Bat Capture Program To Emergence Of Covid-19 (Tass)
FBI Director Sets New Record For Lies, Dodges, And Obfuscations (Fed.)
Pentagon Rejects DC Request For National Guard To Handle Illegal Migrants
Democrats Abandon Covid Protocols To Vote On Bill (OK)
Mass Coral Growth at Great Barrier Reef Defies Doomsday Predictions (DS)
Assange Family Barred From Taking Melzer Book Into Australia Parliament (G.)

 

 

 

 

Arming Ukraine

 

 

German electricity bill more than triples

 

 

60 years ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..Blinken claimed that the US is a much more “responsible” nuclear-armed state..”

Russia Explains Why It Won’t Use Nukes In Ukraine (RT)

Allegations about Russia threatening to use nuclear weapons against Kiev are “untenable and baseless,” the deputy head of Moscow’s delegation to the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, Andrey Belousov, said on Friday in New York. “This is impossible since Russian doctrinal guidelines strictly limit emergency situations in which the use of nuclear weapons is hypothetically possible, namely in response to aggression involving weapons of mass destruction, or in response to aggression involving conventional weapons, where the very existence of the state is threatened,” Belousov explained. “None of these hypothetical scenarios is relevant to the situation in Ukraine,” he stated.

The Russian diplomat also rejected insinuations about Moscow placing its nuclear deterrent on “high alert,” explaining that the current state of “increased vigilance,” with extra personnel on duty at strategic command posts, is “completely different” from an actual “state of high alert of strategic nuclear forces.” Belousov argued that any warnings about a “serious risk of nuclear war” ever voiced by Russian officials in the context of the Ukraine crisis were directed at NATO, as a way to deter Western countries from direct aggression, as they “dangerously balance on the edge of a direct armed confrontation with Russia.”

While he did not name the accusers, Belousov’s response comes after the Ukrainian delegation to the NPT conference on Wednesday accused Moscow of “nuclear terrorism” and “openly threatening the world with its ability to use nuclear weapons,” while citing rhetoric by the “Russian media, think tanks and experts.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also accused Russia of “reckless, dangerous nuclear saber-rattling” to “those supporting Ukraine’s self-defense,” in his address on Monday. Blinken claimed that the US is a much more “responsible” nuclear-armed state, and “would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies, and partners.”

Read more …

“World War One. World War Two. Korea. Vietnam. Palestine. Iran. Nicaragua. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. Taiwan.”

The Decline and Fall of the Western Empire (Batiushka)

Sometime in the future a learned academic will be writing a weighty tome with the title The Decline and Fall of the Western Empire. Perhaps the Contents Page will include, among others, twelve chapters with titles something like this: World War One. World War Two. Korea. Vietnam. Palestine. Iran. Nicaragua. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. Taiwan. Indeed, Karin Kneissel, the former Austrian Foreign Minister, is at present writing a book with the working title A Requiem for Europe. In an interview with Asia Times on 31 July she declared that ‘European countries are growing ever weaker on the international stage and their places are being taken by Asian countries’. She said that the Europe ‘where she was born and grew up and to which she was devoted no longer exists’. ‘European leaders, through ignorance and arrogance, are neglecting the existing geopolitical realities and basic principles of diplomacy and this has created a dangerous situation’.


She added: ‘This is connected with Eurocentrism. We believe that we are so great that nobody can do without us…It seems to me that Europe needs Russia more than Russia needs Europe. If I am right, then is it really in the interests of the Old World to treat Moscow as an enemy, inclining Moscow to Beijing? Today Europeans are more and more disillusioned and desperate and this may cause mass disorder and anti-government violence’. Kneissel, who is from Central Europe, makes it sound as if Europe is living in the past, before 1914, when it was politically central to the world, instead of being a more or less irrelevant political backwater as it is in 2022. What is certain is that the physical fall of an empire is always preceded by its spiritual fall. What did this spiritual fall consist of?

Read more …

“..it’s also an attack on our values and the world order we want..”

NATO Chief: Russia Must Not Win Its War In Ukraine (OP)

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Russia must not be permitted to win in the war it launched against Ukraine, which has given rise to the most dangerous moment for Europe since World War II. Speaking in Norway on August 4, Stoltenberg said the alliance and its member countries may have to continue to support Ukraine with arms and other assistance for a long time in order to keep Russia from succeeding after it launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24. “It’s in our interest that this type of aggressive policy does not succeed,” Stoltenberg said. “This is the most dangerous situation in Europe since World War II,” he said, adding, “what happens in Ukraine is terrible but it would be much worse if there was a war between Russia and NATO.”


Stoltenberg then reaffirmed the alliance’s resolve to defend all its 30 member countries. “If (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin even thinks of doing something similar to a NATO country as he has done to Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine, then all of NATO will be involved immediately,” Stoltenberg said. The war has led previously nonaligned Finland and Sweden to seek NATO membership, with the request so far ratified by 23 of the 30 member states, including the United States. “This is not just an attack on Ukraine, an independent democratic nation with more than 40 million people, it’s also an attack on our values and the world order we want,” the NATO chief said of the war.

Read more …

“The Americans have taken up a course of suppressing any independence..”

Lavrov Speaks Out On US Effort To Dominate World (RT)

Washington’s attempts to spread its influence to more and more areas around the globe are doomed to fail, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday. “Our American colleagues demonstrate permissiveness” for themselves in international affairs “every time they try to assert their dominance” in new places, Lavrov said during a meeting with Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh. “The Americans have taken up a course of suppressing any independence,” Russia’s top diplomat insisted. But those who follow their actions “understand the futility of a policy according to which you can just turn a blind eye to one situation, one crisis created by the US, and expect that everything will be more or less OK there,” he said.


Lavrov mentioned the conflict in Ukraine and the current crisis over Taiwan as examples of reckless policies pursued by the US. “They decided to turn Ukraine into a menace for Russia and for many years ignored the racist policies of the Kiev regime, which has been destroying everything Russian… they violated the principles of indivisible security, which they signed up for at the highest level and which they simply trampled upon,” he explained. Moscow has pointed to the persecution of Russian speakers in Donbass by the Kiev authorities and the US push to make Ukraine a member of NATO as being among the main reasons for launching its military operation in the neighboring country in late February. “Similarly, in the case of [US House speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, they [the Americans] ignored their own principles, which they proclaimed publicly,” the Russian foreign minister pointed out.

Read more …

“..some groups have already sought to organize protests in Berlin under the slogans “Revolt,” “Uprising,” and “Civil War.”

Germany Risks Facing ‘Winter Of Anger’ (RT)

Germany’s federal and regional governments are bracing for a potential wave of protests which might come this autumn or winter, the state-funded ARD and RBB broadcasters reported this week. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet fears that rising food and energy prices could lead to social unrest and be exploited by various “radical” movements, the outlets explained. According to the media, the protests might be similar to the ones Germany experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the government faced resistance to its lockdown and vaccination policies. ARD’s Tagesschau news service reported that some groups have already sought to organize protests in Berlin under the slogans “Revolt,” “Uprising,” and “Civil War.”

According to the reports, the protests might be similar to those experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the government faced resistance to its lockdown and vaccination policies. The new rallies might once again unite people known as the Querdenker (lateral thinkers) in Germany. This is a loose organization of grassroots movements that became prominent during the anti-lockdown protests. The German media has repeatedly pointed to the movement’s supposed links to various far-right extremist groups. A “Free Saxony” movement in the eastern German state of Saxony has also called for “massive civil resistance,” according to Tagesschau, citing Matthias Quent, a researcher with the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences.

Saxony’s interior minister, Armin Schuster, also told ARD that his ministry was preparing for “various” scenarios, adding that some “groups, activists or parties” might seek to “exploit” the current situation for their own narrow goals. Some of those who “mobilize and agitate”people had already drawn the attention of his ministry, he added. According to the media, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck also faced criticism during his summer tour across Germany and his speech in the town of Bayreuth in Bavaria was “massively disturbed” last week. The protesters, who staged demonstrations during his tour reportedly called for the launch of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to alleviate the energy crisis. They also allegedly demanded sanctions imposed against Russia be lifted.

Read more …

The hand that feeds you..

Zelensky is hurting from the Amnesty report.

Zelenskyy Lashes Out At EU Aid Delay (Pol.eu)

A new draft proposal by the European Commission would provide €8 billion in financial aid to Ukraine through a mix of grants and loans, two EU officials told POLITICO Friday. The EU would disburse up to €5 billion as long-term loans leveraged on the back of guarantees provided by EU countries, according to their contribution to the bloc’s budget. Interest payments would be subsidized by the EU’s budget. The remaining amount, around €3 billion, would be provided as grants, the officials said. The new draft proposal comes after Germany refused to provide guarantees to back up to €9 billion in loans for Ukraine. Berlin argued that grants are better suited to help Kyiv — which is already heavily in debt — and pointed to its own bilateral grant of €1 billion.

That position caused Italy and France, which also provided bilateral aid, to raise issues as well, forcing the Commission back to the drawing board. While there’s no timeline yet, the Commission is aiming to obtain approval by the European Parliament and EU countries in September so that disbursement can start in October, one official said. The issue of aid has become fraught, with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blasting the EU for the delay in his most recent overnight address. Back in May, EU leaders pledged to provide “up to €9 billion” in macro financial assistance to Kyiv. But so far, the Commission has only been able to disburse €1 billion in loans backed by the EU’s budget.

The challenge is acute, because Kyiv has been running a budget deficit of around $5 billion per month since Russia’s invasion. It has called on international donors for help so it can cover basic costs like pensions and public sector wages — or risk financial collapse. “Every day and in various ways, I remind some leaders of the European Union that Ukrainian pensioners, our displaced persons, our teachers and other people who depend on budget payments cannot be held hostage to their indecision or bureaucracy,” Zelenskyy said. “Such an artificial delay of macro-financial assistance to our state is either a crime or a mistake, and it is difficult to say which is worse in such conditions of a full-scale war,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the remaining €8 billion.

Read more …

Make peace and your kids won’t be in the cold.

Two EU Members Reject Gas Rationing Plan (RT)

Poland and Hungary have refused to support the EU’s plan to cut gas consumption by 15%, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing a document published by the Czech Republic, which currently chairs negotiations within the bloc. EU countries last week agreed on a plan to reduce gas usage in order to fill storages amid concern of a possible shut-off of Russian supplies. The EU Council approved the plan on Friday. However, according to Reuters, the vote for approval only required a simple majority – meaning the support of 15 of the bloc’s 28 members – to be adopted. Hungary, which is currently in talks to secure more gas supplies from Russia, had opposed the scheme from the very beginning. According to the document seen by Reuters, Budapest questioned the legality of the plan, claiming that it would affect the country’s energy security.


Poland, meanwhile, initially agreed to cut consumption but on Friday voted against the plan, the agency reports. Warsaw called the legal basis of the document “defective” and said that decisions affecting the energy mix of EU countries should be made with the unanimous approval of all of member states. The newly adopted rationing plan is not mandatory unless the EU Council triggers a ‘Union alert’ on gas supply security. It also includes a number of exemptions. In particular, member states that are not connected to the gas networks of other EU countries are exempt from the requirement. In addition, members can request a relaxation of the conditions if they have exceeded their storage capacity targets or if their strategically important industries are heavily dependent on gas.

Read more …

Something George Webb is looking into.

Russia Connects USAID’s Bat Capture Program To Emergence Of Covid-19 (Tass)

Russian Defense Ministry assumes a connection between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program on bat control and the emergence of Covid, Russian Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops commander Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov said Thursday. “We consider a possibility that the USAID is involved in the emergency of the novel coronavirus. Since 2009, the agency funded the PREDICT program, which focused on studying novel coronaviruses and capturing bats that transmit these viruses. One of the program’s contractors was Metabiota, notorious for its military biological operations in Ukraine,” he said. He also stated that the statements made by US congressmen also raise concerns about the role of US biologists in the emergence and spread of COVID-19.

Kirillov pointed out that member of the US House Intelligence Committee Jason Crow warned US citizens during the National Security Conference in July against handing over their DNA samples to private companies, because they could be sold to third parties. “There are now weapons under development, and developed, that are designed to target specific people,” Crow said at the time. “Considering the interest of the US Administration to research of focused action biological means, such statements provide a new angle on the reasons behind the emergence of the novel coronavirus infection and the spread of the COVID-19 pathogen,” Kirillov said.

The general noted that the Johns Hopkins University held the Event 201 exercise that focused on actions amid an epidemic of an unknown coronavirus. “According to the exercise background, [the coronavirus] was transmitted from bats to humans through an intermediate carrier – pigs. This is how the Spanish flu, which took lives of tens of millions of human lives, became a pandemic,” Kirillov noted. “The implementation of the COVID-19 development scenario, as well as the emergency shutdown of the PREDICT program in 2019, make it possible to assume the intentional nature of the pandemic and the US’ involvement in its emergence,” he concluded.

Read more …

“..concerns that “the FBI has become too politicized in its decision making” were allegedly “removed from this year’s final report”..

FBI Director Sets New Record For Lies, Dodges, And Obfuscations (Fed.)

Ranking member Chuck Grassley was just one of the many Republicans who grilled Wray about the FBI’s increasing partisanship and the effect that a weaponized federal agency has on Americans’ trust in its institutions. “Director Wray, simply put, the FBI’s credibility is on the line, as are principles that helped found and sustain our great nation,” Grassley said in his opening statement. Grassley sent a letter to Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland last month outlining how both the Department of Justice and the nation’s primary domestic intelligence agency are “institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law.”

That was after multiple whistleblowers alleged that high-ranking bureau officials manipulated evidence related to an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his “pay-to-play scandal of influence-peddling.” Evidence also suggests that “FBI Headquarters either improperly withheld information or presented inaccurate information to the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh and possibly also Delaware” about Hunter. When Grassley asked Wray on Thursday why concerns that “the FBI has become too politicized in its decision making” were allegedly “removed from this year’s final report” and what Wray plans to do to address those concerns, the director dodged the question.

“I think you’ve answered the process. But you haven’t answered this specific thing about why that information was taken out of the report,” Grassley noted after Wray went on a tangent about visiting various field offices. “Yeah, I don’t, I’m not familiar with that. … Let me see if there’s something we can share with you on that,” Wray said. [..] One of Wray’s talking points during the hearing was the spike in violent crime across the county. When Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas asked him how that violence is related to the crime rings operating thanks to the compromised U.S.-Mexico border, Wray danced around the issue.

“Director Wray, I’ve always thought of you as a straight shooter but you won’t answer that question?” Cornyn asked. It was then that Wray conceded that the “border presents significant security issues” that feed the violence he claims his agency is struggling to combat. “There’s a wide array of criminal threats that we encounter down at the border. You mentioned a little bit in some of your questions, the transnational criminal organizations that use diverse and complex methods to traffick drugs, that then cascades over into prison and street gangs who distribute it,” Wray admitted.

Read more …

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has had enough of open borders, sent 6,500 migrants aboard 160 buses to Washington..

Pentagon Rejects DC Request For National Guard To Handle Illegal Migrants

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser revealed Friday the Defense Department rejected her request to provide National Guard troops to the city to deal with a growing number of a illegal migrants being bused from Texas. Bowser said she plans to modify her request and submit it again in hopes that being more specific about the use of troops may persuade the Pentagon to change its mind. “We want to continue to work with the Department of Defense so that they understand our operational needs, and to assure that any political considerations are not a part of their decision,” she said. Bowser said the Pentagon raised “the concern about the open-ended nature of our request, and their ability to respond to it.”


“So having just looked at their letter, they appear to say a more specified request would help them understand our needs,” she said. Bowser’s announcement came the same day Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revealed he is now beginning to ship illegal migrants to New York City after Mayor Eric Adams refused his request to come visit the border. According to Abbott’s office, more than 6,500 migrants have been moved aboard 160 buses to Washington. In its letter to the District of Columbia government, the Pentagon said troops are unnecessary because the city has already received enough federal funding through a nonprofit agency to house and care for the migrants.

Read more …

“Democrats are telling their senators not to get tested for covid to ensure they can pass their $800 billion spending bill before summer recess. They can’t lose a single vote so a positive covid test would derail the bill. ”

Democrats Abandon Covid Protocols To Vote On Bill (OK)

After years of obsessively following and promoting COVID related policies, Democrats are abandoning their precious mass testing policy now that it suits their political agenda. The laughably named “Inflation Reduction Act,” which naturally does nothing to reduce inflation, is so important to the Democrats’ legislative agenda that they’re throwing caution to the wind to ensure that no Senators will miss an upcoming vote. During the pandemic, there have been concerns over delayed votes due to potential positive COVID tests, but that won’t be getting in the way this time. According to a new report, there’s a new and unofficial “Don’t Test, Don’t Tell” policy to ensure they don’t delay enacting their latest tax and spending bill: This is, as usual from Democratic politicians these days, the height of hypocrisy.


They’ve indefinitely advocated for mass testing and “taking COVID seriously,” which causes huge disruptions to work and school life, as well as creating panic over every positive COVID test, regardless of severity. Democrats have criticized Republicans for not doing enough to combat every possible positive case, even though their politicians, including President Biden, continue to get the virus. After making COVID “interventions” a pseudo-religious ritual for those on the left, suddenly politics comes first. Possibly the most unintentionally comedic part of this unofficial announcement is that they seem to believe that wearing masks will prevent the spread of the virus: “They’re not going to delay it if a member has gotten Covid. Counterparts are saying they’re not going to test anymore. It’s not an official mandate but we all know we’re not letting Covid get in the way. The deal is happening. Less testing, just wear masks and get it done.”.

Read more …

“Only three of the 24 reefs surveyed in the last two years had decreased hard coral cover…”

Mass Coral Growth at Great Barrier Reef Defies Doomsday Predictions (DS)

The near vertiginous rise in the annual growth of coral at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is continuing, with further major increases recorded across large areas. According to the 2021-22 annual summary from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), levels of coral cover in the northern and central areas of the reef were at their highest levels over the past 36 years of monitoring. The growth is of course excellent news for environmentalists, but curiously, at the time of writing, the news is being downplayed in the mainstream media. The demise of the world’s coral reefs has long been a go-to poster scare story for Net Zero promoters. As late as October 2020, the BBC was telling stories about the Reef losing half of its coral.[..]

This notion that global warming will cause corals to die is frankly a big whopping fib. Tropical coral, which is closely related to its cnidarian cousin the jellyfish, thrives in waters between 24°C and 32°C. It is highly adaptable but seems to dislike sudden changes in temperature, often caused by natural weather oscillations such as El Niño events. As the latest results from the AIMS show, coral quickly recovers when normal localised conditions return. In fact, coral often grows faster in warmer waters nearer the equator than the GBR. The big agitprop lie suggests minor long-term sea temperatures changes will wipe out the coral, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise.


Recovery is said to have continued following a “period of cumulative disturbances” from 2014 to 2020. Only three of the 24 reefs surveyed in the last two years had decreased hard coral cover. The biggest disturbance, of course, arose around 2016 and was caused by a powerful, and natural, El Niño Pacific oscillation that quickly raised surrounding ocean temperatures by up to 3°C. Sudden warming spooks the coral and they expel symbiotic algae in a process commonly known as bleaching.

Read more …

The book by the UN special rapporteur on torture, no less.

Assange Family Barred From Taking Melzer Book Into Australia Parliament (G.)

Security staff at Parliament House in Canberra seized copies of a book about Julian Assange from his family members as they entered the building to meet MPs on Thursday, deeming it “protest material”. Assange’s family and supporters visited parliament on Thursday to urge the Albanese government to intervene in the proposed extradition of the WikiLeaks founder from the UK to the United States. They were carrying copies of a book on Assange’s case by Nils Melzer, the former United Nations special rapporteur on torture, which they intended to give to MPs and media. But Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said parliament security refused to let the family take the book into the building, because they deemed it to be “protest material”.


“I was saying ‘this is ridiculous. They’re books’,” Gabriel Shipton said. “I offered to call Andrew Wilkie, who was the MP who co-chaired the Parliamentary Friends of the Bring Julian Assange Home Group. He said ‘yes, go ahead, call him, but you can’t take the books in’.” The family was able to distribute books to MPs and media from a box already stored in Wilkie’s office, and a staffer from Wilkie’s office was able to later retrieve the seized books. But Louise Bennet, a campaigner with the Bring Assange Home Campaign, said the actions of security were “ridiculous”. “They were incredibly adamant that it was protest material and that it was not allowed into the building,” Bennet said. “It just blows my mind. This is the sort of thing that we see in Trump’s America, that we criticise in China. What is our parliament afraid of that we can’t bring a book in?”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

EVs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Aug 052022
 


Piet Mondriaan Avond (Evening): The Red Tree 1908-10

 

Ukraine Violates War Laws, Endangers Civilians: Amnesty (NW)
Kiev Blasts Amnesty Report On Ukraine Risking Civilian Lives (RT)
NATO Working With Arms Industry to Get Ukraine More Weapons (Antiwar)
Gazprom Explains Complications In Turbine Row (RT)
How A Missile In Kabul Connects To A Speaker In Taipei (Escobar)
Kremlin Reveals ‘Real Threat’ To World Order (RT)
Irish Farmers Outraged Over 25% Emissions Reduction Plan (TCS)
Covid Vaccines Are Killing One in Every 800 Over-60s (DS)
Japanese Surgeon Calls for Suspension of COVID Boosters (ET)
The Truth About the Alex Jones Phone Records (SN)
Republicans’ Last-minute Cheney Lifeline (Axios)
Democrats Block Measures To Stop Gain-of-Function Research (JTN)
The Point of No Return (Thomas Sowell)
Parts of Great Barrier Reef Show Highest Coral Cover In 36 Years (CBS)
The Big Green Lie Almost Everyone Claims to Believe (ET)

 

 

 

 

Tucker Macgregor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555019724509089792

 

 

 

 

Tedros is unvaxxed
https://twitter.com/i/status/1554949172322869254

 

 

 

 

 

 

Human shields=war crimes.

Ukraine Violates War Laws, Endangers Civilians: Amnesty (NW)

Amnesty International has accused Ukraine of war crimes during its ongoing military conflict with invading Russian forces. The humanitarian organization said in a release on Wednesday that the Ukrainian military’s tactics “violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians” by operating weapons out of bases established in residential areas while civilians are present. Russia has previously been accused by Amnesty International of violating multiple international laws during the war. The organization on Wednesday said that Ukraine’s alleged violations “in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks.” “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.

“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.” While conducting an investigation of Russian attacks in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions of Ukraine between April and July, Amnesty International researchers said they discovered that the Ukrainian military was operating out of civilian buildings in at least 19 towns and villages. The discovery was corroborated by satellite images, according to the release. The organization said that Ukraine committed “a clear violation of international humanitarian law” by basing at least five military facilities in civilian hospitals. Russian airstrikes on health care facilities have resulted in a significant number of civilian injuries and deaths during the war, according to the World Health Organization.

Amnesty International also discovered that Ukraine had installed military bases in 22 out of 29 schools visited in the Donbas and Mykolaiv regions during the investigation, according to the release. The organization said that Russia later launched strikes on many of the same schools between April and late June, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.

Read more …

“We’ve been talking about this constantly, calling the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces the tactics of using civilians as a ‘human shield’,” Zakharova said.

Kiev Blasts Amnesty Report On Ukraine Risking Civilian Lives (RT)

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba pushed back against an Amnesty International report that blames Kiev for placing its military assets in schools and residential areas, violating humanitarian law and putting civilians at risk. In his comments posted on social media on Thursday, the minister said that he was outraged by the NGO’s claim. “I understand that Amnesty will respond to criticism by saying that they criticize both sides of the conflict. But such behavior on Amnesty’s part is not about looking for the truth and presenting it to the world, but about creating a false balance between the criminal and his victim”, he said. Kuleba also urged the organization to stop “creating a fake reality” where everyone is “at fault for something.”

Amnesty should primarily focus on what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what devastation Moscow has brought upon this country, he argued. On Thursday, Amnesty released a report accusing Kiev of “a clear violation of international humanitarian law,” saying it was putting civilian lives at risk by placing its military close to civilian infrastructure. In 22 out of the 29 schools visited by Amnesty between April and July, the human rights group said it found evidence of current or prior military activity. In five locations, they witnessed Ukrainian troops using hospitals as bases. At the same time, the group said it was “not aware” that Ukraine tried to evacuate civilians from the areas in question.

However, Amnesty also noted that no Ukrainian troops were present in some areas where it assessed Russian forces had delivered strikes on residential areas. For that reason, the NGO said that Ukraine’s unlawful military use of civilian objects did not “in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks.” According to Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, the NGO’s report only confirmed what Moscow has known for a long time. “We’ve been talking about this constantly, calling the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces the tactics of using civilians as a ‘human shield’,” Zakharova said.

Read more …

“In July, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov made an offer to Western arms makers to use Ukraine as a testing ground for new weapons in a pitch for more arms..”

Offering his people as practice targets..

NATO Working With Arms Industry to Get Ukraine More Weapons (Antiwar)

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday said that the military alliance was working closely with the arms industry to get more weapons to Ukraine and said more must be done to support Kyiv for the “long haul.”“We are providing a lot of support but we need to do even more and be prepared for the long haul,” the NATO chief told Reuters. “Therefore we’re also now in close contact and working closely with the defense industry to produce more and to deliver more of different types of ammunition, weapons, and capabilities.” The Western response to the war in Ukraine has been a boon for US arms makers, who are cashing in on replacing stockpiles of weapons sent to Ukraine, direct sales to Kyiv, and European NATO allies increasing their military spending.


In July, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov made an offer to Western arms makers to use Ukraine as a testing ground for new weapons in a pitch for more arms. “We are interested in testing modern systems in the fight against the enemy and we are inviting arms manufacturers to test the new products here,” he said. The next big escalation in military aid for Kyiv could be the US or some of its NATO allies sending warplanes to Ukraine. US Air Force officials have said they are in talks on providing Kyiv with aircraft and sound very receptive to Ukraine’s request for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

Read more …

“According to Gazprom, only one of the six main gas compressor units is currently operational..”

Gazprom Explains Complications In Turbine Row (RT)

Western sanctions are hindering the return of a gas turbine from Germany and threaten future equipment maintenance at the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Gazprom announced on Thursday. In the latest development in the gas turbine repair row between Moscow and Berlin, the Russian energy major has laid out the reasons why the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is not fully back on-line an why getting repaired equipment back is impossible.“The current anti-Russian sanctions are hindering the successful resolution of the issue of the transportation and repair of Siemens gas turbine engines for the Portovaya compressor station, which supplies gas to European consumers through the Nord Stream pipeline.” Gazprom wrote on its Telegram channel.


The crucial part that is stuck in Germany, after repairs in Canada, should have been sent back to Russia in May. But the paperwork for its return is not in order as it was issued by Siemens Energy and not the firm that is contracted to Gazprom, the gas giant claims. If the turbine is shipped to Russia, there is a risk that Canadian authorities will see this is a breach of contract, and withdraw permission for further maintenance of turbines to be carried out on its soil. According to Gazprom, only one of the six main gas compressor units is currently operational at the station with its daily delivery capacity reduced to roughly 20%. The remaining turbines require factory maintenance or overhaul, Gazprom adds. The company explained that other Western sanctions regarding the transportation of gas equipment may also apply to the turbine. All of which, given the current situation, makes the return of the equipment impossible, reiterated Gazprom.

Read more …

“..China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”

How A Missile In Kabul Connects To A Speaker In Taipei (Escobar)

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated. All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul. Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South.

After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order. Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea. Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way. sThe day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability. That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game. What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:

Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.” That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line. Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations. Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”

Read more …

“..tensions in Europe have been stoked by aggressive NATO policies and encroachment toward Russia’s borders..”

Kremlin Reveals ‘Real Threat’ To World Order (RT)

The original threat to global order was the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Peskov pushed back on claims made by NATO’s secretary-general that Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine was to blame for the major shake-up. “The real threat to the world order and the situation in the world and … in Europe comes from the coup that took place in Ukraine in 2014, which was carefully orchestrated by, among others, NATO countries, despite the guarantees that the foreign ministers of a number of countries had provided. Hence the threat and danger to the world order,” he stressed.


According to Peskov, tensions in Europe have been stoked by aggressive NATO policies and encroachment toward Russia’s borders. “This situation has been maturing for several decades and in many ways it was fueled by the aggressive policies NATO pursued towards our country as they brought their infrastructure closer to Russia. This created additional threats for us,” Peskov noted, explaining that, faced with such reality, Moscow had no choice but to take action. On Thursday, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the Ukraine conflict is the “most dangerous situation in Europe since World War Two,” and the West must do its best to stop Russia from winning. With that, he vowed to continue to support Kiev with arms and other types of aid.

Putin

Read more …

“That reduction of 22 cows effectively wipes out the economic sustainability of this farm and replicated through the neighbouring and similar farms. It undermines the viability of the wider rural community..”

Irish Farmers Outraged Over 25% Emissions Reduction Plan (TCS)

The Irish government had previously been debating what the cut on emissions from the agriculture industry would be, finally settling on a 25% reduction below 2018 levels by 2030. “Today, the government has agreed on a pathway to a 51% cut in economy-wide emissions by 2030. The emissions ceiling for agriculture has been set at a level requiring a 25% reduction by 2030. This falls within the target range assigned to the sector under the Climate Action Plan 2021. I am pleased to have reached this conclusion as a way of offering certainty to our farm families and their businesses over the next decade,” said Irish Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue in a press release. Many farmers had been expecting a cap on emissions but said they were preparing for something more moderate.

They’re now arguing that culling their herds, which would sabotage their own businesses in the process, will be the only way they can meet the lofty standards of the Irish government. “The target that we’ve been working towards has been 18%, maybe 22% but not 25%,” said Cork farmer Alan Jagoe. “We’re producing food on our farms. We’re not taking fossil fuels off the ground; we are not mining; we are producing food that we all eat. That has been lost in this debate.” Jagoe further stated that the policy was totally “unrealistic.” “We had a pathway and a direction, and I cannot overemphasize enough that the work it would take to get to an 18% target would be absolutely massive,” Jagoe continued. “It’s a fundamental change in the way we farm, the way we apply our fertilizers, the way we apply our slurry. This is a fundamental policy shift to get to 18%, and we were prepared to work towards it, but now we have been given 25%.”

According to the Irish Farmers Journal, Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association president Pat McCormack is also baffled by the policy. He has stated that de-herding is already happening due to previous environmental regulations and that this will be exacerbated by the new policy, leading to a forced culling of herds and making family businesses less sustainable financially. Regarding one family farm with 30ha with 84 cows, McCormack stated that the farm would have to cut its livestock population by nearly 25%. “That reduction of 22 cows effectively wipes out the economic sustainability of this farm and replicated through the neighbouring and similar farms. It undermines the viability of the wider rural community,” McCormack said.

Read more …

“..the coagulation problems, myocarditis, we know that, but there are many more things happening at the moment.”

Covid Vaccines Are Killing One in Every 800 Over-60s (DS)

Covid vaccine boosters in older people are killing one person for every 800 doses administered and should be withdrawn from use immediately, a leading vaccine scientist has said. Dr. Theo Schetters, a vaccinologist based in the Netherlands who has played a leading role in the development of a number of vaccines, says he analysed the official data from the Dutch Government and found a very close correlation between when fourth vaccine doses were administered in the country and the number of excess deaths, as shown in the chart below. Importantly, in the Netherlands the booster rollout in different regions was staggered over a number of weeks allowing an analysis by region, which confirms the effect.

Dr. Schetters, who is a recipient of the Medal of Honour of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Montpellier in France, told Dr. Robert Malone, an inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, that medical doctors are currently seeing “all sorts of symptoms that they do not know what it is” and that “in the Netherlands now it’s very clear that there is a good correlation between the number of vaccinations that are given to people and the number of people that die within a week after that”. It is essential to look at all-cause mortality, he said, as the vaccine “potentially affects all organs”.

So it potentially affects all organs. And that’s what the medical doctors now see, they see all sorts of symptoms that they do not know what it is. And because the adverse effects are so not just single one adverse effect, but can be anything, they surface very difficult to a statistical level. And that’s why we do analysis on all cause mortality, because say, okay, and if we do not know what is exactly related to vaccination, of course, the coagulation problems, myocarditis, we know that, but there are many more things happening at the moment. And so that’s why we look at all cause mortality, and in the Netherlands now it’s very clear that there is a good correlation between the number of vaccinations that are given to people and the number of people that die within a week after that. So let’s say in this week we gave 10,000 vaccinations. Then in this week, we have something like 125 excess in death in that week.

The correlation is striking, Dr. Schetters said, to the extent that if you have more vaccines in a week then you also have more excess deaths, and if you have fewer vaccines in a week, you have fewer deaths. He says he has written to the Director of the Institute of Health in the Netherlands to alert him to the findings.

Read more …

“..suppressed immune function is likely to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccination..”

Japanese Surgeon Calls for Suspension of COVID Boosters (ET)

In a letter to the peer-reviewed journal Virology, a Japanese cardiovascular surgeon, Dr. Kenji Yamamoto, has called for the discontinuation of COVID-19 booster shots. “As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued,” Yamamoto wrote. Among his urgent concerns are the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines have been linked to vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, which, in some cases, has been lethal to patients. Yamamoto works at Okamura Memorial Hospital in Shizuoka, Japan. In the letter he explains that he and his colleagues have “encountered cases of infections that are difficult to control,” including some that occurred after open-heart surgery and were still not under control after several weeks of treatment with multiple antibiotics.

These patients, says Yamamoto, showed signs of being immunocompromised, and some of them died. Yamamoto believes their suppressed immune function is likely to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccination. It is rare for a cardiac surgeon to get involved in government vaccination policy. It is even rarer for a practicing medical doctor to express an opinion like this that flies in the face of the medical status quo in a prestigious medical journal, and for the medical journal itself to publish the opinion. Other clinicians, too, who have never spoken publicly before are also voicing similar concerns.

“The signals in the best sources we have currently available, which is our VAERS data, have been screaming,” said Dr. Angelina Farella, a pediatrician based in Webster, Texas who has expanded her practice into family medicine and has been treating COVID patients when other doctors in her area refused to see them. “It’s an all-out red-alert, about heart disease, deaths, and vaccine injury,” said Farella. In over 25 years of practicing medicine, which, Farella said, has included giving vaccinations to children every day, she has never seen such a dangerous vaccine.


Yikes!

Read more …

Robert Barnes @barnes_law: “Turns out plaintiffs lawyer lied in court when he illicitly spied on attorney client emails & texts, which would make 1/6 committee subpoena a violation of 4th, 5th & 6th Amendment rights. The #AlexJones case keeps setting records for violating rights.”

The Truth About the Alex Jones Phone Records (SN)

An emergency protective order motion has been filed in the Alex Jones case relating to claims in court that lawyers had inadvertently obtained years worth of Jones’ phone records, with emails showing Plaintiffs had not been given approval to use the material in court as it would violate attorney client privilege. A video clip from the trial went viral yesterday showing Jones responding to the revelation by Mark Bankston that Jones’ lawyers had mistakenly sent Bankston what he described as “an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone, with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years.” “That is how I know you lied to me when you said you did not have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston claimed.

This was then seized upon by media outlets to suggest that some kind of Hunter Biden laptop moment had occurred, apparently miring Jones in an even deeper scandal. However, according to an Emergency Motion for Enforcement of Protective Order filed by Jones’ lawyers, they did not given permission for the files, which only span a 6 month period from the end of 2019 through early 2020 and do not represent “an entire digital copy” of the cellphone, to be entered into evidence in court. “The file transfer link, however, inadvertently gave Plaintiffs access to dozens of other folders as well, including confidential documents, such as the medical records of Sandy Hook Parents who are Plaintiffs in the Connecticut litigation and other documents subject to various privileges, including attorney-client and work product,” states the motion.

An email shows that the issue was raised by Bankston, who told Jones’ attorneys in an email that the files contained “confidential information.” “My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I’m correct,” he enquired. Bankston was told by Jones’ attorney F. Andino Reynal to “disregard the link.” “It is now apparent that Plaintiffs’ counsel did not “disregard the link”, but has reviewed and used documents he acknowledged defendants “did not intend to send” and appeared to be “work product or confidential.” Defendants, therefore, seek Emergency relief pursuant to Rule 193.3 and the Court’s Protective Order,” states the motion.

The chunk of files were apparently sent to Bankston by a paralegal by mistake and were intended for lawyers in Connecticut representing other Sandy Hook families in separate cases, but were seized upon by Bankston and the media to suggest Jones had engaged in perjury or that he was hiding information. Jones responded to the controversy by asserting that he turned all his phones over to his lawyers and was merely trying to comply with discovery. Despite not being given permission to use the material in court, Bankston appears to have used it anyway as a PR stunt to sneak attack Jones, take him by surprise, and generate salacious media headlines.

Read more …

The Democrats don’t want her either; she’s toxic for votes.

Republicans’ Last-minute Cheney Lifeline (Axios)

A handful of Republican operatives are quietly mounting a last-ditch effort to rescue Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from a Trump-backed primary challenge, Axios has learned. The previously unreported effort shows how some Republicans are trying to surreptitiously undercut the former president’s revenge campaign, which has so far claimed the political lives of a significant chunk of GOP critics. Cheney — the vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee — could be the next casualty. She’s facing tough odds in her primary fight this month against Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman. Involved in the effort are Jeff Larson, the chairman of Republican research firm America Rising and a longtime Cheney backer, and Julia Griswold Dailer, a former Trump White House and inauguration committee aide.

Their strategy is two-pronged: Persuade Democrats to cross the aisle and back the Wyoming Republican in this month’s open primary, and dent her Trump-endorsed challenger by portraying her as insufficiently loyal to the former president. Two seemingly unrelated political groups recently popped up to try to beat back Hageman’s challenge. Wyomingites Defending Freedom and Democracy is running digital and television ads and encouraging Democrats in the state to cross party lines and vote for Cheney in the Aug. 16 primary. Conservatives for a Strong America is portraying Hageman as a fake conservative secretly in league with Cheney and critical of Trump. The latter group is also trying to boost two of Cheney’s other primary challengers in an apparent effort to split the anti-Cheney vote.

Tex McBride, a Wyoming rancher who leads WDFD, told Axios that Larson recruited him for that role. “They needed somebody that … has a voice in the state rather than just trying to bring in someone from the outside who nobody knows or trusts,” McBride said in an interview. “My involvement is really just to put people in touch with each other and they go do their own deal, and help raise some money, but that’s the extent of it,” Larson told Axios.

Read more …

Why?

Democrats Block Measures To Stop Gain-of-Function Research (JTN)

Senate Democrats on Thursday declined to offer unanimous consent to two measures to stop gain-of-function research, a process now infamous over its alleged connection to the spread of COVID-19. Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall put forward both the Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act and the SAFE Risk Research Act, which aimed to cut funding to universities conducting such research and foreign countries doing so, respectively. Gain of function is a process by which researchers genetically modify a virus. It has the potential for risk as an enhanced virus could potentially become a significant threat to humanity. Earlier this year, Congress banned funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that U.S. intelligence and many Republicans suspect may have been the source of the coronavirus.


Marshall first introduced the Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act in October of last year. Democrats denied Marshall’s Thursday bid for unanimous consent, meaning the bill’s passage will not be expedited. “It is disturbing that one of our top public health agencies directed this risky research to be offshored while encouraging the pause in that exact same research in the U.S.,” Marshall said on the Senate floor on Thursday, per a press release from his office. “Despite warnings and past lab accidents, our public health agencies like NIH continue to fund the WMD research, often in China nonetheless.” “Shockingly, Congress has minimal insight into the amount of this research at NIH,” he continued. “There is no transparency into their risk evaluation process.” “This is a national security issue,” Marshall insisted. “We must pause this research until national security experts can help create appropriate risk metrics, guardrails and processes for this research.”

Nipah virus gain of function

Read more …

“Why do we elect legislators to do what the voters want done, if unelected judges are going to make up laws on their own..”

The Point of No Return (Thomas Sowell)

This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us. If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying “You won’t know what hit you!” There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge’s children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws. There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can’t be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics — regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue — then you can forfeit your freedom. Worse yet, you can forfeit the freedom of generations not yet born.

Some people seem to think that the Supreme Court has banned abortions. It has done nothing of the sort. The Supreme Court has in fact done something very different, something long overdue and potentially historic. It has said that their own court had no business making policy decisions which nothing in the Constitution gave them the authority to make. Get out a copy of the Constitution — and see if you can find anything in there that says the federal government is authorized to make laws about abortion. Check out the 10th Amendment, which says that the federal government is limited to the specific powers it was granted, with all other powers going to the states or to the people. Why do we elect legislators to do what the voters want done, if unelected judges are going to make up laws on their own, instead of applying the laws that elected officials passed?

Read more …

“..an increase in average hard coral cover in the northern region of the reef to 36% in 2022 from 27% in 2021, and an increase in in the central region to 33% in 2022 from 27% in 2021..”

Parts of Great Barrier Reef Show Highest Coral Cover In 36 Years (CBS)

The central and northern stretches of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are showing the highest coral cover seen in 36 years, showing that the fragile UNESCO World Heritage site could still recover from decades of damage, a monitoring group reported Thursday. Coral cover in the southern region of the reef decreased, however, and the reef is vulnerable to increasingly common disturbances like mass bleaching events, the group said. There was an increase in average hard coral cover in the northern region of the reef to 36% in 2022 from 27% in 2021, and an increase in in the central region to 33% in 2022 from 27% in 2021, the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) said in its annual summary report.

Despite this, “a third of the gain in coral cover we recorded in the south in 2020/21 was lost last year due to ongoing crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks,” Dr. Paul Hardisty, CEO of AIMS, said in a statement. “This shows how vulnerable the Reef is to the continued acute and severe disturbances that are occurring more often, and are longer-lasting.” AIMS has been monitoring the Great Barrier Reef since 1986. It said the increase in frequency of mass bleaching events — when coral, in response to stressful conditions like heat, loses its pigments and symbiotic algae, turns white, and potentially dies — were “uncharted territory.” “In our 36 years of monitoring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef we have not seen bleaching events so close together,” Hardisty said.

“Every summer the Reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching and potentially mortality and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing.” Dr. Mike Emslie, also from the AIMS monitoring program, said that most of the coral increase in the north and central parts of the reef was driven by fast-growing but fragile Acropora corals, and could therefore be reversed quickly. “These corals are particularly vulnerable to wave damage, like that generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones,” Emslie said. “The increasing frequency of warming ocean temperatures and the extent of mass bleaching events highlights the critical threat climate change poses to all reefs, particularly while crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and tropical cyclones are also occurring. Future disturbance can reverse the observed recovery in a short amount of time.”

Read more …

Patrick Moore, past president of Greenpeace Canada: “Two of Canada’s smartest writers set the record straight. We are being lied to that CO2 is a “pollutant” when it is the basis for all life. The fate of civilization depends on our defeating this lie.”

The Big Green Lie Almost Everyone Claims to Believe (ET)

Almost every member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, pays homage to the Big Green Lie. So do all the past and remaining Conservative candidates vying to be prime minister of the UK and every candidate currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. So does virtually all of the mainstream press. The Big Green Lie—that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—is so pervasive that even those considered skeptics—including right-wing NGOs and pundits—generally adhere to the orthodoxy, differing not in their stated belief that CO2 is a pollutant but only in how calamitous a pollutant it is.

Because everyone now participates in the CO2-emissions-are-bad lie, the debate over climate policy hasn’t been over whether a CO2 problem exists but over how urgently CO2 needs to be addressed, and how it should be addressed. Do we have eight years left before Armageddon becomes inevitable or decades? Do we get off fossil fuels by building nuclear plants or wind turbines? Should we change our lifestyles to need less of everything? Or should we mitigate this evil—the view of those deemed climate minimalists—by shielding our continents from a rising of the oceans by enclosing them behind sea walls?

With almost everyone across the political spectrum publicly agreeing that curbing CO2 is a good thing, the debate has been between those who want to do good quickly by reaching Net Zero in 2040 and sticks in the mud who want to slow down the doing of a good thing. With discourse careening down rabbit holes, almost everyone gets lost pursuing solutions to Alice-in-Wonderland delusions—and wasting trillions of dollars in the process.

Patrick Moore
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555093266051342336

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

1981
https://twitter.com/i/status/1553907150556110849

 

 

 

 


All countries of the world by real size arranged like the real map (via http://thetruesize.com)

 

 

 

 

Perpetual motion
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555201958734168065

 

 

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

 

 

 

Apr 052019
 


Jack Delano Diner along U.S. Highway No. 1 near Berwyn, Maryland 1940

 

WikiLeaks Says Assange to Be Expelled Within ‘Hours to Days’ (TeleSur)
Barr Defends His Summary Of Mueller Report, And The Delay (AP)
Boeing Admits ANOTHER Glitch In 737 MAX Software (RT)
WTO Rules Against US And Boeing In Mammoth Trade Row With EU (DW)
Rising Risk Of US And China Housing Slump Causing Recession – IMF (G.)
Theresa May To Make Written Brexit Offer To Jeremy Corbyn (G.)
EU’s Donald Tusk ‘Suggests Flexible Brexit Delay’ (BBC)
Angela Merkel Promises To Back Ireland In Avoiding Hard Border (G.)
Currency-Trading Algos “Flummoxed” by Rapid-Fire Brexit Headlines (WS)
Marine Plastic Pollution Costs The World Up To $2.5 Billion A Year (G.)
Great Barrier Reef Suffers 89% Collapse In New Coral (G.)
Bavaria To Pass ‘Save The Bees’ Petition Into Law In Landmark Move (G.)
Attenborough’s First Act As An Eco-Warrior (G.)

 

 

Sad sad day. Time to pray.

WikiLeaks Says Assange to Be Expelled Within ‘Hours to Days’ (TeleSur)

Julian Assange will be expelled from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, England within “hours to days,” high-ranking Ecuadorean state officials told WikiLeaks. Acording to reports, an agreement between the United Kingdom and the South American nation has been reached regarding Assange’s imminent arrest. The Ina Papers offshore scandal will be used as a pretext, WikiLeaks says.Earlier this week, Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno argued that WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has “repeatedly violated” the terms of his asylum in the embassy and that he will “make a decision in the short term.”

Ecuador’s head of state, interviewed by the local Radio Broadcasters’ Association, said Assange does not have the right to “hack private accounts or phones” and cannot intervene in the politics of other countries, especially those that have friendly relations with Ecuador. The Wikileaks founder accepted political asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sex crimes, which have been dropped. However, in the last two years, ever since Moreno took office, a new set of draconian measures have reduced his fundamental rights, in regards to freedom of speech, visits and movement inside the diplomatic mission.

Assange, who was granted Ecuadoran citizenship in December 2017, legally cannot be extradited as Article 25 of Ecuador’s 2008 constitution forbids extradition of nationals. Yet he has denounced attempts, influenced by U.S. pressure, to strip him of this right. A United Nations Special Rapporteur on Privacy is due to visit Assange on Wednesday to investigate Ecuador’s spying on the activist. Ecuador filed a complaint with the rapporteur Monday denouncing WikiLeaks and others for reporting on the INA Papers offshore scandal engulfing its president.

Read more …

Just because the losers are sore, he has to defend himself?

Barr Defends His Summary Of Mueller Report, And The Delay (AP)

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday defended his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, saying the confidential document contains sensitive grand jury material that prevented it from being immediately released to the public. The statement came as Barr confronts concerns that his four-page letter summarizing Mueller’s conclusions unduly sanitized the full report in President Donald Trump’s favor, including on the key question of whether the president obstructed justice. House Democrats on Wednesday approved subpoenas for Mueller’s entire report and any exhibits and other underlying evidence that the Justice Department might withhold.

The disparity in length between Barr’s letter and Mueller’s full report, which totals nearly 400 pages, raises the likelihood of additional significant information that was put forward by the special counsel’s office but not immediately shared by the attorney general. In Thursday’s statement, Barr defended the decision to release a brief summary letter two days after receiving the report on March 22. He has previously said he did not believe it would be in the public’s interest to release the full document in piecemeal or gradual fashion, and that he did not intend for his letter summarizing Mueller’s “principal conclusions” to be an “exhaustive recounting” of the special counsel’s investigation.

Barr is now expected to release the entire report, with redactions, by mid-April. “Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the Attorney General decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and his conclusions immediately — without attempting to summarize the report — with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process,” the Justice Department statement said. The statement also said that every page of Mueller’s report was marked that it may contain grand jury material “and therefore could not immediately be released.”

Read more …

Boeing wants you to believe it’s about software. The media helps. “It’s just a little coding error, and we’re real sorry for it, but we’ll fix it in no time.” It’s a narrative, carefully constructed.

Boeing Admits ANOTHER Glitch In 737 MAX Software (RT)

After a report on the fatal crash of Ethiopian Airlines blamed a 737 MAX software error, Boeing reportedly revealed a second glitch. The “relatively minor” but still critical problem will delay 737s returning to service. In a report on last month’s crash that killed all 157 on board of the ill-fated airliner, Ethiopia blamed Boeing’s MCAS software that caused the jet to nosedive. On Thursday, Boeing confirmed to the Washington Post that it had found another software problem. The problem affects flaps and other flight stabilization hardware, according to two unnamed Federal Aviation Administration officials cited by the Post. The FAA has classified it as critical to flight safety and ordered a fix.


It will take weeks for the problem to be patched, meaning that the 737 Max fleet will remain grounded for the foreseeable future. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plunged into a field shortly after takeoff in early March. Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 nosedived into the sea last October, killing all 189 passengers and crew. Investigators noted “clear similarities” between both accidents. On Thursday, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg offered condolences for “lives lost” and said the company was “relentlessly focused on safety to ensure tragedies like this never happen again.” The Ethiopian government report said the crew of Flight 302 “had performed all the procedures, repeatedly, provided by [Boeing], but was not able to control the aircraft.”

Read more …

“.. the EU was also failing to stop its own illegal subsidies for Europe’s Airbus..”

WTO Rules Against US And Boeing In Mammoth Trade Row With EU (DW)

US aerospace giant Boeing has received unfair tax breaks in the US state of Washington, an appellate panel in the WTO ruled on Thursday. The tax break of some $100 million annually harmed the sales of Boeing’s European rival Airbus, according to the WTO officials. The decision, which is not subject to appeal, opens the way for the EU to claim billions in damages. The damages are estimated based on the negative impact of the subsidies and not the subsidy itself. EU trade officials described the ruling as a “final victory” in the 15-year-long dispute. “The Appellate Body has now settled this case definitively, confirming our view the US has continued to subsidise Boeing despite WTO rulings to the contrary,” European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement.


However, a 2018 ruling by the WTO already found that the EU was also failing to stop its own illegal subsidies for Europe’s Airbus. Washington has since claimed an unspecified amount in damages and a WTO mediator is still examining this claim. The EU and the US have traded accusations on illegally subsidizing their respective aircraft manufacturers since 2004. The alleged subsidies vary from tax breaks and government research and development funding, to state issued loans, as both sides seek to give their companies a leg up in the global rivalry. In 2011, the WTO found that Boeing received $5.3 billion in illegal subsidies between 1989 and 2006. The verdict was confirmed in 2012. In late 2016, the WTO found some US subsidies have continued despite the global body declaring them illegal, and the Thursday verdict confirmed this decision.

Read more …

A China housing slump. Now that’s dangerous.

Rising Risk Of US And China Housing Slump Causing Recession – IMF (G.)

A growing number of homes in the US and China are teetering on the brink of a price slump that would drag their economies into a recession, the International Monetary Fund has warned. Using the latest evidence from global housing markets, the Washington-based organisation said there was a clear increase in the risk of a housing price collapse in both countries after years of ultra-low interest rates and loose lending by financial institutions. Ahead of its annual meeting next week, the IMF’s research showed a strong connection between falling house prices and declines in activity across the economy between 1990 and 2017, illustrating the power of housing markets to trigger wider slumps in GDP growth.


It follows similar concerns from US economists that the global recovery has been running out of steam since 2008 and slowdowns in the US and Chinese economies are likely to undermine worldwide growth. Recent falls in housing activity and relatively high long-term borrowing rates have also been seen as signals of a recession, possibly as soon as next year, in the US. Blackrock, the world’s largest fund manager, told investors that traders were becoming increasingly worried about the potential for a recession in the US. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, said this week that rising trade tensions, concerns about Brexit and tougher financial conditions as central banks raised interest rates had “increasingly unsettled” the global economy over recent months.

Read more …

Yada yada.

Theresa May To Make Written Brexit Offer To Jeremy Corbyn (G.)

Theresa May is expected to write to Jeremy Corbyn to set out the government’s offer on Brexit, with negotiations due to resume in Downing Street on Friday. With just five days to go before the prime minister must travel to Brussels to request a further Brexit delay from EU leaders, little progress appears to have been made on finding a compromise deal both Labour and the Conservatives can back. But after the government delegation reported back to May on Thursday, officials began drafting a letter setting out a way forward. One government source suggested that, in accordance with Labour’s demands, it would include the proposal that a confirmatory referendum on any Brexit deal be offered to MPs as an option in any vote next week.


After Thursday’s discussions in Downing Street, Corbyn sent a note to Labour MPs, saying: “Agenda items were customs arrangements, single market alignment including rights and protections, agencies and programmes, internal security, legal underpinning to any agreements and confirmatory vote.” Technical talks lasted four and a half hours, but both sides emerged cautious about how much progress had been made. [..] A deal including a customs union would be explosive in the Conservative party as the majority of Tory MPs oppose such a move. Hardline Eurosceptic MPs are still furious, with many plotting moves against the prime minister, despite there being no formal Conservative party mechanism to move a motion of no confidence in her until December.

Read more …

They’re going to be in the European elections.

EU’s Donald Tusk ‘Suggests Flexible Brexit Delay’ (BBC)

European Council President Donald Tusk is proposing to offer the UK a 12-month “flexible” extension to its Brexit date, according to a senior EU source. His plan would allow the UK to leave sooner if Parliament ratifies a deal, but it would need to be agreed by EU leaders at a summit next week. The UK’s Conservatives and Labour Party are set to continue Brexit talks later. Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has told the BBC that if they fail, the delay is “likely to be a long one”. The UK is due to leave the EU on 12 April and, as yet, no withdrawal deal has been approved by MPs. Downing Street said “technical” talks between Labour and the Conservatives on Thursday had been “productive” and would continue on Friday.


Prime Minister Theresa May has said a further postponement to the Brexit date is needed if the UK is to avoid leaving the EU without a deal, a scenario both EU leaders and many British MPs believe would create problems for businesses and cause difficulties at ports. However, the PM wants to keep any delay as short as possible. To do that, she and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would need to agree a proposal for MPs to vote on before 10 April, when EU leaders are expected to consider any extension request at an emergency summit. If they cannot, Mrs May has said a number of options would be put to MPs “to determine which course to pursue”.

Read more …

The de facto European president hasn’t said much for a long time.

Angela Merkel Promises To Back Ireland In Avoiding Hard Border (G.)

Angela Merkel has pledged the European Union’s support for averting a hard border on the island of Ireland despite concern this could undermine the single market in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The German chancellor expressed solidarity with the Irish government in a visit to Dublin on Thursday and urged the UK to present a viable plan to avert crashing out of the EU next week. Asked if averting a border was compatible with protecting the single market, Merkel told a press conference: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way … we simply have to do this, we simply have to be successful.” The chancellor was speaking after meeting the Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and a group of people from Northern Ireland and the border area who told of lives and livelihoods lost during the Troubles.


Merkel said the stories moved her. “I lived behind the Iron Curtain, so I know only too well what it means once borders vanish … what I have heard here will encourage me to explore ways and means to continue the peaceful co-existence.” Speaking at a joint press conference with Varadkar, the chancellor said Germany and the EU would consider an extension request to help the UK avoid a no-deal departure. “We need to be patient and understanding of the predicament that they are in. But of course, any further extension must require and must have a credible and realistic way forward.” She said she hoped Theresa May would be able to table a proposal by next Wednesday at a special European Council meeting. “We want to stand together as 27. Until the very last hour – I can say this from the German side – we will do everything in order to prevent a no-deal Brexit.”

Read more …

Brexit: Just like Waiting for Godot, but still faster than robots.

Currency-Trading Algos “Flummoxed” by Rapid-Fire Brexit Headlines (WS)

The drama of Brexit with all its arcane details of UK parliamentary procedures and rarely noted characters that suddenly appear prominently on the global stage and utter market-moving words has turned into a complicated mess that is generating too many rapid-fire headlines per day, often in a whiplash manner, and news-reading currency-trading algos haven’t been programmed for this and are overwhelmed. Bloomberg has published more than 1,000 Brexit headlines a day “on some days,” and Reuters “up to 400” Brexit headlines a day, according to a Reuters report. Other news outlets and wire services together also publish hundreds of headlines a day.


News-reading FX algos are programmed to react to all that instantly, but they don’t know what the next 10 Brexit stories over the next few moments are going to be, and that might put the trade on the wrong side of the next headline. Artificial Intelligence isn’t quite ready yet to sort all this out. Reuters describes it this way: As a divided government battles a divided parliament over a way forward, the chorus of characters who can now influence events has grown, flummoxing news-reading algorithms, or ‘algos’, which are designed to parse phrases from recognized speakers before executing a trade. “The model signals are more quantitative driven and rely on historical data feeds,” said Neil Jones, head of hedge fund currency sales at Mizuho in London. “Brexit headlines have thrown a spanner in their works for the sheer number of characters moving the currency on a daily basis.”

Read more …

Sounds like a nonsense number to me. Try a hundred times that for starters.

Marine Plastic Pollution Costs The World Up To $2.5 Billion A Year (G.)

Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans costs society billions of dollars every year in damaged and lost resources, research has found. Fisheries, aquaculture, recreational activities and global wellbeing are all negatively affected by plastic pollution, with an estimated 1-5% decline in the benefit humans derive from oceans. The resulting cost in such benefits, known as marine ecosystem value, is up to $2.5bn a year, according to a study published this week in Marine Pollution Bulletin. Plastic waste is also believed to cost up to $33,000 per ton in reduced environmental value, the study found. An estimated 8m tons of plastic pollution enter the world’s oceans every year.

Dr Nicola Beaumont, an environmental economist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, who led the study, said the investigation was the first of its kind to explore the social and economic impact of plastics in the sea. “Our calculations are a first stab at ‘putting a price on plastic’. We know we have to do more research to refine, but we are convinced that already they are an underestimate of the real costs to global human society,” said Beaumont. The estimates do not take into account the direct and indirect impacts on the tourism, transport and fisheries industries, or on human health, the authors warned.

Plastic waste can be found all over the world – from the most populated coastlines to the most remote – and its impact on zooplankton, invertebrates, fish, turtles, birds and mammals is all negative, the study found. But authors discovered that plastics – which can remain buoyant for decades or longer, travelling distances of more than 3,000km from origin – create new habitats for bacteria and algae. These “colonies” increase the biogeographical range of bacteria and algae, thereby risking the spread of invasive species and disease, the research found.


A crab stuck in plastic in Verde Island Passage, Batangas City, Philippines. Photograph: Noel Guevara/Greenpeace/EPA

Read more …

No coral babies. Komodo island was closed to tourists, do the same for the Great Barrier.

Great Barrier Reef Suffers 89% Collapse In New Coral (G.)

The number of new corals on the Great Barrier Reef crashed by 89% after the climate change-induced mass bleaching of 2016 and 2017. Scientists have measured how many adult corals survived along the length of the world’s largest reef system and how many new corals they produced in 2018 in the aftermath of severe heat stress and coral mortality.The results, published in Nature, show not only a dramatic reduction in new coral recruitment compared with historic levels, but also a change in the types of coral species produced.


The paper’s lead author, coral scientist Terry Hughes from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said the results paint an uncertain picture for the reef in years to come if further bleaching events occur before corals have time to sufficiently recover – which typically takes a decade. “We’ve told the story of coral dying, we’ve told the story of some being winners and losers. Now we’ve got the next phase where species have a chance to recover,” Hughes said. “But what we’re seeing is that it’s happening a lot slower because we only have 10% of the babies.”

Read more …

Germans like their nature.

Bavaria To Pass ‘Save The Bees’ Petition Into Law In Landmark Move (G.)

Bavaria has announced that it will pass into law a popular “save the bees” petition that promises drastic changes in farming practices – without putting it to a referendum first. The landmark move comes amid increasingly alarming warnings from scientists that nearly half of all insect species are in rapid decline – a third of the crucial pollinators threatened with extinction. The petition launched in February to seek better protection of plant and animal species had become the most successful in the southern German region’s history, garnering 1.75m signatures. The proposal set a target for 20% of agricultural land to meet organic farming standards by 2025, before reaching 30% by 2030. 10% of green spaces in Bavaria would have to be turned into flowering meadows, and rivers and streams better protected from pesticides and fertilisers.


Rather than putting the petition to a referendum, Bavaria’s state premier, Markus Söder, announced it would simply be written into law, passing through parliament. “We are taking the text of the referendum word for word,” said Söder, leader of the conservative CSU party which governs the state in a coalition majority. The farming industry, which had sometimes felt marginalised in the environmental debate, would have to be given support to carry out the transformation, he added. Scientists in Germany and worldwide have sounded the alarm about massive insect losses in terms of species diversity and total biomass, with dire consequences for the animals that feed on them and for plants that require them for pollination.

Read more …

“..the herd we are watching is 70% smaller than it was 20 years ago.”

Attenborough’s First Act As An Eco-Warrior (G.)

It looks as spectacular as you would expect. Vast aerial sweeps across the Peruvian coast as millions of cormorants and boobies gather to feast on anchovies and breed, or across frozen tundra to watch herds of wildebeest head for the shelter of the forest in temperatures 40 degrees below freezing take your breath away. Then it catches in your throat, as you watch an orchid bee, in search of perfume to attract a mate, fall into a flower’s buckety petal and squeeze out of a tiny tunnel that deposits two sacks of pollen on its back; just as God, or a million years of evolutionary adjustments, intended. On every scale, it is amazing. You can only boggle at the endless precision of the natural world, and of the people who devote themselves to capturing its wonders.


This is Netflix’s first foray into nature programming – Our Planet, an eight-part, multimillion-dollar series, filmed by more than 600 crew members over four years in 50 countries and narrated by our very own David Attenborough. Produced largely by the team behind the BBC’s Planet Earth and Blue Planet, it looks very much like what they might have done next for Auntie if the Natural History Unit had given them their druthers (and Netflix’s budget). As with Planet Earth, it takes a different landscape every episode and fills the screen with incredible scenes. Lesser flamingos building mud mounds for their eggs and hatching thousands of chicks in unison. Eagles in combat in the air. Three of the 60 species of manakin birds doing their mating dances, each more jaw-droppingly complex than the last.


Just as God, or a million years of evolutionary adjustments, intended … an orchid bee. Photograph: Warwick Sloss/Silverback/Netflix

The routine from the blue manakin – which involves four birds who practise beforehand, with a juvenile male standing in for the prospective lady – will have you revising your own sexual decision-making. You’ll not be charmed by a pint and a compliment again, I assure you. Where it differs from BBC shows is in no longer ignoring or minimising the threats facing all the environments and animals on display. Hamstrung by the idea that any mention of eco-problems would make audiences switch off, and the broadcasters’ preferred strategy of hoping that sharing incredible sights around the world would inspire people to save them, nature programming has been taken to task for avoiding the issue, and not using their power to raise awareness of the dangers facing us all. Contextless stories don’t inspire us to change, after all; they just allow us to continue in our comfortable, fatal state of denial.


[..] Netflix has stolen their thunder by procuring his first outing as an in-yer-face eco-warrior. Our Planet places clearer emphasis on the fragility and interconnectedness of all the species and eco-systems on display, and on the huge impact humanity has had on them in so short a time. “In one human lifetime,” says Attenborough in the opening minutes, “wildlife populations have fallen by an average of 60%. The stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted.” Towards the end of the wildebeest scenes, he cuts the ground from under us by noting that the herd we are watching is 70% smaller than it was 20 years ago.


TV that may leave you jackknifing in pain … the wildebeest migration in Tanzania. Photograph: Sophie Lanfear/Silverback/Netflix

Read more …

Oct 262018
 


Ernst Haas Greece 1952

 

Expect a “Lost Decade”, Stock Market Rout “Only Just a Start” (Mish)
Asian Stocks Hit 20-Month Lows, S&P Futures Slide As Investors Flee Risk (R.)
Friday Hasn’t Even Started Yet, But It’s Already Ugly (WS)
ECB Keeps Rates On Hold But Reaffirms QE Exit Plans (CNBC)
UK Labour Pledges To Reverse Cuts And ‘End Austerity’ (G.)
Grassley Refers Avenatti And Swetnick For DOJ Investigation (G.)
World’s Billionaires Became 20% Richer In 2017 (G.)
Twitter Bans Former Asst. Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts (ZH)
Judge Says Assange Hearing Needs A Translator Fluent In ‘Australian’ (RT)
Canadian Doctors To Start Prescribing Museum Visits (AFP)
Entire Great Barrier Reef At Risk Of Bleaching And Coral Death (G.)

 

 

So what’s the net effect of QE?

Expect a “Lost Decade”, Stock Market Rout “Only Just a Start” (Mish)

October has been a terrible month for equities. Yet, this is only a start of what’s to come.

Despite the rout, the S&P is just barely down for the year.

Expect a “Lost Decade”

Why?

The Shiller PE Ratio also known as “CAPE”, the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings Ratio, is in the stratosphere. It’s not a timing mechanism, rather it’s a warning mechanism. The main idea is that earnings are mean reverting. On that basis, stocks are more overvalued than any time other than the DotCom era. But that is misleading. In 2000 there were many sectors that were extremely cheap. Energy was a standout buy then. So were retail and financials. It’s difficult to find any undervalued sectors now other than gold.

Read more …

Another Reuters headline says: “World stocks head for worst losing streak in over half a decade..”

Asian Stocks Hit 20-Month Lows, S&P Futures Slide As Investors Flee Risk (R.)

Asian shares skidded to 20-month lows, S&P futures fell sharply and China’s yuan weakened at the end of a turbulent week for financial markets on Friday, as anxiety over corporate profits added to lingering fears about global trade and economic growth. The gloom enveloping Asia was at odds with a bounce on Wall Street overnight, highlighting fragile investor confidence, as shares of tech titans Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc fell sharply after the closing bell on disappointing earnings. In Friday’s Asian session, S&P E-mini futures slumped 0.88 percent, setting up a potentially rough session for U.S. markets which had crumbled on Wednesday on concerns about earnings and sent global equities into a tailspin.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan dropped 1.04 percent, erasing tiny gains made in the opening hour and hitting its lowest level since February 2017. Not helping was a slide in the Chinese yuan past a key level, refocusing market attention on slowing growth in the world’s second-biggest economy. Shares in Europe are seen following Asia down, with London’s FTSE expected to open 0.9 percent lower, Germany’s DAX off 1 percent and France’s CAC 40 down 1.2 percent, according to David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets UK. “There’s no question that the weight of sentiment has been building,” said James McGlew, executive director of corporate stockbroking at Argonaut in Brisbane, highlighting in particular rising geopolitical tensions including Brexit, and “internal financial tension” in China.

Read more …

Big tech big losses.

Friday Hasn’t Even Started Yet, But It’s Already Ugly (WS)

So far in October, the S&P 500 has booked 13 losing days, including October 10, when the index dropped 3.3%, and October 24, when it dropped 3.1%. Then came today, with the feel-good moment of a boisterous 1.9% gain. And then came after-hours trading, and nearly everything went to heck, particularly the FANGMAN stocks that weigh so heavily on the index with their $4-trillion market cap. And Friday morning looks already ugly.

All of the FANGMAN stocks were in the red in late trading:
Facebook [FB]: -2.3%
Amazon [AMZN]: -7.4%
Netflix [NFLX]: -2.8%
Google’s parent Alphabet [GOOG]: -3.7%
Microsoft [MSFT]: -1.5%
Apple [AAPL]: -0.4%
NVIDIA [NVDA]: -2.8%

There were some standout reasons: Amazon plunged after it reported record profit but missed on revenues and guided down Q4 expectations for sales and profits, a sign of slowing revenue growth. It was down as much as $150 a share, or almost 9%. Google’s parent Alphabet reported that revenues grew 22%, which missed expectations. Earnings beat, but a considerable slice – $1.38 billion! – of those earnings came from the gains in its portfolio of equity securities. CFO Ruth Porat warned that traffic acquisition costs would increase further as consumers are shifting search activity from desktop computers to mobile devices. Shares plunged up to 5%.

Read more …

Can Draghi stop purchasing Italian bonds?

ECB Keeps Rates On Hold But Reaffirms QE Exit Plans (CNBC)

The European Central Bank (ECB) took no action on Thursday, leaving its benchmark interest rates unchanged. However, the ECB confirmed that its plan to end monetary easing by the end of the year remains on track. “Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, the Governing Council will continue to make net purchases under the asset purchase programme (APP) at the new monthly pace of 15 billion euros until the end of December 2018,” the ECB said in a statement. “The Governing Council anticipates that, subject to incoming data confirming the medium-term inflation outlook, net purchases will then end,” the bank added.

The decision takes place as concerns mount over Italy’s fiscal policies and their potential impact over the stability of the euro area. The end of the ECB’s massive crisis-era stimulus program could be a challenging moment for European bonds, given that the ECB will no longer be in the market purchasing sovereign paper and providing some sort of backstop. This could add further pressure, mainly on Italy, given the widespread concerns over its debt pile.

Read more …

There’s a taste of Italy here, though political leanings are very different.

UK Labour Pledges To Reverse Cuts And ‘End Austerity’ (G.)

The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has said Labour would reverse cuts made by the government since 2010 as Labour highlighted more than £108bn needed to “end austerity”. Labour’s pre-budget review said it would take £42bn to reverse departmental spending cuts. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had already highlighted another £19bn needed to stop further cuts to government. Some £33.5bn would be required to reverse cuts to social security and social care, Labour said. McDonnell pledged to increase spending on the National Health Service, adult social care, and schools, at a speech in London to business and trade union representatives.

Earlier this month the prime minister, Theresa May, also said she would end the policy of austerity instituted by her predecessor David Cameron and continued by the current government. May told the Conservative party conference: “After a decade of austerity, people need to know that their hard work has paid off.” However, policy experts have highlighted that the government’s pledge leaves room for manoeuvre. The £19bn bill calculated by the IFS, a non-partisan thinktank, would be needed to prevent further cuts in spending to government departments whose budgets are not protected, under one definition of “ending austerity”.

Read more …

Why invite more of the same?

Grassley Refers Avenatti And Swetnick For DOJ Investigation (G.)

Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee, has referred the lawyer Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick, one of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, for criminal investigation. In a statement, Grassley said he was referring the two to the justice department for a “criminal investigation relating to a potential conspiracy to provide materially false statements to Congress and obstruct a congressional committee investigation”. Swetnick, who was represented by Avenatti, came forward in late September to allege that Kavanaugh took part in efforts to gang-rape women at drunken parties. She said she too was gang-raped at one such party, but did not directly accuse Kavanaugh of being involved.

Kavanaugh categorically denied the accusations calling them “a joke” and “a farce” in his testimony before the Senate. Avenatti has become an increasingly high-profile opponent of Donald Trump after coming to prominence as the lawyer of Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claims she had an affair with Trump. Avenatti has been an outspoken critic of Trump on cable TV and social media. He is also mulling a run for the White House in 2020. Swetnick was the third woman to come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct during his confirmation process for the supreme court. The Senate approved Kavanaugh’s nomination by a 50-48 vote in early October.

Grassley accused Swetnick and Avenatti of knowingly misleading the committee. “That’s unfair to my colleagues, the nominees and others providing information who are seeking the truth,” said the Iowa Republican. “It stifles our ability to work on legitimate lines of inquiry. It also wastes time and resources for destructive reasons. Thankfully, the law prohibits such false statements to Congress and obstruction of congressional committee investigations. For the law to work, we can’t just brush aside potential violations. I don’t take lightly making a referral of this nature, but ignoring this behavior will just invite more of it in the future,” Grassley said.

Read more …

Inequality has become a dangerous game, but greed wins the day every day.

World’s Billionaires Became 20% Richer In 2017 (G.)

Billionaires made more money in 2017 than in any year in recorded history. The richest people on Earth increased their wealth by a fifth to $8.9tn (£6.9tn), according to a report by Swiss bank UBS. The fortunes of today’s super-wealthy have risen at a far greater rate than at the turn of the 20th century, when families such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast wealth. The report by UBS and accountants PwC said there was so much money in the hands of the ultra-rich that a new wave of rich and powerful multi-generational families was being created. “The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age” the UBS Billionaires 2018 report said.

“That period bred generations of families in the US and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy and the arts for more than 100 years. With wealth set to pass from entrepreneurs to their heirs in the coming years, the 21st century multi-generational families are being created.” The world’s 2,158 billionaires grew their combined wealth by $1.4tn last year, more than the GDP of Spain or Australia, as booming stock markets helped the already very wealthy to achieve the “greatest absolute growth ever”. More than 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth, and given the number of billionaires over 70 the report’s authors expect a further $3.4tn to be handed down over the next 20 years.

“A major wealth transition has begun,” the report said. “Over the past five years, the sum passed by deceased billionaires to beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17% each year, to reach $117bn in 2017. In that year alone, 44 heirs inherited more than a billion dollars each.

Read more …

Completely insane.

Twitter Bans Former Asst. Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts (ZH)

Twitter has suspended noted anti-war commentator, economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts, 79, served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1982. He was formerly a distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. Roberts maintains an active blog. He’s also vehemently against interventionary wars around the world, and spoke with Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news in a Tuesday article – in which Roberts said that President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty was a handout to the military-security complex.

The former Reagan administration official clarified that he does not think “that the military-security complex itself wants a war with Russia, but it does want an enemy that can be used to justify more spending.” He explained that the withdrawing from the INF Treaty “gives the military-security complex a justification for a larger budget and new money to spend: manufacturing the formerly banned missiles.” [..] The economist highlighted that “enormous sums spent on ‘defense’ enabled the armaments corporations to control election outcomes with campaign contributions,” adding that in addition, “the military has bases and the armaments corporations have factories in almost every state so that the population, dependent on the jobs, support high amounts of ‘defense’ spending.”

“That was 57 years ago,” he underscored. “You can imagine how much stronger the military-security complex is today.” -Sputnik. Roberts also suggested that “The Zionist Neoconservatives are responsible for Washington’s unilateral abandonment of the INF treaty, just as they were responsible for Washington’s unilateral abandonment of the ABM Treaty [in 2002], the Iran nuclear agreement, and the promise not to move NATO one inch to the East.”

Read more …

So Assange still doesn’t have his internet back, but he does talk to an Ecuador court via video link.

Judge Says Assange Hearing Needs A Translator Fluent In ‘Australian’ (RT)

The presiding judge in WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange’s case against the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry has reportedly said that the court made a mistake by appointing an English translator who doesn’t speak Australian. The anecdote was reported by Bloomberg on Thursday and allegedly took place at the first hearing of Assange’s lawsuit against the ministry. Speaking via video link, Australian-born Assange complained to the court that his state-appointed translator from English to Spanish was not cutting it. It’s unclear what exactly the issue was, but Judge Karina Martinez apparently thought Assange’s Australian accent was thick enough to warrant a dedicated expert.

While Australian English is the most spoken dialect Down Under, it is by no means a separate language. The Australian dialect originated in the late 18th and early 19th century from convicts who were the first British settlers to arrive in New South Wales. Admittedly, the Australian vernacular is quite distinct, has rich slang, and peculiar terms. Differences in pronunciation and vocabulary can at times leave an average British or American English speaker perplexed. Assange’s accent, however, is far from the thickest around. Last week, he filed a lawsuit against Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Jose Valencia, accusing the government of violating his “fundamental rights and freedoms” with a set of new rules.

The government files released by an Ecuadorian opposition lawmaker last Tuesday outline the efforts of the Latin American country to prevent Assange from engaging in activities that “could be considered political or interfering with the internal affairs of other states.” They also limit Assange’s visitation rights, force him to pay his own medical bills, and even threaten to take away his cat if he doesn’t look after it properly. Assange’s lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, has accused Valencia of “isolating and muzzling” the fugitive, himself an Ecuadorian citizen since December 2017. Garzon said Assange still has no access to the internet, despite Ecuador’s earlier announcement it would restore communications.

Read more …

Worth a try.

Canadian Doctors To Start Prescribing Museum Visits (AFP)

A group of Canadian doctors are to begin prescribing trips to an art gallery to help patients suffering a range of ailments become a picture of health. A partnership between the Francophone Association of Doctors in Canada (MFdC) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) will allow patients suffering from a number of physical and mental health issues, along with their loved ones, to take in the benefits of art on health with free visits. The pilot project is unprecedented globally, according to its organizer. The project will see participating physicians prescribe up to 50 visits to the MMFA during treatment, each pass valid for up to two adults and two minors.

So far 100 doctors have enrolled to take part over the course of a year, Nicole Parent, head of the MFdC, told AFP Thursday. The numbers offer proof that doctors have “a sensitivity and openness to alternative approaches if you want” Parent said, citing scientifically proven benefits of art on health. The benefits are similar to those patients can get from physical activity, prompting the secretion of a similar level of feel-good hormones, and can help with everything from chronic pain to depression, stress and anxiety. The pilot program will allow organizers to gather data and analyze results, allowing for the development of protocol for identifying patients.

Read more …

This summer (which starts Dec 20).

Entire Great Barrier Reef At Risk Of Bleaching And Coral Death (G.)

Mass bleaching and coral death could be likely along the entire Great Barrier Reef this summer, according to a long-range forecast that coral experts say is “a wake-up call” for the Australian government. The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has forecast a 60% chance that the entire Great Barrier Reef will reach alert level one, which signals extreme heat stress and bleaching are likely. The forecast period covers November 2018 to February 2019 and the risk extends to the southern Great Barrier Reef, which escaped the mass mortality seen in the middle and northern parts of the reef in 2016 and 2017.

“This is really the first warning bells going off that we are heading for an extraordinarily warm summer and there’s a very good chance that we’ll lose parts of the reef that we didn’t lose in the past couple of years,” said marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. “These are not good predictions and this is a wake-up call.” Hoegh-Guldberg said it was particularly worrying that the long-range forecasts were already showing high chances of bleaching and mortality before March, which is the main month of the year for bleaching events.

He said if the models proved accurate it would mean the entire Great Barrier Reef would be damaged by climate change and coral populations would trend towards very low levels, affecting the reef’s tourism and fishing industries and the employment they support. “To really have the full picture we’re going to have to wait for those projections that cover the main part of bleaching season,” he said. “Given sea temperatures usually increase as we get towards March, this is probably conservative.”

Read more …

May 292018
 


Roy Lichtenstein Crying girl 1963

 

Showdown Looms In Italy As Caretaker PM Assembles Team (AFP)
The Biggest Short-Sellers Of Italian Bonds (ZH)
If Italy Exits The Euro, It Could Be The End Of The Single Currency (Tel.)
Stock Market Borrowing at All Time High, Increasing Risk of Downdrafts (NC)
The Financial Scandal No One Is Talking About (G.)
Fears Of Bad Brexit Deal Raise Tension Between Bank of England, Treasury (G.)
Eastern, Southern African Finance Leaders Debate Yuan As Reserve Currency (R.)
Indonesia’s Currency Is Spiraling. Sacrifices Are Needed To Save It (CNBC)
Papua New Guinea Bans Facebook For A Month To Root Out ‘Fake Users’ (G.)
Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Lashes Out At Former CEO Ackermann (HB)
Fake Maths: The NHS Doesn’t Need £2,000 From Each Household To Survive (G.)
After China’s Waste Import Ban EU Wants To Get Rid Of Single-Use Plastics (RT)
Great Barrier Reef On Sixth Life In 30,000 Years (AFP)

 

 

A team he knows will never be accepted.

Showdown Looms In Italy As Caretaker PM Assembles Team (AFP)

Italy’s caretaker prime minister was Tuesday assembling a cabinet lineup despite almost certain rejection by the populists whose bid for power collapsed at the weekend. Fresh elections are now looming as the most likely outcome of the long-running political saga sparked by inconclusive elections in March. Carlo Cottarelli, a former IMF economist, was tasked with naming a technocrat government on Monday after President Sergio Mattarella nixed a cabinet proposed by the far-right League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S). The president in particular vetoed their pick for economy minister, fierce eurosceptic Paolo Savona, throwing the eurozone’s third largest economy into a fresh crisis.


Savona has called the euro a “German cage” and said that Italy needs a plan to leave the single currency “if necessary”. Mattarella said that an openly eurosceptic economy minister was counter to the parties’ joint promise to simply “change Europe for the better from an Italian point of view”. Cottarelli said Italy would face new elections “after August” if parliament did not endorse his team, a near certainty given that M5S and the League together hold a majority. [..] Salvini and Di Maio furiously denounced the presidential veto, blasting what they called meddling by Germany, debt ratings agencies, financial lobbies and even lies from Mattarella’s staff. “Paolo Savona would not have taken us out of the euro. It’s a lie invented by Mattarella’s advisors,” Di Maio said in a live video on Facebook. “The truth is that they don’t want us in government.”

Read more …

Draghi vs the vigilantes.

The Biggest Short-Sellers Of Italian Bonds (ZH)

[..] it was in December when we first pointed out a dramatic observation by Citi, which noted that over the past several years, the only buyer of Italian government bonds was the ECB, and that even the smallest political stress threatened a repeat of the 2011 “Berlusconi” scenario, when the freshly minted new ECB head Mario Draghi sent Italian yields soaring to prevent populist forces from seizing power in Italy. Or maybe it didn’t, and it only took the bulls far longer than the bear to admit that nothing in Europe had been fixed, even as the bears were already rampaging insider Europe’s third largest economy.

Consider that according to the latest IHS Markit data, demand to borrow Italian government bonds — an indicator of of short selling — was up 33% to $33.3 billion worth of debt this year to Tuesday while demand to borrow bonds from other EU countries excluding Italy has risen only 5% this year. That said, things certainly accelerated over the last week, when demand to borrow Italian bonds soared by $1.2 billion, which according to WSJ calculations, takes demand, i.e. short selling, close to its highest level since the financial crisis in 2008 (while demand to borrow bonds from EU countries excluding Italy has fallen by $800 million over the past week).


Said otherwise, while the events over the past week may have come as a surprise to many, to the growing crowd of Italian bond shorts today’s plunge and the blowout in Italian-German spreads was not only expected, but quite predictable and extremely lucrative… which is also a major problem as Brussels is well-known to take it very personally when a hedge fund profits from the ongoing collapse of Europe’s failing experiment in common everything, and tends to create huge short squeezes in the process, no matter how obvious the (doomed) final outcome is.

Read more …

Sorry, but I said it a lot better on Friday.

If Italy Exits The Euro, It Could Be The End Of The Single Currency (Tel.)

You might think that it would be fitting if the European Union were to come to a sticky end because of Italy. After all, the agreement that established the entity that we now call the European Union was signed in Rome. For several decades after that 1957 treaty, Italy was one of the strongest supporters of the European project. Having endured first fascism and then, after the war, unstable and ineffectual government, it suffered none of the angst about the loss of sovereignty that plagued British debates about joining the European Community. Moreover, in the early years of the union, Italy prospered. At one point its GDP overtook the UK’s, an event that was widely celebrated in Italy as “il sorpasso”, the surpassing, or, if you like, the overtaking.


But the overtaking did not last long. Indeed, since the euro was formed in 1999, the Italian economy has grown by a mere 9%, or less than 0.5% per annum. Over the same period, the UK economy has grown by 42%. This recent disastrous economic performance, plus mounting anxiety about inward migration and the fact that the EU has left Italy to cope with this huge influx on its own, has changed many Italians’ attitudes to the EU. Understandably. These failings go to the heart of the EU project. The truth is that Italy should never have joined the euro in the first place. And it isn’t only Anglo-Saxon euro pessimists such as myself who believe this. At the time the German Bundesbank was appalled at the idea that Italy should be admitted. After all, even then it had a huge public debt and a history of high inflation offset by frequent currency depreciation.

Read more …

“..the Chinese stock markets permit a much higher level of borrowings than those in the West..”

Stock Market Borrowing at All Time High, Increasing Risk of Downdrafts (NC)

I find it hard to get excited about stock market risks unless defaults on the borrowings can damage the banking/payments system, as they did in the Great Crash. This is one reason the China perma-bears have a point: even though the Chinese government has managed to do enough in the way of rescues and warnings to keep its large shadow banking system from going “boom,” the Chinese stock markets permit a much higher level of borrowings than those in the West, which could make them the detonator for knock-on defaults. The US dot-com bubble featured a high level of margin borrowing, but because the US adopted rules so that margin accounts that get underwater are closed and liquidated pronto, limiting damage to the broker-dealer, a stock market panic in the US should not have the potential to produce a credit crisis.

But if stock market bubble has been big enough, a stock market meltdown can hit the real economy, as we saw in the early 2000s recession. Recall that Greenspan, who saw the stock market as part of the Fed’s mission, dropped interest rates and kept them low for a then unprecedented nine quarters, breaking the central bank’s historical pattern of reducing rates only briefly. Greenspan, as did the Bank of Japan in the late 1980s, believed that the robust stock market prices produced a wealth effect and stimulated consumer spending. It isn’t hard to see that even if this were true, it’s a very inefficient way to try to spur growth, since the affluent don’t have anything approach the marginal propensity to spend of poor and middle class households.


Subsequent research has confirmed that the wealth effect of higher equity prices is modest; home prices have a stronger wealth effect. A second reason for seeing stock prices as potentially significant right now be is that the rally since Trump won the election is important to many of his voters. I have yet to see any polls probe this issue in particular, but in some focus groups, when Trump supporters are asked why they are back him, some give rise in their portfolios as the first reason for approving of him. They see him as having directly improved their net worth.1

Read more …

Accounting.

The Financial Scandal No One Is Talking About (G.)

For centuries, accounting itself was a fairly rudimentary process of enabling the powerful and the landed to keep tabs on those managing their estates. But over time, that narrow task was transformed by commerce. In the process it has spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry and lifestyles for its leading practitioners that could hardly be more at odds with the image of a humble number-cruncher. Just four major global firms – Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ernst & Young (EY) and KPMG – audit 97% of US public companies and all the UK’s top 100 corporations, verifying that their accounts present a trustworthy and fair view of their business to investors, customers and workers.

They are the only players large enough to check the numbers for these multinational organisations, and thus enjoy effective cartel status. Not that anything as improper as price-fixing would go on – with so few major players, there’s no need. “Everyone knows what everyone else’s rates are,” one of their recent former accountants told me with a smile. There are no serious rivals to undercut them. What’s more, since audits are a legal requirement almost everywhere, this is a state-guaranteed cartel. Despite the economic risks posed by misleading accounting, the bean counters perform their duties with relative impunity.


The big firms have persuaded governments that litigation against them is an existential threat to the economy. The unparalleled advantages of a guaranteed market with huge upside and strictly limited downside are the pillars on which the big four’s multi-billion-dollar businesses are built. They are free to make profit without fearing serious consequences of their abuses, whether it is the exploitation of tax laws, slanted consultancy advice or overlooking financial crime.

Read more …

Interesting fight.

Fears Of Bad Brexit Deal Raise Tension Between Bank of England, Treasury (G.)

The growing risk of a bad Brexit deal for the City of London is causing severe tensions between the Bank of England and the Treasury, according to reports. Amid mounting fears that Brussels will reject plans put forward by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, for maintaining close ties with the EU for financial services, the Financial Times reported that Bank officials are at loggerheads with the Treasury over the search for a “Plan B” arrangement. Threadneedle Street fears it could be left as a “rule taker” should Britain agree to a new deal that maintains European market access for financial firms without giving the Bank sufficient control over City regulations in future. The concerns stem from the sprawling scale of the City as one of the biggest financial centres in the world.


Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, used a speech in London last week to highlight the risks posed to the financial system from Brexit and said it was one of the issues raised by Britain leaving the European Union that made him most “nervous”. He also warned in plain terms last year that “we do not want to be a rule taker as an authority”. According to the FT, a number of officials at Threadneedle Street said Jon Cunliffe, the Bank’s deputy governor for financial stability, had fallen out with the Treasury over the issue. The paper quoted one anonymous official saying “the fear is the Treasury is going to give it all away”. The breakdown in relations comes as Hammond strives to prevent an exodus of international banks from the Square Mile, having attempted to reassure them in March that the UK would seek to maintain European market access after Brexit.

Read more …

Wishful thinking.

Eastern, Southern African Finance Leaders Debate Yuan As Reserve Currency (R.)

Eastern and southern African central bankers and government officials are to consider the use of China’s yuan as a reserve currency for the region, the official Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday. Seventeen top central bankers and officials from 14 countries in the region will meet at a forum in Harare to consider the viability of the Chinese yuan as a reserve currency, Xinhua said, citing a statement from the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern and Southern Africa (MEFMI). The forum, to take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, will be attended by deputy permanent secretaries and deputy central bank governors, as well as officials from the African Development Bank, Xinhua reported.


Attendees will strategies on the weakening external positions of most member countries, following the global economy slowdown. “Most countries in the MEFMI region have loans or grants from China and it would only make economic sense to repay in termini (Chinese yuan),” said MEFMI spokesperson Gladys Siwela-Jadagu. “This is the reason why it is critical for policy makers to strategize on progress that the continent has made to embrace the Chinese yuan which has become what may be termed ‘common currency’ in trade with Africa,” she added. “Ascendancy of Chinese yuan in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies is an important symbol of its importance and the IMF’s approval as an official reserve currency,” said Siwela-Jadagu.

Read more …

Argentina, Turkey, Indonesia. Next!

Indonesia’s Currency Is Spiraling. Sacrifices Are Needed To Save It (CNBC)

Indonesia’s rupiah has been growing worryingly weak, and the country’s central bank has seen little success after multiple attempts to prop up the currency. Now, Bank Indonesia said it will meet again on Wednesday — and speculations are rife that the central bank has more tricks up its sleeve. The rupiah has been one of the worst-hit Asian currencies as investors pull out of the Indonesian stock and bond markets amid rising U.S. Treasury yields and strengthening in the greenback. The falling value of the rupiah could spell trouble for the country’s large foreign currency debt, and the outflows from its bonds are bad news for its government.


The central bank has tried to stem the currency weakness with measures including hiking interest rates and buying sovereign bonds, but the rupiah still depreciated: It fell to 14,202 per U.S. dollar on May 23. That was the weakest in more than two years. With the persistent rupiah weakness, more “rate hikes may be needed, with the next one possibly as early as this week,” Eugene Leow, a strategist at Singapore’s DBS Bank, wrote in a Monday note. The central bank hiked interest rates by 25 basis points in its mid-May meeting — the first raise since November 2014. Central bankers were scheduled to convene again in June, but Bank Indonesia last Friday said an additional policy meeting would be held on May 30.

Read more …

Censors?!

Papua New Guinea Bans Facebook For A Month To Root Out ‘Fake Users’ (G.)

The Papua New Guinean government will ban Facebook for a month in a bid to crack down on “fake users” and study the effects the website is having on the population. The communication minister, Sam Basil, said the shutdown would allow his department’s analysts to carry out research and analysis on who was using the platform, and how they were using it, admits rising concerns about social well-being, security and productivity. “The time will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images, users that post false and misleading information on Facebook to be filtered and removed,” Basil told the Post Courier newspaper. “This will allow genuine people with real identities to use the social network responsibly.”


Basil has repeatedly raised concerns about protecting the privacy of PNG’s Facebook users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, which found Facebook had leaked the personal data of tens of millions of users to a private company. The minister has closely followed the US Senate inquiry into Facebook. “The national government, swept along by IT globalisation, never really had the chance to ascertain the advantages or disadvantages [of Facebook] – and even educate and provide guidance on use of social networks like Facebook to PNG users,” said Basil last month. “The two cases involving Facebook show us the vulnerabilities that Papua New Guinean citizens and residents on their personal data and exchanges when using this social network.”

Read more …

Blame game. Deutsche is hanging in the ropes.

Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Lashes Out At Former CEO Ackermann (HB)

German executives rarely wash their dirty laundry in public. This week was a notable exception, when David Folkerts-Landau, Deutsche Bank’s chief economist, accused his former bosses of causing the bank’s current woes by racing hell-for-leather into investment banking. Mr. Folkerts-Landau, who has been with Deutsche’s investment banking division for over two decades, accused its former CEOs of reckless expansion and of losing control of the ship. “Since the mid-1990s, the bank’s management has left operational and strategic control of its financial markets business to the traders,” he said in an interview with Handelsblatt. The bank is still reeling from the consequences of this “reverse takeover,” the economist said.


Deutsche Bank has accumulated more than €9 billion in losses over the past three years, due chiefly to the woes of its investment banking division. The bank is in the throes of a revamp intended to refocus operations on more stable sources of revenue, such as private and commercial banking and asset management. Mr. Folkerts-Landau singled out Josef Ackermann, the bank’s flamboyant boss from 2002 to 2012, for particular criticism over his aggressive expansion into investment banking. “Ackermann was (…) fixed on the magic goal of a return on equity of 25% before taxes. At that time, however, this could only be achieved by accepting major financial and ethical risks,” said the German-born economist. After the financial crisis, Mr. Ackermann rejected state aid from the German authorities and postponed tackling the bank’s structural problems, Mr. Folkerts-Landau added.

Read more …

Yeah, you can do the math in many different ways.

Fake Maths: The NHS Doesn’t Need £2,000 From Each Household To Survive (G.)

Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation published a report on funding for health and social care. One figure from the report was repeated across the headlines. For the NHS to stay afloat, it would require “£2,000 in tax from every household”. Shocking stuff! The trouble with figures like this is that while there may be a sense in which this is mathematically true, that kind of framing is dangerously close to being false. If you’re sitting at a bar with a group of friends and Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth of everyone in the room makes you all millionaires. But if you try to buy the most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, your debit card will still be declined.

Similarly, the IFS calculated its “average” figures by taking the total amount it calculated the NHS would need and dividing it by the number of households in the country. That’s certainly one way of doing it – it’s not wrong per se – but in terms of informing people about the actual impact on their own finances, it’s very misleading. We have progressive taxation in this country: not every household gets an equally sized bill. Could you pay more if the government chose to cover the cost of social care through a bump in income tax? Sure, but for the vast majority of the country it would be a few hundred pounds.


That’s without engaging with the underlying assumption that a bump in income tax is the way the government will choose to go. Some people have argued that, since the last couple of decades have seen wealth accumulate disproportionately at the very top, government should tax wealth rather than income. Alternatively, researchers have shown that health spending is one of the best ways to stimulate the economy, so the government could opt against tax increases in the short term and instead let healthcare spending act as a fiscal stimulus, at least until purchasing power had increased.

Read more …

The reason why is revealing.

After China’s Waste Import Ban EU Wants To Get Rid Of Single-Use Plastics (RT)

The European Commission wants to ban single-use plastic products like disposable cutlery, straws and cotton buds to fight the plastic epidemic littering our oceans – months after China banned millions of tons of imported EU waste. The EC unveiled the market ban proposal on Monday, which included 10 items that make up 70% of all the marine litter in the EU. As well as the aforementioned items, the list includes plastic plates, drink stirrers, sticks for balloons and single-use plastic drinks containers. The crackdown comes less than six months after the EU announced its first-ever Europe-wide strategy on plastic recycling following China’s ban on waste imports from Western countries.

At the end of 2017, Beijing banned the import of 24 types of waste from the US and EU and accused the nations of flouting waste standard rules. The new proposal says the ban on single-use plastic products will be in place wherever there are “readily available and affordable” alternatives. Where there aren’t “straight-forward alternatives,” the focus will be on limiting their use through a national reduction in consumption. In order for the products to be sold in the EU, they will have to be made exclusively from sustainable materials. Single-use drink containers will only be allowed on the market if their caps and lids remain attached.


[..] The EC’s proposal will now go to the European Parliament and Council for adoption. It will need the approval of all EU member states and the European Parliament in order to pass – a process which could take three to four years before the rules come into force. Once fully implemented in 2030, the EC estimates that the new measures could cost businesses more than €3 billion ($3.5 billion) per year. But they could also save consumers about €6.5 billion per year, create 30,000 jobs and avoid €22 billion in environmental damage and cleanup costs.

Read more …

Resilient little bugger.

Great Barrier Reef On Sixth Life In 30,000 Years (AFP)

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, under severe stress in a warmer, more acidic ocean, has returned from near-extinction five times in the past 30,000 years, researchers said Monday. And while this suggests the reef may be more resilient than once thought, it has likely never faced an onslaught quite as severe as today, they added. “I have grave concerns about the ability of the reef in its current form to survive the pace of change caused by the many current stresses and those projected into the near future,” said Jody Webster of the University of Sydney, who co-authored a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience.


In the past, the reef shifted along the sea floor to deal with changes in its environment – either seaward or landward depending on whether the level of the ocean was rising or falling, the research team found. Based on fossil data from cores drilled into the ocean floor at 16 sites, they determined the Great Barrier Reef, or GBR for short, was able to migrate between 20 centimetres (7.9 inches) and 1.5 metres per year. This rate may not be enough to withstand the current barrage of environmental challenges. The reef “probably has not faced changes in SST (sea surface temperature) and acidification at such a rate,” Webster told AFP. Rates of change “are likely much faster now — and in future projections.”

Read more …

Apr 292018
 


John Collier Lady Godiva c1897

 

The Stock Market That’s Never Satisfied (Forsyth)
Kim Pledges to Invite Media to Witness Nuclear Site Shutdown in May (BBG)
North Korea To Wind Clocks Forward By 30 Minutes (UPI)
Are European Companies Ready for Life Without Draghi? (DQ)
Millennial Housing Crisis Engulfs Britain (G.)
Twitter Sold Information To Researcher Behind Facebook Data Scandal (ZH)
Early Facebook Investor, Mentor: “They’ve Done Bupkis To Protect Us” (ZH)
Facebook’s Global Monopoly Poses A Deadly Threat In Developing Nations (G.)
Future Uncertain For Assange In Wake Of US-Ecuador Military Deal (DisM)
‘Caravan’ Migrants Weigh Staying In Mexico Or Risking US Expulsion (R.)
In The Opioid Epidemic, White Means Victim, Black Means Addict (G.)
Australia Pledges Half A Billion To Restore Great Barrier Reef (AFP)

 

 

Why own stocks?

The Stock Market That’s Never Satisfied (Forsyth)

If anything, the stock market is being extraordinarily critical of what it’s being served, notably earnings that are exceeding already high expectations. Take Caterpillar, which initially rallied Tuesday after reporting better-than-expected results. But on the post-earnings conference call, its chief financial officer called the first quarter the farm- and construction-equipment maker’s “high-water mark for the year.” So, if it doesn’t get any better than that, the stock market’s response isn’t to savor the moment, but to sell it. CAT ended up losing 6.2% in reaction to that comment, leading a massive retreat in industrial and material names that helped the Dow industrials shed over 400 points in the trading session.

That isn’t an entirely irrational response, given data that show growth is slowing, while inflation is picking up. To those late-cycle symptoms add rising rates, both the ones administered by the Federal Reserve and those set by the bond market. On the latter score, the benchmark Treasury 10-year note briefly peaked just over 3%, a psychologically significant but otherwise not terribly meaningful number. Arguably far more significant is that investors and savers can get 2% on six-month Treasury bills and almost 2.5% on a two-year note. Two years ago, dividend stocks provided investors a one-percentage point advantage over risk-free rates, says Danielle DiMartino Booth in her Money Strong missive. Now those places have been swapped.

Adds David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist for Gluskin Sheff, this ability to get a “safe yield” for the first time in a decade, with no risk from falling stock or bond prices, represents a “seminal shift and a huge source of competition for the dividend allure of the stock market.” The prospect of higher rates may cheer savers, but poses greater risk to an economy never more dependent on debt, DiMartino Booth says. But that’s the direction the Fed is headed, given the rise in inflation and signs of slowing growth, an unpleasant combination that suggests stagflation; if not 1970s-style double-digit inflation and unemployment, then an economy expanding more slowly than prices are rising.

Read more …

He claims it’s all still intact.

Kim Pledges to Invite Media to Witness Nuclear Site Shutdown in May (BBG)

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close his main nuclear weapons test site in May and said he will invite South Korean and American media to witness the shutdown. Ahead of an historic meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump expected within the next three to four weeks, Kim told South Korea’s president that two tunnels at the nuclear test site are still in good condition, playing down international speculation that the site was so badly damaged by nuclear explosions that it can no longer be used. Kim’s pledges to Moon at their historic summit on Friday were detailed in Seoul on Sunday by Moon’s chief communication official.

Kim told President Moon Jae-in on the disputed Korean border that Trump will learn at their meeting that North Korea has no intention of using its nuclear arsenal toward South or the Pacific or to target the U.S. The North had no reason to own nuclear weapons if it and the U.S. promise non-aggression against each other, he said, according the the Seoul briefing. Trump said Saturday night that he expects his historic meeting with Kim will take place “over the next three or four weeks.” “Strength is going to keep us out of nuclear war, not get us in,” Trump told a rally in Washington, Michigan. Earlier, he said details of the summit are being ironed out, and that he’d spoken with the leaders of South Korea and Japan about preparations for the meeting.

Read more …

Symbols are important.

North Korea To Wind Clocks Forward By 30 Minutes (UPI)

North Korea has decided to wind its clock forward half an hour to match its time with the South’s, two years and eight months after it decided to adopt its own standard time, News 1 reported. Seoul’s presidential official Yoon Young-chan told reporters Sunday that in talks between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Kim said he would shift time in Pyongyang to Korea Standard Time (UTC+9:00) Accompanied by his wife Ri Sol-ju, Kim is said to have pointed to the two clocks hanging inside the Peace House, located on the South’s side of Panmunjom truce village, and said that this “pained his heart,” before suggesting to Moon that the South and North “first unify the time.”

Until 2015, Pyongyang used the same time (135 degrees East) as Seoul but adopted its own standard time which was thirty minutes behind KST. The North Korean leader said, as Pyongyang was the one that changed the time, it should be the one to make the adjustment again, JoongAng Ilbo reported. Yoon said this indicates Kim’s willingness to actively coordinate with the international community.

Read more …

A continent full of zombies.

Are European Companies Ready for Life Without Draghi? (DQ)

[..] there are signs that the ECB has quietly begun to taper its corporate-bond buying program. The rate of purchases under the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme dropped 50% in April to about €700 million per week, down from €1.4 billion during the first quarter, analysts at Deutsche Bank pointed out. That could mean the ECB is starting a “stealth taper” in order to wean the European bond market off the corporate debt purchases it began in June 2016, Deutsche Bank said. But are the companies that benefited from the ECB’s largesse ready for life without Draghi? There’s no doubting the ECB’s bond buying has exacerbated distortions in the corporate bond market — distortions that were first engendered by the central bank’s low interest rate policy. Yields came crashing down and spreads narrowed.

At the peak of ECB’s bond buying binge, the average yield of the Iboxx non-financials index fell as low as 0.69%. For German blue-chip companies such as BASF, Continental, Linde, SAP and Siemens, yields fell to less than 0.5%. France’s pharmaceutical company Sanofi and German consumer goods manufacturer Henkel even managed to issue bonds at slightly negative yields, effectively helping pay off their debts. But that was then. Now, the average yield of the Iboxx non-financials index is back above 1.10%. As Reuters reports, some of Europe’s biggest money managers are reducing their exposure to corporate bonds. Some are even shorting them, betting that stress is building in a market that was buoyed by years of rock-bottom borrowing costs. Some new bond issues have even struggled to find buyers, when not so long ago they were flying off shelves.

Bank of America guesstimated last year that as many as 50 of the euro zone’s 600 biggest companies deserve to be classified as “zombies,” as they pay far too much interest in relation to their profits. For these companies the ECB’s bond-buying program was a godsend, allowing them to continue refinancing their debt and stave off default. But interest rates are beginning to rise again. Whether or not the ECB has already begun to taper its corporate bond buying on the quiet, the program will likely be phased out later this year. And yields have already been rising ever so gradually in anticipation. That means that the companies that have benefited from the central bank’s monetary support are going to soon find themselves facing a whole new, more challenging reality. For some it’s unlikely to be a pleasant one.

Read more …

That’s what happens when you try and run an economy on a housing bubble.

Millennial Housing Crisis Engulfs Britain (G.)

Home ownership among young families has plummeted across every corner of Britain over the past 35 years, according to a devastating inquiry into the housing crisis facing millennials. The proportion of families headed by a 25- to 34-year-old that own their own home has more than halved in some regions, showing that the crisis goes far beyond London. Analysis conducted as part of a two-year investigation into intergenerational fairness in Britain, chaired by a former Tory minister, found that millennials are being forced into increasingly cramped and expensive rented properties that leave them with a longer commute and little chance of saving for a home. It also finds an increasing proportion of the young living in overcrowded housing.

The commission, which has been overseen by the Resolution Foundation thinktank and includes the former universities minister David Willetts, is expected to conclude that new taxes on property wealth may be the only way to restore fairness and prepare the country to pay the care and support costs of an ageing population. Ownership among 25- to 34-year-olds has plummeted in Greater Manchester from 53% in 1984 to 26% last year. It has fallen from 54% to 25% in south Yorkshire, from 45% to 20% in the West Midlands, from 50% to 28% in Wales and from 55% to 27% in the south-east. In outer London, the proportion has collapsed from 53% to just 16%. Out of 22 regions analysed by the commission, in only one – Strathclyde in Scotland – has home ownership among the young remained stable. It stood at 32% in 1984 and 33% last year, having peaked at 45% in 2002.

Ownership in London has fallen consistently over the past 30 years, whereas rates in some other parts of the country declined more slowly before the early 2000s, but very rapidly thereafter. Even favourable economic conditions are likely to result in millennials catching up with the home ownership levels of the previous cohort only by the age of 45. Fast-growing inheritances will help some, but nearly half of young non-homeowners have parents who do not own either.

Read more …

We need an overall ban on data harvesting for profit.

Twitter Sold Information To Researcher Behind Facebook Data Scandal (ZH)

Twitter has now also become embroiled in the Facebook data harvesting scandal – as the Sunday Telegraph reveals that the social media giant sold user data to Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher and director of Global Science Research (GSR), who created an app which harvested the data of millions of Facebook users’ without their consent before selling it to political data firm Cambridge Analytica. “Aleksandr Kogan, who created tools for Cambridge Analytica that allowed the political consultancy to psychologically profile and target voters, bought the data from the microblogging website in 2015, before the recent scandal came to light. -Sunday Telegraph”

Kogan says that the data was only used to generate “brand reports” and “survey extender tools” which were not in violation of Twitter’s data policies. While most tweets are public information and easy for anyone to access, Twitter charges companies and organizations for access to information in bulk – though Twitter bans companies which use the data for political purposes or to match with personal user information found elsewhere. A Twitter spokesman confirmed the ban and said: “Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices.

The company said it does not allow “inferring or deriving sensitive information like race or political affiliation, or attempts to match a user’s Twitter information with other personal identifiers” and that it had staff in place to police this “rigorously”.-Sunday Telegraph Data licensing made up 13% of Twitter’s 2017 revenue at $333 million. In a March blog post, Citron Research said that Twitter’s 2018 data-licensing business will generate $400 million (analysts polled by FactSet say $387 million) and that it represents the fastest-growing segment of the company’s operations (which it is, according to FactSet).

Read more …

“..I feel like my baby has turned out to be something horrible, and these people I trusted and helped along have forgotten where they came from..”

Early Facebook Investor, Mentor: “They’ve Done Bupkis To Protect Us” (ZH)

Even if Facebook’s stellar Q1 earnings report hadn’t helped erase some of the losses that Facebook shares incurred in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanderberg would still believe that the company’s troubles are largely behind them and that the company had essentially repaired the damage done to its reputation. That was the assessment delivered by early Facebook investor and one-time Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee, who warned during an appearance at an event organized by Quartz in Washington DC last week that the company’s leaders are deeply complacent and still haven’t accepted the fact that Facebook has badly mislead its users about how the company profits off their data.

Despite Zuckerberg’s warning, embedded in his opening statement to Congress earlier this month, that the company planned to make changes that could “significantly impact” profitability, McNamee believes it’s likely Facebook is “going to get away” with the bad things that it has done, which is “particularly dangerous” considering the 2018 midterm elections are only months away. McNamee said he’s deeply disappointed in how Zuckerberg and Sandberg have responded to the crisis by refusing to accept responsibility. During their post-crisis media tour, both executives insisted on blaming Cambridge Analytica for “misleading” Facebook, even though Facebook never bothered to alert users whose data had been affected. “They’ve done bupkis to protect us,” McNamee said.

The whole affair has left McNamee – who considers his involvement with Facebook during its early days to be the “highlight of a long career” – deeply saddened. “Every part of this has made me sadder and sadder and sadder. I feel like my baby has turned out to be something horrible, and these people I trusted and helped along have forgotten where they came from,” he said in a conversation with Kevin Delaney, Quartz’s editor-in-chief. McNamee has become an outspoken critic of the company, comparing its role in the 2016 US election to “the plot of a sci-fi novel” while at the same time admitting that he has “profited enormously” by backing Facebook early on. The organization he helped found, the Center for Humane Technology, has made it a mission to expose Facebook’s multiple flaws, and to try to fix them.

Read more …

Facebook facilitates ethnic cleansing. But profits are more important.

Facebook’s Global Monopoly Is A Deadly Problem In Developing Nations (G.)

[..] Facebook is a new kind of monopoly. We’re accustomed to the idea of companies becoming dominant in some jurisdictions. But we have never before encountered a corporation that has a global monopoly. Because wherever you go on the planet these days, Facebook is the only social-networking game in town. It has no serious competitors – anywhere. The implications of this are only now beginning to dawn on us. In the past two years, we have woken up to Facebook’s pernicious role in western democratic politics and are beginning to think about ways of addressing that problem in our bailiwicks. To date, the ideas about regulation that have surfaced seem ineffectual and so the damage continues.

But at least liberal democracies have some degree of immunity to the untruths disseminated by bad actors who exploit Facebook’s automated targeting systems – provided by a free press, parliamentary inquiries, independent judiciaries, public-service broadcasters, universities, professional bodies and so on. Other societies, particularly the developing countries now most assiduously targeted by Facebook, have few such institutions and it is there that the company has the capacity to wreak the most havoc. We’ve had intimations of this for a while, notably after it became clear that Facebook was a medium for anti-Muslim hysteria in Myanmar, hysteria that was subsequently translated into full-blown ethnic cleansing.

One of the key figures in all this was the ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, who used Facebook to broadcast his views about the Rohingya after he was banned from preaching by the government. Wirathu compared Muslims to mad dogs and posted gruesome pictures of dead bodies that he claimed were killed by Muslims – with predictable consequences. United Nations officials now say that social media has had a “determining role” in anti-Rohingya Muslim violence in Myanmar, which the UN itself has called “ethnic cleansing”. For “social media”, read Facebook, because there’s no competition to it in Myanmar.

Read more …

Torture.

Future Uncertain For Assange In Wake Of US-Ecuador Military Deal (DisM)

Late yesterday, Telesur reported that Ecuador had signed a “security deal” with the United States, which is expected to result in a US military presence in that country. Telesur wrote: “Ecuador signed Wednesday a cooperation agreement with the United States to fight transnational organized crime and drug trafficking…. Moreno’s move is a further shift away from the policies of his left-wing predecessor and former ally, Rafael Correa, who has criticized and refused to participate in the U.S.-sponsored Plan Colombia, arguing peace is not obtained with helicopters and weapons but rather by promoting economic and social development.”

The news comes as a new blow to hopes that Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno would heed calls from around the globe to end the solitary confinement of Julian Assange. Tomorrow, the arbitrarily confined journalist will have been totally isolated for one month. The latest news of a military agreement struck between Moreno’s government and the US comes as yet another major shift away from the policies of Ecuador’s prior administration. It is also a distinct pivot away from Ecuador’s decision, made just a few months prior, to confer citizenship and diplomatic status on the Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief.

This writer previously expressed the opinion that the ongoing solitary confinement of Assange by his own government constitutes torture. Disobedient Media has also reported consistently on the numerous online and physical vigils, petitions and other efforts to encourage Ecuador to return the Ecuadorian embassy in London to a place of refuge, as intended when the previous administration bravely granted Assange political asylum from the threats to his life and work emanating from the United States.

In our previous report, Disobedient Media noted that enforced isolation is not only torture in the opinions of those who have experienced it, but has also been labeled as such by the UN. Rick Raemisch wrote in an opinion piece published by The New York Times that, according to the Nelson Mandela rules, solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days constitutes torture. This means that the length of time for which Julian Assange has been cut off from the outside world would now have almost doubled the official benchmark for being considered torture.

Read more …

if the US would simply clean ita back yard, and stop stoking tensions there, it wouldn’t have these problems.

‘Caravan’ Migrants Weigh Staying In Mexico Or Risking US Expulsion (R.)

Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans who drew the wrath of President Donald Trump in a month-long caravan to the U.S. border will make hard decisions on Sunday whether to risk being deported all the way home by trying to cross, or to build a life in Mexico. After angry tweets from Trump, U.S. border authorities said some people associated with the caravan had been caught trying to slip through the fence, and encouraged the rest to hand themselves in to authorities. “We are a very welcoming country but just like your own house, we expect everyone to enter through our front door, and answer questions honestly,” San Diego Chief Patrol Agent Rodney S. Scott said in a statement.

Most of the group of about 400 travelers who arrived in border city Tijuana on buses over the past couple of days said they intended to legally seek asylum in San Diego later on Sunday, but lawyers advising the group gave them stark advice – not everyone will be successful. After the grueling journey, a somber mood took hold as the reality sank in that many of them would be separated from their families. Lovers and parents with slightly older sons and daughters could be forced to split up. At venues around the city, U.S. immigration lawyers working on a pro bono basis on Saturday listened to harrowing tales of life in the immigrants’ home countries.

Death threats from local gangs, the murder of family members, retaliatory rape, and political persecution back home prompted them to flee, the migrants and lawyers say. Many of the immigrants who spoke at length with Reuters at various points during their trip through Mexico had been short on knowledge of their legal rights, but at least 24 recounted detailed stories of facing death threats.

Read more …

How true.

In The Opioid Epidemic, White Means Victim, Black Means Addict (G.)

My cursor is hovering over the “unfriend” button, but I haven’t clicked it. Today, my relationship-severing finger is poised to get rid of Matt. Matt is a friend with whom I spent a lot of time about six years ago. We were close in rehab, but I haven’t seen him since. I entered Greenbriar treatment center in Washington, Pennsylvania, just a few days after he’d arrived, and he showed me the ropes. For the next few weeks, we were virtually inseparable. Rehab can be a frightening place when you first arrive. With any luck, you’ve already had some sort of “come to Jesus” moment with yourself and you’ve realized that you need to be there or else you’re going to die. I had had no such moment and was fully convinced that this was all a big mistake.

Once I got through the door into the facility, I heard it lock electronically with a loud buzz and a finality that shook my bones. I immediately regretted it. There is no lonelier feeling on this Earth than sitting there, abandoned and broken. You’ve burned all your bridges on the outside and your life feels as though it’s half a world away. This is the moment when you really need a guy like Matt to walk up to you, thrust out his hand and say: “Hi! I’m Matt! What’s your name?” Over the next few weeks, he and I attended group therapy sessions together and stayed up late talking about our problems, our addictions and our families. We ugly-cried in front of each other as we shared our darkest secrets, what we had done for drugs and how deeply unhappy we were.

Matt is a man who, in many ways, helped me to take my recovery seriously in rehab and, in the first few weeks after my release, he helped me to remain sober on the outside. And, today, I sit in front of my monitor poised to cancel him forever because whiteness is apparently more addictive than any drug could ever be. We sobered up in the same facility, but he was a victim. I was an addict. Matt is a Christian. I am not. Matt is a Republican. I am not. And, most significantly, Matt is white. I am not. And these facts make all the difference in America.

Read more …

First you destroy it, then you spend taxpayers’ money to restore it. It’s called a profit model.

Australia Pledges Half A Billion To Restore Great Barrier Reef (AFP)

Australia pledged half a billion dollars to restore and protect the Great Barrier Reef Sunday in what it said would be a game-changer for the embattled natural wonder, but conservationists were not convinced. The World Heritage-listed site, which attracts millions of tourists, is reeling from significant bouts of coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change.It is also under threat from the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has proliferated due to pollution and agricultural runoff.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said more than Aus$500 million ($400 million) would go towards improving water quality, tackling predators, and expanding restoration efforts.

Turnbull said it was the “largest ever single investment — to protect the reef, secure its viability and the 64,000 jobs that rely on the reef”.”We want to ensure the reef’s future for the benefit of all Australians, particularly those whose livelihood depends on the reef,” he added.The reef is a critical national asset, contributing Aus$6.4 billion a year to the Australian economy.Canberra has previously committed more than Aus$2.0 billion to protect the site over the next decade, but has been criticised for backing a huge coal project by Indian mining giant Adani nearby.With its heavy use of coal-fired power and relatively small population, Australia is considered one of the world’s worst per-capita greenhouse gas polluters.

Canberra insists it is taking strong action to address the global threat of climate change, having set an ambitious target to reduce emissions by 26 to 28% from 2005 levels by 2030.

Read more …

Jan 162018
 
 January 16, 2018  Posted by at 10:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Jean-Francois Millet The flight into Egypt 1864

 

Crytocurrencies Crashing Fast On South Korea Regulation Plans (Ind.)
PBOC Official Says China’s Centralized Cryptocurrency Trade Must End (R.)
China’s Shutdown Of Bitcoin Miners Isn’t Just About Electricity (F.)
China Is Heaping Debt on Its Least Productive Companies (CFR)
Xi Jinping’s Debt Clampdown Has Left a Trail of Dead Projects (BW)
Here’s What Historically Happens to Stocks When Bull Markets End (GoldSilver)
UK’s Carillion Crisis Deepens Amid Scramble To Save Jobs After Collapse (G.)
Quarter Of UK’s Poorest Households Are Getting Deeper In Debt (G.)
Greek Parliament Votes Through Raft Of Tough Reforms (K.)
Australia Offers Cash For Great Barrier Reef Rescue Ideas (AFP)
UK Supermarket Iceland To Eliminate Plastic On All Own-Label Products (G.)

 

 

As I’m writing this, I’m seeing bitcoin being obliterated. Other crypto’s were even worse off earlier. BTC down some 16% today at 5 AM ET, at $11,400. It was over $17,000 10 days ago.

Crytocurrencies Crashing Fast On South Korea Regulation Plans (Ind.)

Cryptocurrencies across the market are in the middle of a huge crash. All cryptocurrencies are falling amid a major selloff. Most have fallen more than 10% over the morning, and the price of bitcoin has dropped below $12,000. Just days ago, bitcoin was marching towards $20,000. But just today it has fallen more than 10% – taking it down almost 40% over the last month, but still having risen more than 1,300% over the year. Bitcoin is the best performing of the various cryptocurrencies over the morning. Ripple, the third largest cryptocurrency, had dropped by as much as 25% amid major volatility. Ethereum fell by more than 15%.

The price of cryptocurrencies tends to fluctuate wildly, and far more quickly than other more traditional assets and currencies. But the plunge on Tuesday morning is extreme even in that market. The drop came amid increasing suggestions in South Korea that officials might look to impose new regulations on the currency. Finance minister Kim Dong-yeon suggested that the country might ban trading in the currencies entirely, pending a government review. The government has said that the plans are only a suggestion and that more talks are needed. But another government minister said that trading could be banned last week, triggering another instant sell-off, and the plans have already led 200,000 people to petition the government asking to keep bitcoin trading legal.

Read more …

Little hope left for crypto in China. Korea shaky at best.

PBOC Official Says China’s Centralized Cryptocurrency Trade Must End (R.)

A senior Chinese central banker says authorities should ban centralized trading of virtual currencies as well as individuals and businesses that provide related services, an internal memo from a government meeting seen by Reuters showed. In the memo outlining details of discussions at a meeting of internet regulators and other policymakers last week, PBOC Vice Governor Pan Gongsheng said the government would continue to apply pressure to the virtual currency trade and prevent the build up of risks in that market. National and local authorities should ban venues that provide centralized trading of virtual currencies, of which bitcoin is the biggest, Pan said. They also need to ban individuals or institutions that provide market-making activities, guarantees, or settlement services for centralized trading of the currencies, such as online “wallet” service providers.

Chinese regulators last year banned initial coin offerings, shut down local cryptocurrency trading exchanges and limited bitcoin mining – but activity in the cryptocurrency and bitcoin space has continued through alternative channels in China despite the crackdown. “The financial work conference clearly called for limiting ‘innovations’ that deviate from the need of the real economy and escape regulation,” Pan said, according to the memo, referring to last week’s meeting. Authorities should also block domestic and foreign websites and close mobile apps that provide centralized virtual currency trading services to Chinese users, and sanction platforms that provide virtual currency payment services, Pan said. He also called for local authorities to investigate services that help people move funds overseas.

Read more …

It’s a power game.

China’s Shutdown Of Bitcoin Miners Isn’t Just About Electricity (F.)

China is planning to limit electricity to Bitcoin miners, and government bodies have expressed concern about energy usage. Bitcoin mining is estimated to use up to 4 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to three nuclear reactors’ production levels. However, this move isn’t just about the electricity. In fact, it is telling that it was China’s central bank that met on the issue of Bitcoin mining, underscoring the fact that the issue is not only, or even primarily, an energy issue. It’s about clamping down on perceived risks of the cryptocurrency, which regulators have associated with malicious acts like fraud and money laundering. Authorities have already cracked down on thousands of criminal cases associated with alternative cryptocurrencies, including Onecoin and Ticcoin. These cryptocurrencies were viewed as Ponzi schemes used to raise illicit funds.

Later, officials shut down cryptocurrency exchanges and banned fundraising through initial coin offerings (ICOs). On Monday, it was reported that Chinese authorities would block cryptocurrency platforms that permit centralized trading. Cracking down on fraud and money laundering alone does not appear to be the way China is addressing risks associated with Bitcoin, however. Authorities are going after the industry more broadly. This may be because China has enough financial risks to regulate at the moment, and it is at capacity, or it could be that officials really do view Bitcoin as insufficiently transparent to represent an appropriate means of exchange or store of value.

Chinese Bitcoin mining companies may be out of luck doing business in a favorable environment. To combat this, some companies have already moved operations overseas. Most recently, Bitmain Technologies set up a subsidiary in Switzerland, which will extend its branches, currently in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Qingdao, Chengdu, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Bitcoin miners have also been attracted to the Canadian province of Québec for its advertised cheap electricity. However, other companies may be forced to shut down. Moving abroad is likely to result in higher energy costs, which can dramatically reduce profit margins gained from mining.

Read more …

“By some estimates, China’s real growth rate, accounting for bad debt, is roughly half the official one of about 6.9%..”

China Is Heaping Debt on Its Least Productive Companies (CFR)

When Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to mention the word “deleveraging” in his long-awaited new economic blueprint in December it was clear that the political tug of war between the advocates of “reform” and “growth” had been won by the latter. In the short-run, growth, as defined by changes in GDP, can be increased by more lending and investing. In the longer-term, however, lending and investing can’t boost GDP if it results in bad debt that is properly written down. The big question is how much bad debt China currently has, and how much more it will be producing in the years ahead. By some estimates, China’s real growth rate, accounting for bad debt, is roughly half the official one of about 6.9%. To gauge whether China has been creating good debt—debt that will produce positive returns—or bad, we’ve examined who the beneficiaries of corporate lending are.

As shown in the left-hand figure below, profits at private-sector enterprises rose 18% between 2011 and 2016, while profits at state-owned enterprises (SOEs) plunged by 33%. As shown in the right-hand figure, however, the share of corporate liability growth accounted for by SOEs soared from 59% in 2010 to 80% by 2016. This is the opposite of what one would expect in a market economy. As we highlighted last year, China’s non-performing loans (NPLs) have been growing. Given the evidence that Xi has abandoned any pretense of concern with NPLs, and our evidence that China is shoveling new loans to companies with the least ability to pay them back, we think China is heading towards a debt crisis.

Read more …

Xi plays a high stakes game.

Xi Jinping’s Debt Clampdown Has Left a Trail of Dead Projects (BW)

A pile of rusty pipes and materials are all that remain of Lanzhou New Area’s tram project. Only a year ago it was a flagship public-private partnership for the planned city in Central China, before it fell victim to President Xi Jinping’s debt clampdown. “The project is dead,” said a guard at the office, who gave only his surname, Le. Nearby, the tram tracks are paved over, the mismatched lines of asphalt scarring a six-lane road that leads to a dead end on the edge of one of China’s most ambitious urban developments. The size of New York City, the zone is a satellite of Lanzhou, capital of China’s poorest province, Gansu, and a place where Xi’s efforts to wean the country off debt and onto services and consumer spending can be seen in stark relief.

In most of China, the economy is powering through Xi’s borrowing bottleneck, with economists surveyed by Bloomberg projecting the nation’s GDP grew 6.8% last year, the first annual acceleration in seven years. But for less-developed areas like Gansu the story is not so simple. Away from the industrial centers along the coast, Gansu came late to the nation’s debt-fueled investment party. During the nation’s economic ascent in the 1990s and 2000s, it became infamous for having the most polluted air in the country, a cocktail of chemicals from petroleum plants and heavy industry mixed with desert dust storms. Lanzhou New Area was only approved in 2012, just before Xi took office, driven by a central government investment spree designed to spread wealth to western regions.

Now, Xi wants to neutralize the risk of soaring debt derailing growth that accounts for more than a third of the global economic expansion. He reinforced that aim at a twice-a-decade Communist Party Congress in October and at the annual Central Economic Work Conference in December, where elite cadres set goals for 2018. From the yuan and bitcoin to banking and housing, taming potential threats is the new priority. Economists and policy makers see the restraints on borrowing as a necessary step toward choking off some of the nation’s construction and investment excesses and building a more sustainable economy. But there are casualties, including Lanzhou New Area’s tram, a network of tunnels for underground utility lines in the city, and more than 200 other public-private projects — almost half the total in Gansu.

Read more …

Average last year of bull market: +16%. Average first year of bear market: -16%.

Here’s What Historically Happens to Stocks When Bull Markets End (GoldSilver)

You undoubtedly know that 2017 was a record-setting year for the broad stock markets. And while gold was up last year despite numerous headwinds, most mainstream investors aren’t paying much attention to gold since they keep seeing so much green in their stock portfolios. Even I was taken back by some of the data from the bull market in stocks… • The Dow hit a record high 71 times last year. On average, a new high was hit more frequently than once a week. • For the first time ever in its almost 90-year history, the S&P 500 rose every month in 2017. And historically there have only been four years with gains in 11 months of the year. • The S&P’s largest pullback in 2017 was 2.8%, the smallest since 1995. • To start 2018, the S&P 500 has risen in each of the five trading sessions, hitting a new record high every day. The last time the index opened the year with at least five straight record highs was 1964.

And as Mike pointed out in his 2018 predictions, the CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings) ratio has now matched its 1999 level, the second highest reading in over 100 years of data. The CAPE now has a higher reading only in 1929. This all begs the question: is the bull market about to come to an end? This is exactly the kind of frothy behavior a market sees near its apex, so it’s definitely a prudent question to ask. If last year ends up being the top of this bull market, what does history say could happen to stocks this year? We dug up the data for all bull markets in the S&P since the year 1900, and then examined what happened in the very first year after each of those bull markets ended. In other words, what did the first year of the bear market look like after the last full year of the bull market? This could be useful data, if 2017 ends up being the peak of the bull market. Here’s what history shows.

First Year Performance of Bear Market After Bull Market Ends

While the declines for the first year of the bear market varied greatly, you can see that on average, the S&P lost 16% the year immediately following the last year of the bull market. Also notice that in only four cases was the decline measured in single digits—all others were double digit losses. Mike Maloney believes this is the year overvalued stocks begin their descent. If he’s right, the decline could be higher than the historical average, since this is the second longest bull market in history.

Read more …

The fruits of privatization.

UK’s Carillion Crisis Deepens Amid Scramble To Save Jobs After Collapse (G.)

Thousands of staff who worked for the collapsed construction firm Carillion inside private sector companies will have their wages stopped on Wednesday unless their jobs are rescued by other firms, the government has said. Experts also said up to 30,000 small firms were owed money by Carillion, which crashed into liquidation on Monday morning, with insolvency practitioners reporting an immediate rush of calls from worried business owners. Ministers gathered for an emergency meeting on Monday night in an effort to limit the damage caused by the collapse of the sprawling construction and support services business. As the fallout spread, the Cabinet Office minister, David Lidington, faced mounting pressure over the government’s oversight of the firm’s increasingly precarious finances in the months leading up to its failure.

Lidington told parliament the government would continue to pay those among Carillion’s 19,500 UK staff who work in public sector jobs, such as NHS cleaners and school catering. But he admitted thousands of Carillion’s private sector workers – who perform jobs ranging from cleaning to catering, security and postroom services for organisations such as the Nationwide building society and BT Openreach – would be cut loose after 48 hours. “The position of private sector employees is that they will not be getting the same protection that we’re offering to public sector employees, beyond a 48-hour period of grace,” Lidington said. He added that this would give time for Carillion’s private clients to decide if they wanted to terminate the contracts or step in to cover wages themselves. “I think that is a reasonable gesture towards private sector employees,” he said, adding that a Jobcentre Plus helpline had been set up.

Read more …

Only debt leaves the country standing.

Quarter Of UK’s Poorest Households Are Getting Deeper In Debt (G.)

One in four of Britain’s poorest households are falling behind with debt payments or spending more than a quarter of their monthly income on repayments, according to a study. The latest evidence of mounting debt problems for some of the most vulnerable in society is shown in a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, at a time when borrowing on credit cards, loans and car finance deals returns to levels unseen since before the 2008 financial crisis. The poorest tenth of households are also more likely to be in net debt, owing more on plastic or on overdrafts and loans than they hold in savings. About a third of the poorest homes are in net debt, compared with only 10% of the highest-income tenth.

For a household of two adults and two children aged between 30 and 44 to be in the poorest tenth, they would have a net annual income of up to £23,200. Young adults are much more likely to be in households in arrears or paying large chunks of their income to banks or credit card providers, the study found. David Sturrock, a research economist at the IFS, said: “Debt looks like a real problem for a significant minority of those on low incomes.” [..] Debt problems for the poorest households can prove persistent, and are of growing concern to the Financial Conduct Authority. Of the poorest fifth of households who were in arrears or spending more than a quarter of their income on debt repayments and charges in 2010, more than 40% were found to be stuck in a similar position two years later.

Read more …

Tsipras has become the oppressor. Credibility of the entire Greek political system is gone for many years to come. That does not bode well.

Greek Parliament Votes Through Raft Of Tough Reforms (K.)

As thousands of protesters rallied in Athens and Thessaloniki on Monday, Parliament approved the prior actions included in an all-inclusive bill which the leftist-led coalition government hopes will be the last significant batch of spending cuts and reforms the country has to implement before its bailout program ends in August. The 1,500-page austerity bill, which includes the demands by Greece’s international creditors to expedite auctions of foreclosed properties and changes to labor law that will make it harder for unions to call strikes, was approved by 154 lawmakers in the 300-seat Parliament. Some 141 lawmakers from main opposition New Democracy, Democratic Alignment, Golden Dawn and the Union of Centrists voted against all the provisions included in the bill. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told lawmakers that the approval of the multi-bill brings Greece “just one step from the end of the bailout.”

“In the summer, we will… leave behind a tough, unfair and harmful period,” he said, adding that the conclusion of the third review “gives hope to millions of our fellow citizens” but has caused agitation to others, referring to the parties of the opposition. Tsipras rejected claims by the opposition that the new bill will ban the right to strike. “The right to strike is a sacred conquest of the working class. It is not being scrapped and it is not under threat from this government,” he said. For his part, New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis denounced Tsipras for “ransoming the country’s future” and damaging its economy. “You are legislating articles that even you don’t agree with,” Mitsotakis said, addressing Tsipras in Parliament, adding that the leftist leader was pushing through measures he was elected to oppose and that he “turned lying into a profession and cynicism into an art.”

Mitsotakis also accused Tsipras and his SYRIZA party of “threatening” investors while they were in the opposition and refuted the government’s narrative that the country is heading for a clean bailout exit in August. The vote in Parliament took place as around a total of 20,000 people in Athens and Thessaloniki marched in protest. Police used pepper spray to disperse rock-throwing protesters outside Parliament. Some demonstrators also sprayed police with red paint. Meanwhile, Monday’s public transport strike – bus, tram, trolley and metro services – in opposition to the bill caused problems for commuters in the Greek capital. The disruption also impacted state-run schools and public hospitals, with teachers and doctors holding work stoppages, while a three-hour walkout by air traffic controllers led to the rescheduling or cancellation of flights.

Read more …

Obvious suggestion: stop pumping mining sludge into the reef system. Did I just make $1 million? Didn’t think so. Don’t be fooled by this sort of crap.

Australia Offers Cash For Great Barrier Reef Rescue Ideas (AFP)

Australia is calling on the world’s top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world’s largest living structure. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change. The 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, with experts warning it could be suffering irreparable damage. On Tuesday, the Australian government announced a Aus$2.0 million (US$1.6 million) funding pot available to people with bright ideas on how to save the reef.

“The scale of the problem is big and big thinking is needed, but it’s important to remember that solutions can come from anywhere,” said Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg. He said the money would be available to the world’s “greatest scientific minds, industry and business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs”. “Solutions could focus on anything from reducing the exposure of corals to physical stressors, to boosting coral regeneration rates by cultivating reef-building coral larvae that attract other important marine species,” Frydenberg added. Up to Aus$250,000 is available for an initial feasibility stage, where researchers can test the technical and commercial viability of their proposals for up to six months.

More than one proposal is expected to be accepted at this stage, the government said. A further Aus$1 million will then be made available to the best solutions at the proof of concept stage, where applicants develop and test their prototypes for up to 12 months. Those that are successful will retain intellectual property rights and will be able to try to commercialise their innovation.

Read more …

No force suppliers to do the same.

UK Supermarket Iceland To Eliminate Plastic On All Own-Label Products (G.)

Iceland has become the first major retailer to commit to eliminate plastic packaging for all its own-brand products. The supermarket chain, which specialises in frozen food, said it would go plastic-free within five years to help end the “scourge” of plastic pollution. The current plastic packaging would be replaced with paper and pulp trays and paper bags, which would be recyclable through domestic waste collections or in-store recycling facilities. The supermarket recently carried out a survey in which 80% of 5,000 people polled said they would endorse the move to go plastic-free. Iceland managing director, Richard Walker, said: “The world has woken up to the scourge of plastics. A truckload is entering our oceans every minute, causing untold damage to our marine environment and ultimately humanity – since we all depend on the oceans for our survival.

“The onus is on retailers, as leading contributors to plastic packaging pollution and waste, to take a stand and deliver meaningful change.” He also said Iceland would ensure all packaging was fully recyclable and would be recycled, through support for initiatives such as a bottle deposit return scheme for plastic bottles. As it was technologically and practically possible to create less environmentally harmful alternatives, “there really is no excuse any more for excessive packaging that creates needless waste and damages our environment”, Walker added. Iceland has already removed plastic disposable straws from its own label range and new food ranges in the next few months will use paper-based food trays. The move, which has been welcomed by environmental campaigners, comes amid growing concern over plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, where it can harm and kill wildlife such as turtles and seabirds.

Read more …

Apr 102017
 
 April 10, 2017  Posted by at 8:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Todd Webb Rue des Plantes, Paris 1950

 

Americans Are Becoming Obsessed With Putting Everything On Credit (MW)
Cash Is Dead. Long Live Cash. (WSJ)
A Change In The Change Of Change (Peters)
Great Debt Unwind: Bankruptcies Surge (WS)
Trump’s Rollback of Bank Regulations Risks a Bondholder Backlash (Street)
Syria Strike Designed To Intimidate North Korea: China State Newspaper (G.)
Is Globalisation Dead? (Pettifor)
Housing Costs Are Pushing People Further Out of Sydney (BBG)
Toronto Mayor Says He’s Open to Sale of City Real Estate Assets
Secret Recording Implicates Bank of England In Libor Manipulation (BBC)
The Fire In The Hold Of The Doomed Euro (Ward)
Tsipras: Debt Relief Prerequisite to Legislate New Measures (GR)
Great Barrier Reef at ‘Terminal Stage’ (G.)
John Clarke has Died

 

 

We need a war on plastic, not cash.

Americans Are Becoming Obsessed With Putting Everything On Credit (MW)

It’s more likely that the last time you bought a pack of gum or a can or soda, you used a credit card. People like their credit cards so much they’re using them even for the tiniest purchases, according to a new survey released Monday from the credit cards site CreditCards.com. Among people with credit cards, 17% said they use them to buy items in brick-and-mortar stores that cost less than $5, up from 11% last year. CreditCards.com surveyed about 1,000 U.S. adults in March 2017. After a lull in the wake of the Great Recession, credit cards are once again being used with increased frequency. The Federal Reserve reported last week that collective credit card debt in the U.S. had reached $1 trillion.

Credit-card debt and auto loan debt balances for people ages 60 and older have also risen since 2008, that Fed data showed, whereas credit-card debt for those 59 and younger has fallen. The Fed, when describing that phenomenon, said lending standards have tightened since the recession, and those who are older may also be more creditworthy. But when consumers can pay their balances each month, turning to credit cards for small purchases isn’t a bad thing, said Matt Schulz, a senior industry analyst for CreditCards.com. Putting more charges on a credit card may indicate consumers feel more optimistic about their financial picture for the future, he said. “People who are chasing rewards realize that those little purchases can add up to a lot of rewards over the course of a year,” he added.

Indeed, several high-profile credit cards offer cash back and perks for spending. For example, Amazon introduced a credit card this year for Prime members that gives 5% cash back on Amazon purchases (Prime itself costs $99 per year.) Some retailers, however, prohibit credit-card purchases below a certain amount to avoid paying transaction fees to the credit-card issuers for such purchases. That said, cash and debit cards still are the go-to options for making small purchases, despite the speed with which credit cards are gaining on them. Of those surveyed, 24% said they use debit cards for small purchases, and 55% said they use cash. It appears younger consumers are behind at least some of the growth in credit card use: Some 70% of baby boomers and their older cohorts, the Silent Generation, still choose cash for small purchases versus 43% of those under 53.

Read more …

A little incoherent article, but point taken. Countries that try to go cashless should be careful.

Cash Is Dead. Long Live Cash. (WSJ)

[..] the push to get rid of cash is hitting speed bumps all over. India, for example, is already partly reintroducing its 500- and 1000-rupee bills after the government’s abrupt demonetization program drew sharp criticism for hurting its cash-dependent rural population. The U.S. shows no inclination to pare back its notes. “I’m very conscious of the $100 bill being the world’s reserve currency, and every central bank around the world has stacks of $100 bills where they used to have gold,” Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal shortly before he left office in January. One reason it’s a non-starter in the U.S.: About 8% of people don’t have a checking or savings account, making it all-but-impossible for them to participate in a cashless economy.

Banning cash “would bring the economy and many people to their knees if enforced,” said Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane. In the aboveground economy, card-based and digital payment systems offering ever-greater speed, safety and convenience have been steadily encroaching on paper money, even for small consumer transactions. Euromonitor International, a market-research firm, said the volume of global cash payments in 2016 for the first time fell below payments on credit and debit cards. Some of the growth in cash can be attributed to the financial crisis and the aftermath, when people lost faith in banks, and when ultralow interest rates and anemic investment returns reduced the opportunity costs of holding savings in cash. The number of $100 bills in circulation, worth $1.15 trillion in December, has surged 76% since 2009, according to Federal Reserve data.

Read more …

“Brexit was a joke. Trump was a joke..”

A Change In The Change Of Change (Peters)

“The change of change is now negative,” said the CIO. “Global growth is still rising, but the rate of improvement is slowing,” he explained. “Same holds true for global inflation, oil prices, copper, iron ore. Credit growth is slowing in the US, Europe, Japan, China.” If these things were all contracting, we’d plunge into recession, but we’re not there. We’re simply at the point in the cycle where the rate of acceleration is slowing – which is both evidence of a pause, and a precondition for every major turn. “The last time we had a major shift in the change of change was a year ago.” In Jan/Feb 2016, China was imploding. Commodity prices were tanking with equity markets, the dollar soared alongside volatility. Then China unleashed explosive credit stimulus, while the Fed blinked, guiding forward interest rates dramatically lower. Within a short time, the change of change turned positive.

Which is not to say things immediately accelerated, it’s just that they started contracting more slowly. And that marked the time to buy. “Pretty much everything that happened in 2016 can be explained by two things; China and oil prices,” he said. “Literally, that’s it.” China’s stimulus-induced rebound and the oil price recovery is all that mattered. “Brexit was a joke. Trump was a joke. In fact, the only real significance of those events was that they provided investors with opportunities to jump on board the reflation trade at back near Q1 prices.” The reflation trade quietly began in the Q1 collapse, and accelerated off the extreme post-Brexit summer lows in global interest rates. That’s what made last year remarkable. Even investors who missed the first opportunity, had two chances to make a lot of money.” You see, that reward is usually reserved for those who act on the first signs of a change in the change of change.

Read more …

Credit shrinks, the Zombies fall.

Great Debt Unwind: Bankruptcies Surge (WS)

Commercial bankruptcy filings, from corporations to sole proprietorships, spiked 28% in March from February, the largest month-to-month move in the data series of the American Bankruptcy Institute going back to 2012. They’re up 8% year-over-year. Over the past 24 months, they soared 37%! At 3,658, they’re at the highest level for any March since 2013. Commercial bankruptcy filings skyrocketed during the Financial Crisis and peaked in March 2010 at 9,004. Then they fell sharply until they reached their low point in October 2015. November 2015 was the turning point, when for the first time since March 2010, commercial bankruptcy filings rose year-over-year.

Bankruptcy filings are highly seasonal, reaching their annual lows in December and January. Then they rise into tax season, peak in March or April, and zigzag lower for the remainder of the year. The data is not seasonally or otherwise adjusted – one of the raw and unvarnished measures of how businesses are faring in the economy. Note that there is no “plateauing” in this chart: since the low-point in September 2015, commercial bankruptcies have soared 65%! That red spike is the mega-increase in March:

At first, they blamed the oil bust. The price of oil began to collapse in mid-2014. By 2015, worried bankers put their hands on the money spigot, and a number of companies in that sector, along with their suppliers and contractors, threw in the towel and started filing for bankruptcy protection. But now the price of oil has somewhat recovered, banks have reopened the spigot, Wall Street has once again the hots for the sector, new money is gushing into it, and oil & gas bankruptcy filings have abated. So now they blame brick-and-mortar retail which is in terminal decline, given the shift to online sales. I have reported extensively on the distress of the larger chain stores, but brick-and-mortar retailers include countless smaller operations and stores that no ratings agency follows because they’re too small and can’t issue bonds, and many of them are even more distressed.

[..] Now come the consumers – not all consumers, but those with mounting piles of debt and stagnating or declining real incomes, of which there are many. They’d been hanging on by their teeth, with bankruptcy filings consistently declining since 2010. But that ended in November 2016. In December, bankruptcy filings rose 4.5% from a year earlier. In January they rose 5.4%. It was the first time consumer bankruptcies rose back-to-back since 2010. I called it “a red flag that’ll be highlighted only afterwards as a turning point.” In March, consumer bankruptcy filings rose 4% year-over-year, to 77,900, the highest since March 2015, when 79,000 filings occurred, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute data. The turning point has now been confirmed. Total US bankruptcy filings by consumers and businesses in March spiked 40% from February and rose 4% year-over-year to 81,590, the highest since March 2015:

Read more …

Trust at risk.

Trump’s Rollback of Bank Regulations Risks a Bondholder Backlash (Street)

President Donald Trump’s pledge to roll back regulations on U.S. banks could face resistance from an influential constituency: bondholders. While stockholders of firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have cheered Trump’s plans to repeal or soften rules imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, bond-rater Standard & Poor’s is warning that such a move could undermine the industry’s creditworthiness. Measures like “stress testing,” in which regulators evaluate banks annually to determine if they’re sufficiently prepared to withstand a deep economic or market downturn, have made the firms safer, according to S&P. And so-called resolution planning – the practice of planning in advance how big banks would be wound down following a Lehman Brothers-style collapse – also has contributed to the industry’s resilience, the ratings firm wrote in a March 20 report.

The timetable for any such changes isn’t yet clear, however. Trump in February signed an executive order directing U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to identify any laws that might impede economic growth or vibrant markets. Those could include the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, signed by former President Barack Obama to curb risky activities like using excessive borrowings to fuel earnings growth and allowing in-house traders to speculate on markets with proprietary capital. “An overhaul of Dodd-Frank could be detrimental for bank creditors,” S&P wrote in the report. “If changes to Dodd-Frank watered down these features, and if banks reacted to such changes by weakening their financial management, we could lower ratings.” The fresh concerns could contribute to a shift in investor sentiment that’s been mostly positive toward banks since Trump’s surprise election on Nov. 8.

Read more …

Xi responds after he’s left Mar-a-Lago.

Syria Strike Designed To Intimidate North Korea: China State Newspaper (G.)

Donald Trump’s decision to attack Syria had also been designed to intimidate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a Chinese newspaper has claimed, as G7 foreign ministers meet to discuss the fallout from last week’s missile incursion. The state-run Global Times said a US strike against North Korea would unleash carnage on the Korean peninsula. The US navy has deployed a strike group towards the western Pacific Ocean, to provide a presence near the Korean peninsula. South Korean officials suspect Kim may be planning to hold his country’s sixth nuclear test later this week to mark the 105th anniversary of the birth of founder Kim Il-sung on 15 April, an event a number of foreign journalists have been invited to cover.

In an editorial entitled: ‘After Syria strikes, will North Korea be next?’, the Global Times suggested the US might now be preparing to launch “similar actions” against Pyongyang and warned of catastrophic consequences if it did. “A symbolic strike against North Korea by the US would bring a disaster to the people in Seoul,” the newspaper said, claiming a “decapitation attack” on North Korea was now “highly possible”. Such a strike would “very likely evolve into large-scale bloody war on the peninsula”. The Global Times noted the decision to deploy a strike force to the Western Pacific over the weekend and cautioned Pyongyang against doing anything that might further inflame the situation.

“New nuclear tests will meet with unprecedented reactions from the international community, even to a turning point.” The warnings came after the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, claimed that the situation in North Korea had “reached a certain level of threat that action has to be taken”. Asked if the attack on Syria could be seen as a message to Pyongyang, Tillerson told ABC: “The message that any nation can take is: ‘If you violate international norms, if you violate international agreements, if you fail to live up to commitments, if you become a threat to others, at some point a response is likely to be undertaken.”

Read more …

“Hayek: state regulation leads to totalitarianism. But instead self-regulating markets led to today’s authoritarians.”

Is Globalisation Dead? (Pettifor)

In the BBC’s brief and pressured half-hour I wanted to get across that globalisation had not delivered on its promise – to make ‘the market’ the main driver of a more effective, more productive economy; to transform societies into nations of ‘shareholders’; to ensure a revolution in homeownership, and to avoid what Hayek called the threat of a totalitarian state. Instead financial globalisation has been an era largely fuelled by carbon (oil and coal) – as had been the case for over a century. However, unlike the Bretton Woods era, post 1970s de-regulated financial globalisation was built on mountains of private and public debt. The first – private debt – led to recurring financial crises, and the second – public debt – rose as private sector activity weakened, and tax revenues fell.

The consequences of these recurring financial crises in ‘advanced’ economies included ‘austerity’, the removal of employment protection, rising housing and education costs, the return of deflationary pressures, high unemployment, falling real wages, low productivity and rising inequality. These crises have led to increased insecurity and over-rapid social and economic change- as well as the greatest financial and economic crisis since 1929 (itself a product of excessive laissez-faire ideology). More widely, the insecurities and dislocations generated by financial globalisation have led whole populations to seek the ‘protection’ of a strong man (e.g. Presidents Trump, Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia).

Not that this worries the extreme adherents of laissez-faire – recall how Hayek supported the murderous dictator Pinochet in Chile for his brutal imposition of deregulatory ‘reform’. And so, contrary to Hayek’s expectations, financial globalisation has proved that it is market fundamentalism, and not the regulatory state that is leading the world into an era of authoritarianism and totalitarianism – in the US, Eastern Europe, India and China.

Read more …

But politicians will keep saying that it’s all because not enough is being built. Why don’t you raise rates first and see what happens?

Housing Costs Are Pushing People Further Out of Sydney (BBG)

New South Wales has taken over as Australia’s economic engine as the mining investment boom tails off, with central Sydney contributing almost a quarter of the nation’s growth last fiscal year. That success has come with a price. As workers flock to Sydney, an under-supply of housing, coupled with record-low interest rates, has made the city the world’s second-most expensive property market. Home prices jumped 19 percent in the past 12 months, stoking concern home ownership is increasingly beyond the reach of younger people. That’s a big political problem for the state’s new Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who made housing affordability one of her priorities when she took the job in late January. Housing affordability is “a barbecue stopper,” Berejiklian, 46, said in an interview in her Sydney office on Thursday.

“We are convinced if we put downwards pressure on prices through supply, that’s the best way we can solve it as a state government.” Sydney’s housing completions reached a 15-year high in 2016, though Berejiklian says the state is only now playing catch-up after “a decade of under-investment.” “There are about 100,000 dwellings we are behind on in terms of really digging into the demand,” she said. [..] There are several barriers to boosting housing supply in Sydney. The city is bordered by mountains to the west, the ocean to the east and rivers and national parks to the north and south, restricting the supply of new land, while moves to increase housing density in established suburbs have run into opposition from residents. That’s meant in the past three years, almost 70 percent of new detached houses have been built more than 30 kilometers from Sydney’s central business district…

Read more …

“..the Canadian government has been trying to find ways to “crystallize” the value in some of its property assets…”

Toronto Mayor Says He’s Open to Sale of City Real Estate Assets

Toronto’s mayor won’t rule out selling some of the city’s prime downtown real estate as he looks to make better use of assets amid an unprecedented property boom. “Would I take that off the table? No, I wouldn’t,” Mayor John Tory said in an interview last week at Bloomberg’s Toronto office. Selling buildings in the city’s costly downtown market probably wouldn’t be “quite as politically charged” as divesting other types of assets, such as the parking authority or power utility Toronto Hydro, he said. The need for North America’s fourth-largest city to fund critical transit upgrades and housing improvements coincides with skyrocketing property prices in the region. Toronto’s real estate portfolio includes 6,976 buildings with 106.3 million square feet (9.9 million square meters), almost half of which is multifamily, according to a Dec. 6 report on the city’s assets.

With all of the demands on the city to raise money for building transit lines and repairing existing housing, then “might you be looking at the business case for handling real estate in a different way? Because this is the most expensive downtown real estate you could possibly have,” said the mayor, elected in 2014. The report, commissioned by the city and conducted by Deloitte, estimates the value of municipal real estate including community housing, parks and forestry is C$27 billion ($20 billion), while the annual operating costs in “core” real estate and facilities management is C$1.1 billion. Tory said he watched with passing interest the federal government’s sale earlier this year of the Dominion Public Building. The historic downtown property beside Toronto’s Union Station sold for about C$275 million ($205 million), according to newspaper reports.

The property was “super underutilized,” BMO analyst Heather Kirk said in an interview, adding the Canadian government has been trying to find ways to “crystallize” the value in some of its property assets. “What a building is worth to the government in current form is totally different than the value to a developer,” Kirk said. “They are buying density.” When asked how any properties might be sold, Tory stressed he didn’t currently have any specific recommendations to make to the city council, although “I just know those are things that sit out there still as options that are in front of the city government to raise money to do the things we have to do,” he said.

Read more …

Ehh.. how do you lock up the Bank of England?

Secret Recording Implicates Bank of England In Libor Manipulation (BBC)

A secret recording that implicates the Bank of England in Libor rigging has been uncovered by BBC Panorama. The 2008 recording adds to evidence the central bank repeatedly pressured commercial banks during the financial crisis to push their Libor rates down. Libor is the rate that banks lend to each other and it sets a benchmark for mortgages and loans for ordinary customers. The Bank of England said Libor was not regulated in the UK at the time. The recording calls into question evidence given in 2012 to the Treasury select committee by former Barclays boss Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker, the man who went on to become the deputy governor of the Bank of England. Libor, the London Interbank Offered Rate, tracks how much it costs banks to borrow money from each other.

As such it is a big influence on the cost of mortgages and other loans. Banks setting artificially low Libor rates is called lowballing. In the recording, a senior Barclays manager, Mark Dearlove, instructs Libor submitter Peter Johnson, to lower his Libor rates. He tells him: “The bottom line is you’re going to absolutely hate this… but we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower.” Mr Johnson objects, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, which required him to put in rates based only on the cost of borrowing cash. Mr Johnson says: “So I’ll push them below a realistic level of where I think I can get money?” His boss Mr Dearlove replies: “The fact of the matter is we’ve got the Bank of England, all sorts of people involved in the whole thing… I am as reluctant as you are… these guys have just turned around and said just do it.”

Read more …

The warnings have always been there. Totally ignored.

The Fire In The Hold Of The Doomed Euro (Ward)

The more basic stuff goes back at least twenty years, to the period where trouble was stored up for the future by fanatical federalists cutting every corner and pulling out all the stops to get EMU (the prototype single currency) up and running. Several eminent economists on continents ranging from Australia and the US to the UK and Europe itself made very sound predictions at the time about coming disaster, and they did so saying two related things: 1) It would offer Germany a cheap, fixed currency leading inevitably to its economic dominance, 2) It would point up the economic consequences of imposing one rigid means of exchange on 18 varietal cultures, leading generally to Southern/South Eastern Europe falling behind.

Just to add more weedkiller to the poisonous formulation, the key European leaders not only ignored the advice; they also first, ignored all the data showing that several member States were nowhere near ready to join the eurozone based on agreed criteria; and then second, were implicated in several corrupt deals on commodities – as varied as German butter, Italian wines and Greek olive oil – to cloud the existence of stark differentials in both export and industrial development. For once, the economic naysayers proved to be soothsayers. Messrs Hollande and Muscovici shrink from the limelight about their own book on the subject of cultural difference (fancy that) but it proved to be spot on….as did the musings of Lawson and Thatcher et al in relation to Germany’s dominance.

The Mark from around 1963 until the creation of EMU was the most reliable, performance-related currency on the planet. But only massive debt forgiveness by the victors after the Second World War enabled that outcome. Both the realities in that last paragraph explain why lectures from Hollande and Merkel today – when joined by hypocrisy from Draghi at the ECB – evoke so much hatred of the EU’s prime movers among the so-called ClubMed nations….and those of us Brits in the Brexit camp. I make these points not to be nihilistic, but rather to level the playing field of media coverage that has been so bombed, excavated, deliberately over-watered and then tilted for good luck by Brussels, Wall Street and Berlin obfuscation and mendacity since 2010. A very real outcome of nihilism is being encouraged (and indeed made inevitable) by the EC’s refusal to recognise that – even as the SS Eunatic set sail – there was a raging fire in the hold.

Read more …

Big words.

Tsipras: Debt Relief Prerequisite to Legislate New Measures (GR)

The mid-term debt relief measures so that Greece can enter the quantitative easing program is the prerequisite to vote for the new measures, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Sunday. Addressing the SYRIZA Central Committee, the party leader spoke about the new austerity measures his administration has agreed to with creditors. He spoke of a compromise that had to be made so that measures had to be counter-balanced by social relief measures of equal fiscal value and aid that the Greek negotiating team. “There are measures that are neither necessary, nor are they the ones we would ever choose, but the compromise achieved would have counter-measures that would counterbalance the fiscal impact and generate zero fiscal balance, and both will be legislated and implemented simultaneously,” Tsipras said.

Speaking on the initial agreement reached at the Malta Eurogroup on Friday, the prime minister said that, “After Malta the way for the identification of the medium-term measures for the debt is open. This will send a clear message to the markets that the uncertainty is over.” “Now we will be the ones to decide the fiscal path the country will follow after the end of the program,” Tsipras said, explaining the strategy for the next round of negotiations. He stressed that without medium-term measures for debt relief that would allow Greece to enter the QE program, he would not implement the new measures.

The prime minister also unleashed an indirect attack against main opposition New Democracy claiming that, “Some were scheming so that the evaluation would not close, because they didn’t want us to be the ones who will pull Greece out of the crisis.” He also attacked ND leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis accusing him of “rushing to meet with the German finance minister to get his blessing and undermine the negotiations.” He also said that the conservative party espouses extreme neoliberalism.

Read more …

It was a big mistake to put the Great Barrier Reef near Australia.

Great Barrier Reef at ‘Terminal Stage’ (G.)

Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover. Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km. The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed. Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef.

This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event. Mass bleaching – a phenomenon caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures – has occurred on the reef four times in recorded history. Prof Terry Hughes, who led the surveys, said the length of time coral needed to recover – about 10 years for fast-growing types – raised serious concerns about the increasing frequency of mass bleaching events. “The significance of bleaching this year is that it’s back to back, so there’s been zero time for recovery,” Hughes told the Guardian. “It’s too early yet to tell what the full death toll will be from this year’s bleaching, but clearly it will extend 500km south of last year’s bleaching.”

Read more …

A really funny man died over the weekend.

John Clarke has Died

We featured quite a few Clarke and Dawe videos through the years. Here’s a few favorites:

How does the financial system work?

European Debt Crisis

The Greek Economy

Read more …

Nov 292016
 
 November 29, 2016  Posted by at 10:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


NPC Skating night, Washington DC 1919

How The Global Left Destroyed Itself -Or, All Sex Is Not Rape- (DLS)
Of Hoovervilles and Trump Towers (Thomas)
The Blinkered Elite Who Still Think Austerity Works (Aditya Chakrabortty)
Athens Fears IMF, Berlin Will Reach Deal For Further Austerity (Kath.)
Where Are We In The Business Cycle? (ZH)
Cash is for Criminals – Taxing Cash Withdrawals from ATMs (Armstrong)
Canada Watchdog Warns Lenders Face Big Losses If Housing Market Turns (FP)
Canada House Price Bubble Threatens ‘Financial Stability’ (WS)
Security Experts Join Jill Stein’s ‘Election Changing’ Recount Campaign (G.)
France and Britain In Danger of Winter Power Shortages (BBG)
Pressure Grows As Athens Eyes Faster Asylum Process (Kath.)
West Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaking Up From The Inside Out (AGU)
Scientists Record Biggest Ever Coral Die-Off On Great Barrier Reef (R.)

 

 

“..the same unreconstructed global capitalism that was still sucking the life from the lower classes that it always had. Only now it was doing so with explicit public backing and with an abandon it had not enjoyed since the roaring twenties.”

How The Global Left Destroyed Itself -Or, All Sex Is Not Rape- (DLS)

With a Republican Party on its knees, Obama was positioned to restore the kind of New Deal rules that global capitalism enjoyed under Franklin D. Roosevelt. A gobalisation like the one promised in the brochures, that benefited the majority via competition and productivity gains, driven by trade and meritocracy, with counter-balanced private risk and public equity. But instead he opted to patch up financialised capitalism. The banks were bailed out and the bonus culture returned. Yes, there were some new rules but they were weak. There was no seizing of the agenda. No imprisonments of the guilty. The US Department of Justice is still issuing $14bn fines to banks involved yet still today there is no justice. Think about that a minute. How can a crime be worthy of a $14bn fine but no prison time?!?

Alas, for all of his efforts to restore Wall Street, Obama provided no reset for Main Street economics to restore the fortunes of the US lower classes. Sure Obama fought a hostile Capitol but, let’s face it, he had other priorities. And so the US working and middle classes, as well as those worldwide, were sold another pup. Now more than ever, if they said say so they were quickly shut down as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “sexist”. Thus it came to pass that the global Left somehow did a complete back-flip and positioned itself directly behind the same unreconstructed global capitalism that was still sucking the life from the lower classes that it always had. Only now it was doing so with explicit public backing and with an abandon it had not enjoyed since the roaring twenties.

Which brings us back to today. And we wonder how it is that an abuse-spouting guy like Donald Trump can succeed Barack Obama. Trump is a member of the very same “trickle down” capitalist class that ripped the income from US households. But he is smart enough, smarter than the Left at least, to know that the decades long rage of the middle and working classes is a formidable political force and has tapped it spectacularly to rise to power. And, he has done more. He has also recognised that the Left’s obsession with post-structural identity politics has totally paralysed it. It is so traumatised and pre-occupied by his mis-use of the language of power – the “racist”, “sexist” and “xenophobic” comments – that it is further wedging itself from its natural constituents every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very doubtful that Trump will succeed with his proposed policies but he has at least mentioned the elephant in the room, making the American worker visible again.

Read more …

I like this: in the 1930s you had “Hoover blankets” for newspapers and “Hoover leather” for cardboard, and now there’s “Trump Towers” for shantytowns.

Of Hoovervilles and Trump Towers (Thomas)

In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover was elected as president of the US. He took office in March of 1929. The following October, the stock market crashed, heralding in the Great Depression. Millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes and/or starved in the ensuing years. Countless people, having nowhere to live, set up shantytowns that came to be known as “Hoovervilles.” Their new residents relied for the most part on public charities or begging for whatever income they could attain. Was Mister Hoover responsible? Well, no. When elected, he had never held public office before and had not contributed to the cause of the depression. So why was he blamed? Well, whenever there’s disaster, it’s human nature to want to put a face on the cause of the problem. We tend to need to have someone at whom we can point our angry finger.

(Almost immediately after the shooting of John Kennedy, the public were shown a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle; the day after the destroying of the Twin Towers, the television news showed a photo of Osama bin Laden. The viewers didn’t question whether these were indeed the culprits; they simply accepted them, as their need to have someone to blame was greater than their need to have truth.) As a Republican, Mister Hoover became an easy target for Democrats seeking to further their own careers. Although the events that led up to the depression were caused by both Democrats and Republicans, both within politics and without, Mister Hoover was a convenient target for Democrats. In fact, the term “Hooverville” was created by Charles Michelson, publicity chief of the Democratic National Committee. Democrats also came up with other pejoratives, such as “Hoover blankets” for newspapers and “Hoover leather” for cardboard used in a shoe when the sole had worn through.

Throughout the 1930s, hundreds of Hoovervilles sprang up, housing hundreds of thousands of recently homeless people. There was even one in New York’s Central Park. By ascribing the Great Depression and everything that went with it to Mister Hoover, it was a foregone conclusion that in the next presidential election, the Democratic candidate would win by a landslide. For the next 20 years, Democrats held the US presidency and, in that time, the government made a major transformation towards collectivism. In spite of the fact that the Great Depression dragged on for around a decade, few Americans grasped the fact that collectivist policies prolonged the depression, rather than alleviated it.

[..] If history were to repeat, Mister Trump would find that, within months of his ascendancy to the throne, market crashes would occur, followed by monetary collapse, diminishment of entitlements, loss of homes and jobs and a return to Hoovervilles. It wouldn’t be surprising if the present generation of collectivist spin doctors choose to call the new shantytowns “Trump towers.” There can be no doubt that it would be a successful political move and, along with other pejoratives, would be extremely likely to result in a one-term presidency for Mister Trump, followed by a landslide victory in 2020 for the Democratic Party. [..] Mister Trump will be no more to blame than Mister Hoover but, as the present economic cycle will reach the tipping point on his watch, there can be little doubt as to who will receive the blame. Just as in 1929, the tail will blindly be pinned on the elephant, not the donkey, and a long era of increased collectivism will be heralded in.

Read more …

“The end had come, but it was not yet in sight”.

The Blinkered Elite Who Still Think Austerity Works (Aditya Chakrabortty)

On 11 September 1929 the Wall Street Journal quoted Mark Twain for its thought of the day: “Don’t part with your illusions; when they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” Whatever that day’s subeditors thought they were doing, their choice now sounds as falsely confident as a rambler about to step off a ledge. Markets were already in turmoil, America was sinking into economic depression and running through the daily news was a thin, high note of hysteria. Still, Irving Fisher and the other wise men foresaw only the slightest of setbacks, and the brokers couldn’t take the cash fast enough. As John Kenneth Galbraith writes in his classic, The Great Crash 1929: “The end had come, but it was not yet in sight”.

Just six weeks later shares nosedived, countless families had their life savings destroyed, and an entire ruling class was stripped of its illusions. It took another 25 years, the Great Depression, the New Deal and a world war before stocks regained their 1929 levels. Look around today: the political class of 2016 is stuffed with people firmly clinging on to their illusions. Come Brexit, come Trump, come possible break-up of Europe: no lessons will be learned, barely an inch will be deviated from the ordained course. For some, the best pose is an uncomprehending defiance. Taking a break from tending to his £27m property portfolio, Tony Blair tells the New Statesman, “I can’t come into front-line politics. There’s just too much hostility.” Thus does the patron saint of exasperation inform his ex-voters: it’s not me, it’s you.

Others are smart enough at least to pay lip service to the new times. A couple of months ago George Osborne told the Financial Times how much he’d learned from Brexit: “There’s a pretty profound sense out there that the system’s not working for people, and instead of telling people, ‘Shut up, you’ve never had it so good,’ you’ve got to respond to that … I want to use this time out of office to try and understand it better.” Trouble is, lip service doesn’t pay so well. Days after that interview, the recently ejected chancellor began a speaking tour of America. In just a month, it was revealed last week, he raked in £320,400. Osborne made more from five speeches (nearly all to the finance industry, naturally, and putting in what his parliamentary register records as a total of 13 and a half hours’ work)than the average British worker will earn in over 11 years.

Read more …

Good cop, bad cop. Rinse and repeat.

Athens Fears IMF, Berlin Will Reach Deal For Further Austerity (Kath.)

With the government banking on securing a “political decision” at Monday’s Eurogroup – as the conclusion of the bailout review is now seemingly out of reach – the prospect of further austerity as demanded by the International Monetary Fund remains the biggest thorn in its side. Indeed, Athens’s biggest fear is that the IMF and Berlin will strike a deal demanding more measures as highlighted in comments by Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos Monday that the government cannot accept “compromise deals made between the IMF and the European countries on the back of Greece.” Tsakalotos criticized the IMF for pressuring Greece to implement more measures while failing to urge European countries to grant the country debt relief, and aimed fire at the eurozone for agreeing to discuss labor measures that stray beyond accepted European principles.

Referring to the labor regulation demands, he said: “Those institutions should not consider a country that is in a [bailout] program to have lesser rights. I think it’s not right, not morally right.” Government aides Monday, meanwhile, said the review would have already been concluded had it not been for the IMF’s demand for more measures in exchange for its participation in the bailout. However, Athens’s case for debt relief received a boost Monday after senior European officials said a solution was overdue. ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure, who was in Athens Monday, said the ECB was “looking forward to a solution” and “all stakeholders in the Greek adjustment program must realize that there are serious concerns about the sustainability of the Greek public debt.”

Read more …

Really? There’s a business cycle left?

Where Are We In The Business Cycle? (ZH)

On the bullish side, MS writes a trend of rising yields, steeper curves and better earnings has been in place for months. It forecasts that this trend will continue through 1Q17, as still-easy year-over- year comparisons mean headline inflation and global earnings continue to rise. The bank also points out something the Fed is well aware off: avoid giving the market much, if any, information. Namely, “an initial lack of policy clarity from the Trump administration may actually be helpful allowing investors to believe that the US ultimately will pursue ‘good’ projects (e.g., infrastructure spending) and avoid ‘bad’ ones (trade protectionism), while dangling the possibility of large corporate tax cuts. ”

However, shortly thereafter the initial optimism will fade and by 2Q17, this picture is set to change: global yields and USD to rise in 1Q as markets anticipate that better growth and inflation will cause the Fed to hike twice later in the year. That will mean a material tightening in financial conditions. [..] Around the same time, China growth will slow as credit-fueled stimulus is dialed back. And high expectations that the new US administration will be market-friendly raise the likelihood of disappointment. Even with expectations of fiscal stimulus, Morgan Stanley’s full year 2017 GDP forecast is just 2%. More troubling is that the expansion, already the 4th longest in US history, and set to be the third longest by the time Trump is inaugurated… is very long in the tooth.

Which brings us to the most concerning observation by Morgan Stanley, according to which 2017 is a year in which the bank’s odds of a boom and bust have materially increased, a finding consistent with a late-cycle US environment. So late, in fact, that one look at the chart below shows the US cycle has not only plateaued but is now stalling and is turning over. This, as Morgan Stanley writes, “is a change. Our long-running narrative had been “slow growth, slow reflation, and slow policy normalization”, a backdrop that we’ve seen as favorable to credit. The prospect for more fiscal stimulus in the US and elsewhere affects all three. Our new forecasts call for higher growth, inflation and policy rates than before, an uncertain cocktail for an expansion that is already one of the longest on record.”

Read more …

Martin rants: “..even the Ten Commandments state clearly that socialism is wrong..”

Cash is for Criminals – Taxing Cash Withdrawals from ATMs (Armstrong)

We are entering a very dark phase in this battle to retain our liberty. A proposal now being whispered behind the curtain in Europe is to impose a tax on withdrawing your own money from an ATM. The banks support this measure as a whole because they see this as preventing bank runs. Nobody will look at the direction we are headed. I am deeply concerned that these type of proposals will send the West in a real revolution not much different from that of Russia in 1917. The divide between left and right is getting much deeper and the left is hell bent on stripping those who produce of their liberty and assets. This type of confrontation is in line with our War Cycle, which we will update in 2017.

This is the most dangerous period we are heading into for governments will respond only in their own self-interest to survive. The socialists hate those who produce. That is just the bottom line. Nobody should have wealth more than they and this is the same human emotion that has cost tens of millions of lives in civil conflicts through out the centuries. Proof this is a persistent problem is the fact that even the Ten Commandments state clearly that socialism is wrong: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house … or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17). Nevertheless, this is repuidiated by socialists who say it’s not fair that anyone has something more than they do.

This material jealousy has been the source of so much death throughout the centuries because it has been exploited by the ruling class to justify their thievery. We will review all our models and update this after the U.S. inauguration since the socialists are trying to figure out how to steal the election from Trump. There is no way to overturn Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania without fraud and they need all three overturned to claim victory. This will not end nicely. The divide will only get bigger. The future is anything but stable and safe.

Read more …

Only China can save the day now?!

Canada Watchdog Warns Lenders Face Big Losses If Housing Market Turns (FP)

Recent increases in mortgage interest rates should be a wake-up call that lenders and borrowers should not be making decisions based on a short-term ability to repay, particularly given the risks created by high house prices and a long period of record low rates, Canada’s top banking regulator said Monday. “The recent uptick in mortgage interest rates should serve as a reminder that low rates are not a given, especially over longer periods of time,” Jeremy Rudin, head of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), told an audience of mortgage professionals in Vancouver. In prepared remarks for the Mortgage Professionals Canada National Conference, Rudin said risks in the market include rising rates and falling house prices.

“A pronounced or prolonged economic downturn could well involve a meaningful housing price correction. This could translate into significant losses for lenders and insurers,” he said. Moody’s Investors Service has estimated that a U.S.-style housing meltdown with home prices falling by as much as 35% could result in combined losses of more than $17 billion for the Canadian banks and mortgage insurers. “Given the risks and vulnerabilities arising from the current environment, sound underwriting is now more important than ever,” Rudin said. This month, Canada’s banks started raising their mortgage prime rates or posted variable rates in what market watchers said was a response to moves by the federal government to cool the housing market. On Nov. 11, mortgage tracker RateSpy.com said the typical five-year discretionary variable rate for Canada’s six largest banks had increased to 2.3% from 2.25%.

Read more …

Warnings from all sides now.

Canada House Price Bubble Threatens ‘Financial Stability’ (WS)

In its economic outlook released today, the OECD is generally gung-ho about the Canadian economy, and practically bubbling over with new enthusiasm for the global economy. It now expects global growth to accelerate from 2.9% this year to 3.3% in 2017 and to 3.6% in 2018. Call it the “Trump effect” gone global. But for Canada, despite its hunky-dory economy due to the “moderately expansionary policy stance in the 2016 federal budget,” the OECD has a stark warning: “House prices, housing investment and household debt are very high, posing financial stability risks.” The OECD’s chart shows the house price indices for Vancouver and Toronto, which make up about one-third of the national housing market, versus the index for the rest of Canada. Note the hook at the top of the red line: a feeble sign that house prices in Vancouver might be heading south:

A “disorderly housing market correction,” as envisioned by the OECD, would reduce residential investment, which has become a key in the Canadian economy. Through the reverse “wealth effects,” private consumption would take a hit, and in the end the banks are on the line, and it “could threaten financial stability.”The indebtedness of Canadian households, when measured against disposable income, continues to “edge up from already high levels,” encouraged and enabled by low interest rates. Of the OECD member states, only six have higher debt-to-disposable income ratios: Ireland, Sweden, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark (the last two with a ratio of over 250%). All of them have majestic government-aided and abetted housing bubbles. For American debt slaves, this measure is just over 100%, below where Canada’s was in 2000!

Read more …

Strange circus.

Security Experts Join Jill Stein’s ‘Election Changing’ Recount Campaign (G.)

More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump even as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all of its 3m ballots. Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine. Stein argued that Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting “risks tainting the recount process” because the electronic scanning equipment involved may incorrectly tally the results and could have been attacked by foreign hackers.

“There is a substantial possibility that recounting the ballots by hand will produce a more correct result and change the outcome of the election,” Stein argued in the lawsuit in Dane County circuit court. A copy was obtained by the Guardian. Stein, the Green party’s presidential election candidate, is working to secure full recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump surprised pollsters by narrowly beating Clinton on his way to a national victory in the electoral college. A petition from Stein requesting a recount was accepted by Wisconsin last Friday.

Her efforts to obtain a recount in Pennsylvania met serious difficulties on Monday as it became clear she needed three voters in each of the state’s 9,163 voting precincts to request a recount on her behalf, and that deadlines to do so had passed in many precincts. Wisconsin also told Stein on Monday that the recount, which was previously estimated to cost $1m, would actually cost her $3.5m and that the funds must be produced by the end of Tuesday. Stein has raised more than $6m for the three-state recount effort using online crowdfunding.

Read more …

One of these years….

France and Britain In Danger of Winter Power Shortages (BBG)

France and the U.K. are the two nations in Europe most at risk of power shortages this winter, particularly if there is a cold snap in early December or January. With availability of Electricite de France’s French nuclear fleet at the lowest level in a decade, the nation will need to rely on imports during several weeks and adding a cold spell to that could make the situation “tense,” according to European grid group Entsoe’s Winter Outlook report. Britain may face a power deficit in early January if temperatures fall below average, it said in the report. The Entsoe analysis indicated that even under severe conditions, demand can be met and reserves maintained across nearly all of Europe, thanks to surpluses in most regions and available interconnector capacity.

The U.K. potentially needs high imports from all neighboring countries in the week from Jan. 9. A combination of low wind and cold temperatures means there might be a deficit. Delays to restarts of several French reactors undergoing safety checks at the request of regulator ASN will mean “significantly” decreased margins in the first three weeks of December. French electricity demand is highly sensitive to cold weather and a drop of 1ºC below normal can add 2,400 megawatts, according to Entsoe. Reseau de Transport d’Electricite, the French grid operator, earlier this month warned of an increasing risk of power shortages in Europe’s second-biggest market. It has several options to reduce demand if needed, including the last-resort possibility of rolling blackouts. The U.K. has a reserve of power stations it can activate and National Grid has described this winter as “tight but manageable.”

Read more …

The EU has so far sent 35 of 500 promised ‘staffers’ for asylum proceedings. Slow it down and they don’t have to resettle refugees. Convenient.

Pressure Grows As Athens Eyes Faster Asylum Process (Kath.)

The municipal council on the Aegean island of Chios has voted against a government proposal to create a new reception center for migrants and refugees on the site of a former landfill with the aim of easing congestion at the existing Souda facility. Adding to the strain, heavy rainfall Monday flooded the Souda camp, forcing local authorities to transfer some 800 migrants and refugees into public buildings. On Lesvos, migrants and refugees marched in the island capital of Mytilene in protest at conditions at Moria camp, while demanding that they be allowed to leave the island. Meanwhile, Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas visited Germany to discuss ways of accelerating Greece’s asylum procedures within the framework of EU rules on refugee protection. According to official data, an additional 268 individuals arrived on Greece’s islands over the weekend.

Read more …

Obviously.

West Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaking Up From The Inside Out (AGU)

A key glacier in Antarctica is breaking apart from the inside out, suggesting that the ocean is weakening ice on the edges of the continent. The Pine Island Glacier, part of the ice shelf that bounds the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is one of two glaciers that researchers believe are most likely to undergo rapid retreat, bringing more ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the ocean, where its melting would flood coastlines around the world. A nearly 225-square-mile iceberg broke off from the glacier in 2015, but it wasn’t until researchers were testing some new image-processing software that they noticed something strange in satellite images taken before the event. In the images, they saw evidence that a rift formed at the very base of the ice shelf nearly 20 miles inland in 2013.

The rift propagated upward over two years, until it broke through the ice surface and set the iceberg adrift over 12 days in late July and early August 2015. Their findings were published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s generally accepted that it’s no longer a question of whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it’s a question of when,” said Ian Howat, associate professor of Earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the new study. “This kind of rifting behavior provides another mechanism for rapid retreat of these glaciers, adding to the probability that we may see significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes.”

Read more …

No return.

Scientists Record Biggest Ever Coral Die-Off On Great Barrier Reef (R.)

Warm seas around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have killed two-thirds of a 700-km (435 miles) stretch of coral in the past nine months, the worst die-off ever recorded on the World Heritage site, scientists who surveyed the reef said on Tuesday. Their finding of the die-off in the reef’s north is a major blow for tourism at reef which, according to a 2013 Deloitte Access Economics report, attracts about A$5.2 billion ($3.9 billion) in spending each year. “The coral is essentially cooked,” professor Andrew Baird, a researcher at James Cook University who was part of the reef surveys, told Reuters by telephone from Townsville in Australia’s tropical north. He said the die-off was “almost certainly” the largest ever recorded anywhere because of the size of the Barrier Reef, which at 348,000 sq km (134,400 sq miles) is the biggest coral reef in the world.

Bleaching occurs when the water is too warm, forcing coral to expel living algae and causing it to calcify and turn white. Mildly bleached coral can recover if the temperature drops and the survey found this occurred in southern parts of the reef, where coral mortality was much lower. While bleaching occurs naturally, scientists are concerned that rising sea temperatures caused by global warming magnifies the damage, leaving sensitive underwater ecosystems unable to recover. UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee stopped short of placing the Great Barrier Reef on an “in danger” list last May but asked the Australian government for an update on its progress in safeguarding the reef.

Read more …

Oct 122016
 
 October 12, 2016  Posted by at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


NPC “Largest electric locomotive and Congressman John C. Schafer” 1924

October 14 Is A $7 Trillion Moment of Truth in Markets (BBG)
Pound Sterling Behaves Like An Emerging Market Currency (Ind.)
Royal Bank of Scotland’s Vampire Unit Guilty Of Financial Terrorism (Fraser)
China Weakens Yuan Fixing for Sixth Day, Fuels Depreciation Talk (BBG)
China Banks May Need $1.7 Trillion Capital Injection To Cover Bad Loans (R.)
China Cities Face End of Fairy Tale as Default Risks Rise (BBG)
Tokyo Apartment Prices To Fall 20% Or More: Deutsche (BBG)
Are Rising House Prices Good For The Economy? (Ahuri)
Bank of Russia Governor Says Oil Rally Can Mean Much Faster Easing (BBG)
The Truth About the War in Aleppo (David Stockman)
Oops! – A World War! (Dmitry Orlov)
Wounded Elephant (Jim Kunstler)
Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness That’s Wrenching Society Apart (Monbiot)
Obituary: Great Barrier Reef – 25 Million BC-2016 – (OO)
More Than 11,200 Migrants Stranded On Aegean Islands (Kath.)

 

 

The return of LIBOR.

October 14 Is A $7 Trillion Moment of Truth in Markets (BBG)

If the London Interbank Borrowing Rate was a musical artist, or an actor, or a sports team, we’d be calling 2016 its comeback year. Not since the financial crisis of 2008 has Libor, to which almost $7 trillion of debt including mortgages, student loans and corporate borrowings, is pegged – experienced such a surge. The three-month U.S. dollar Libor rate has jumped from 0.61% at the start of the year to 0.87% currently – a 42% rise – ahead of money market reform that’s due to come into effect on Oct. 14. The new rules require prime money market funds – an important source of short-term funding for banks and companies – to build up liquidity buffers, install redemption gates, and use ‘floating’ net asset values instead of a fixed $1-per-share price.

While the changes are aimed at reinforcing a $2.7 trillion industry that exacerbated the financial crisis, they are also causing turmoil in money markets as big banks adjust to the new reality of a shrinking pool of available funding. Some $1 trillion worth of assets have shifted from prime money market funds into government money market funds that invest in safer assets such as short-term U.S. debts. The exodus has driven up Libor rates as banks and other corporate entities compete to replace the lost funding. Now, analysts are debating whether the looming Oct. 14 deadline will mark a turning point for the interbank borrowing rate, as money markets acclimatize to a new reality.

While analysts at Deutsche Bank believe that Libor may be poised to tighten when compared to other benchmark interest rates after Oct. 14, their counterparts at TD Securities speculate that Libor will “head higher” and the spreads won’t “compress anytime soon.”

Read more …

But Britons just keep fighting and blaming each other.

Pound Sterling Behaves Like An Emerging Market Currency (Ind.)

Is the British pound the Mexican peso? Amid rising fears that the UK will take a big economic hit from its move to leave the European Union, the correlation between the pound and an index of emerging-market currencies has jumped to levels last seen in the run-up to the Brexit vote. “Investors are increasingly casting UK assets in an emerging-market light, amid a fundamental re-appraisal of the country’s medium- to long-term economic fortunes,” Chris Scicluna, London-based strategist at Daiwa Capital Markets, said. On Tuesday, the pound fell for a fourth day, tumbling 0.49% to below $1.23, bringing its year-to-date fall against the dollar to 17% — the worst among 16 major peers.

“The pound is the purest expression of investors’ fears about political risk in developed markets,” Nicholas Spiro at Lauressa Advisory wrote in a note to clients on Monday. “While the Mexican peso — the most liquid emerging market currency and the most reliable gauge of ‘Trump risk’ — has given sterling a run for its money this year, it’s the pound that has become a proxy for politically-driven volatility in markets.” While developed-country government bonds typically benefit from safe-haven buying during bouts of market nerves, the dynamic is now in reverse, with the pound and government bonds falling in tandem, and the UK 10-year note yielding 0.98% compared with 0.52% in mid-August. While global bond markets have sold off this month, amid expectations of tighter monetary policies, UK yields have outpaced rises in the US and euro-area countries.

Read more …

This story is fast moving beyond belief. A state owned bank that kills off 1000s of businesses to make a quick buck?!

Royal Bank of Scotland’s Vampire Unit Guilty Of Financial Terrorism (Fraser)

We all know that the Royal Bank of Scotland went rogue under Fred Goodwin. What was less clear – until yesterday anyway – was that, eight years after it was saved from oblivion thanks to Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s £850 billion bailout package, the bank appears be no less of a rogue institution today. A data dump of thousands of RBS documents leaked to Buzzfeed News and the BBC has demonstrated that the bank had a policy of pushing small business customer firms to the wall in order to grow its own profits, increase bonuses for staff and rebuild its tattered balance sheet in the wake of its near collapse. There have been many, many credible reports of such activity – essentially killing viable businesses for profit – over the past five years or so but, as the former business secretary Vince Cable told Newsnight last night, “there is now a smoking gun”.

What Kremlinologists of the bank knew before yesterday was that RBS, today 73% owned by UK taxpayers, together with its sister banks NatWest and Ulster Bank, had left a trail of destruction which some have described as a corporate holocaust across the UK’s and Ireland’s small and medium-sized company base, that they had been seeking to save their own skins at their customer firms’ expense, and that tens of thousands of business customers had been affected. For example, I revealed in my book Shredded: Inside RBS The Bank That Broke Britain how RBS was engaged in a form of “financial terrorism” with a view to bolstering its own balance sheet from August 2008 onwards.

In the book, I revealed that, in May 2009, RBS instituted a policy of cherry-picking businesses from across its UK and Irish customer base operating in sectors including care homes, pubs, nurseries, nightclubs, hotels, retail units, industrial units and farms etc. – for referral to its “vampire unit”, global restructuring group. The referrals often followed what I called “manufactured defaults”, which meant the bank engineered a covenant breach or an LTV breach either through a phoney “drive by” valuation of the customer’s property assets delivered by a tame firm of chartered surveyors or in some instances a missold swap.

Read more …

“They do want the depreciation; they just don’t want it to happen quickly..”

China Weakens Yuan Fixing for Sixth Day, Fuels Depreciation Talk (BBG)

China’s central bank weakened the yuan’s reference rate for a sixth day, the longest run of cuts in nine months, amid speculation policy makers will allow further declines as the dollar rises. The next possible target is 6.83 against the greenback, with a potential Federal Reserve interest-rate increase supporting the dollar, said Shaun Osborne at Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto. The People’s Bank of China may need to step up efforts to prevent market fears over any sharp depreciation, according to a Scotiabank report written by Singapore-based foreign-exchange strategist Qi Gao. The PBOC set its daily fixing at 6.7258 against the dollar, extending a six-day weakening run to 0.9%.

The onshore yuan extended declines from a six-year low to drop 0.06% to 6.7228 as of 9:49 a.m. in Shanghai, while the offshore rate climbed 0.07%. The Chinese currency has fallen 6.5% against a 13-currency index this year. “The yuan’s depreciation against the dollar and versus a trade-weighted basket are both intentional policy choice,” said Cliff Tan, a currency strategist in Hong Kong at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. “They do want the depreciation; they just don’t want it to happen quickly. Our forecast is still 6.80 at the end of this year, and it looks like the currency is headed there.”

Read more …

“S&P expects Beijing will continue to allow rapid credit growth over the next 12-18 months before attempting to rein it in…”

China Banks May Need $1.7 Trillion Capital Injection To Cover Bad Loans (R.)

Rising debt levels will worsen the credit profiles of China’s top 200 companies this year, requiring the country’s banks to raise as much as $1.7 trillion in capital to cover a likely surge in bad loans, S&P Global said in reports on Tuesday. The study sees little scope for improvement in 2017 amid worsening leverage and excess capacity in almost all sectors. Debt has emerged as one of China’s biggest challenges, with the country’s debt load rising to 250% of GDP. Excessive credit growth is signaling an increasing risk of a banking crisis in the next three years, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) warned recently. 70% of the companies in the S&P survey were state owned, and they accounted for $2.8 trillion or 90% of the total respondents’ debt.

S&P estimated the problem credit ratio at Chinese banks was already at 5.6% at end-2015. In a downside scenario of unabated credit growth, that could worsen to 11-17%. In such a situation, banks would need as much as $1.7 trillion in recapitalization by 2020, S&P estimated. Even under a base case scenario, they would require $500 billion. That compares with China’s last big bank debt cleanup some two decades ago, when an estimated 4 trillion yuan ($600 billion) was spent on restructuring as of late 2005, according to a report for French economics thinktank CEPII. S&P expects Beijing will continue to allow rapid credit growth over the next 12-18 months before attempting to rein it in, implying risks would heighten in one to two years.

The IMF has warned China its credit growth is unsustainable, with companies sitting on $18 trillion in debt, equivalent to about 169% of GDP. Chinese banks’ non-performing loans are already at nearly 2%, the highest since the global financial crisis in 2009, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC). But some analysts believe the ratio could be as high as between 15 and 35%, as many banks are slow to recognize problem loans or park them off balance sheet, and as lenders come under political pressure from local governments to roll over bad loans to prevent job losses and defaults.

Read more …

LGFVs are the domain of shadow banks.

China Cities Face End of Fairy Tale as Default Risks Rise (BBG)

Finance firms that help keep cash flowing to China’s towns, cities and provinces face rising risks of landmark bond defaults just as they turn to global markets for funds. China’s economic slowdown is weighing on revenue at regional governments, hampering their ability to support the 5.3 trillion yuan ($789 billion) of outstanding onshore notes from local-government financing vehicles, which have yet to suffer nonpayments. Such issuance fell 18% last quarter as regulators curbed sales, forcing some to seek funds overseas. Financing units in provinces including Hunan, Jiangsu, Hubei and Sichuan are considering or planning U.S. currency notes, people familiar with the matters have said.

Warning signs are spreading. In the nation’s northeast, Changchun Urban Development & Investment Holdings Group was downgraded by Fitch Ratings last month. In the once-booming coal town of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, Yijinhuoluoqi Hongtai City Construction Investment & Development Co. had 189.5 million yuan of borrowings overdue as of March 31, according to Pengyuan Credit Rating, which downgraded it to A+ from AA- in May. “I don’t believe in the fairy tale that no LGFV will default,” said Terence Cheng, chief investment officer in at HuaAn Asset Management in Hong Kong. “Even China’s state-owned enterprises have been allowed to default. There is no absolute guarantee that an LGFV will not default.”

Read more …

Japan’s a big risk for bursting bubbles.

Tokyo Apartment Prices To Fall 20% Or More: Deutsche (BBG)

The Bank of Japan’s shift to controlling bond yields is driving up mortgage rates, prompting Deutsche Bank to predict Tokyo apartment prices may fall 20% or more by 2018. The BOJ’s negative-rate policy was already hurting buyer sentiment, and its move to boost longer-term yields is a double-blow to the industry, according to Yoji Otani, a real estate analyst at Deutsche Bank in Tokyo. The 35-year fixed mortgage rate has climbed for two straight months after touching a record low of 0.9% in August, and sales of new condominiums in Tokyo this year have fallen to the lowest since the nation’s property bubble collapse in the early 1990s.

“The one positive thing about negative rates was that it lowered borrowing costs, and now that is going to end,” said Otani, who expects prices to fall 20% to 30% by the end of 2018. “The collapse of this silent bubble has begun.” Banks have already started raising fixed-mortgage interest rates and some lenders may be charging customers 2% or more within two years under the BOJ’s current yield policy, according to Credit Suisse. The adoption of the new monetary policy is in effect a form of tapering and the cost of home loans will rise as the central bank becomes less aggressive in its bond purchase program, according Masahiro Mochizuki, a real estate analyst at the Swiss bank.

Read more …

Interesting findings on how Australia is the nation full of ATMs. Perverse consequences (“why Australian multi-factor productivity stopped growing at the turn of the millennium.”). h/t Yves

Are Rising House Prices Good For The Economy? (Ahuri)

Overall, the results indicate that a $1,000 increase in housing wealth is associated with an increase in debt of approximately $240 per annum. This is a large response compared to the magnitudes found in studies in the United States and United Kingdom… House price increases are associated with larger increases in total indebtedness for home owners with higher initial loan-to-value (LTV) ratios. Home owners with larger values of non-mortgage debt as well as higher LTV ratios are more sensitive to house price movements compared to other home owners… The take-up of further mortgage debt among vulnerable highly leveraged households exposes them to income, housing and financial market shocks.

The results are in contrast to the general belief in Australia that debt is held by those most able to service it—higher income and high-wealth households. Macroeconomic policy-makers should interpret high levels of debt and rising household debt-to-income ratios in Australia carefully. Overall, the findings show that house price changes influence household debt through two channels: a direct wealth effect and an indirect collateral effect via the household’s borrowing capacity. That is, some households face borrowing constraints and, for these households, rising house prices increase the value of their property that may be used as security for a loan and thereby loosen the borrowing constraints… Our results indicate that in response to increasing house prices, some home owners, especially home owners with low debt, engage in debt financing of consumption (involving extracting equity from their home).

Other home owners, especially those with relatively high debt levels refinance existing mortgages or adjust existing debt portfolios. The most important responses are in labour participation and hours of work by women, both partnered and single. The effect is strongest among the older cohort of women and is associated with early retirement for those experiencing above average housing wealth gains. Younger partnered men and women exhibit a reduction in hours of work in response to the gain in housing wealth. That is, these gains in wealth effectively fund time away from work to undertake non-market activities such as providing household care for children, ageing parents, undertaking volunteer work or enjoying more leisure.

Read more …

Putin and his people are talking up the price of oil. So far, it works to an extent.

Bank of Russia Governor Says Oil Rally Can Mean Much Faster Easing (BBG)

Russian central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina is growing confident that her country’s biggest vulnerability can turn into an asset. The Bank of Russia, which last month issued an unprecedented commitment to leave borrowing costs unchanged the rest of the year, will face an easier path to interest-rate cuts if oil prices rise further, Nabiullina said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Moscow on Tuesday. While Brent crude has almost doubled from a 12-year low in January, the central bank’s “moderately tight” stance allowed for only two reductions in 2016 before policy makers all but shut the door on more monetary easing this year.

“If there is a higher oil price, then it can lead to a stronger ruble, and – through the foreign-exchange channel – that in turn can cause a more rapid decline in inflation expectations, slowing inflation,” Nabiullina said. “Then we can ease monetary policy much faster.” The outlook marks a rare signal by the central bank that it’s open to deeper monetary easing as its chase of an inflation goal enters the final stretch. Policy makers are targeting price growth of 4% by end-2017 and see it reaching 5.5% to 6% in 2016 after overshooting their forecasts for a fourth consecutive year in 2015. Oil traded near a 15-month high after rising 3.1% Monday, when Putin said at a conference in Istanbul that his country is willing to join efforts by OPEC to stabilize the market through a production freeze or cut.

Read more …

The War Party. Read. Time to venture outside the narrative machine.

The Truth About the War in Aleppo (David Stockman)

This is starting to sound pretty ominous. The Washington War Party is coming unhinged and appears to be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to provoking Putin’s Russia and numerous others. The recent collapse of cooperation in Syria – based on the false claim that Assad and his Russian allies are waging genocide in Aleppo – is only the latest example. So now comes the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, General Mark Milley, doing his best imitation of Curtis LeMay in a recent speech dripping with bellicosity. While America has no industrial state enemy left on the planet that can even remotely challenge its economic might, technological superiority and overwhelming military power, General Milley unloaded a fusillade of bluster at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington DC:

“The strategic resolve of our nation, the United States, is being challenged and our alliances tested in ways that we haven’t faced in many, many decades,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told the audience. “I want to be clear to those who wish to do us harm … the United States military – despite all of our challenges, despite our [operational] tempo, despite everything we have been doing – we will stop you and we will beat you harder than you have ever been beaten before. Make no mistake about that.” That is rank nonsense. We are not being “tested” by anyone. To the contrary, Imperial Washington is provoking tensions and confrontations everywhere – from the South China Sea to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, the Black Sea, the Baltics and Ukraine – that have no bearing whatsoever on the safety and security of the citizens of Spokane WA, Topeka KS and Springfield MA.

Indeed, the clear and present danger to peace and freedom in the homeland lies not in the machinations of foreign capitals, but in the arrogant and bombastic groupthink that has overtaken the denizens of the Imperial City. The latter is again on display in the full-throated fulminations about the siege of Aleppo being emitted by the Washington War Party and its trained poodles in the establishment media – most especially the New York Times. We are told that the Russian Air Force and Assad’s military are targeting schools, hospitals and the 200,000 or so civilians of Eastern Aleppo for indiscriminate bombing and slaughter.

It’s shades of Benghazi 2011 all over again – an incipient genocide that Washington must stop in the name of R2P (Responsibility to Protect). No it’s not! What is happening in Aleppo is a raging sectarian civil war and a proxy battleground for the regional political maneuvers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. They are none of America’s business and haven’t been since the so-called Arab spring uprising spread to Syria in 2011. Indeed, Syria is a lawless, bombed-out, economically decimated failed state today owing to Washington’s heavy-handed intervention at the behest of the War Party’s bloody twin sisters. That is, the neocons and the R2P liberal interventionist claque around Hillary Clinton, including UN Ambassador Samantha Powers and National Security Council head Susan Rice.

Read more …

Does Dmitry rely too much on Russian rationalism as the main factor?

Oops! – A World War! (Dmitry Orlov)

Over the past week or so I’ve been receiving a steady stream of emails demanding to know whether an all-out nuclear war is about to erupt between the US and Russia. I’ve been watching the situation develop more or less carefully, and have been offering my opinion, briefly, one on one, to a few people’s great relief, and now I will attempt to spread the cheer far and wide. In short, on the one hand, all-out nuclear annihilation remains quite unlikely, barring an accident. But, on the other hand, such an accident is by no means impossible, because when it comes to US foreign policy “Oops!” seems to be the operative term.

One reason to be cheerful is that any plan to attack Russia is bound to become mired in bureaucracy. Battle plans are developed by mid-rank people within the US military establishment, approved and forwarded up the chain of command by higher-rank people and finally signed off on by the Pentagon’s top brass and their civilian political accomplices. The top brass and the politicians may be delusional, megalomaniacal and inadvertently suicidal, but the mid-rank people who develop the battle plans are rarely suicidal. If a particular plan has no conceivable chance of victory but is quite likely to lead to them and their families and friends becoming vaporized in a nuclear blast, they are unlikely to recommend it.

Another reason to be cheerful is that Russia has carefully limited the Pentagon’s options. One plan that, in the popular imagination, could lead to an all-out war with Russia, would be the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria. What many people miss is that it is not possible to impose a no-fly zone on a country with a sufficiently powerful air defense system, such as Syria. As a first step, the air defense system would have to be taken out, and the air campaign to do so would be very expensive and incur massive losses in both equipment and personnel. But then the Russians made this step significantly worse by introducing their S-300 system. This is an autonomous, tracked, mobile system that can blow objects out of the sky over much of Syria and some of Turkey. It is very difficult to keep track of, because it can use “shoot and scoot” tactics, launching an attack and crawling away in a random direction over rough terrain.

Last on my list of reasons why war with Russia remains unlikely is that there isn’t much of a reason to start one, assuming the US behaves rationally. Currently, the biggest reason to start a war is that the Syrian army is winning the conflict in Aleppo. Once Aleppo is back in government hands and the US-supported jihadis are on the run, the Syrian civil war will largely be over, and the rebuilding will begin.

Read more …

“..who will emerge from the rubble? I suspect it will be someone we haven’t heard of before, just as Bonaparte was unheard of in France in 1792..”

Wounded Elephant (Jim Kunstler)

It is getting to be too late to sort out all the confusion sown by this horrific campaign. From here on its really more a matter of the dust settling. In background of it all looms the train-wreck of global finance, which will be the true determinant of what the American people will have to do in the years ahead. During the weeks of the election distraction, the European banks struggle to conceal their insolvency while the politicians of Euro-land desperately try to paper over the cracks in these fracturing institutions. Few can tell what is actually happening in China’s banking system, but it’s sending out ominous tremors that are hard to ignore.

But be sure it is all daisy-chained right into Wall Street and the US banks. The potential for wrecking markets and currencies around the world is extreme at this moment. It may only be a matter of whether it happens before or after the election. Then we’ll see what happens when financial institutions can’t trust each other. Trade stops. Economies crumble. Pretenses evaporate. If it gets bad enough, the shelves of the supermarkets go bare in three days and you’re living in a permanent hurricane disaster without the wind and rain. Believe me, that will be bad enough. Hillary, if elected, will not get to play FDR-2. Rather, she’ll be stuck in the role of Hoover, the Return, presiding over a freight elevator of an economy with a broken cable.

Expect problems with the US dollar. Expect “emergency” actions. Expect the unintended consequences of those actions. If there is one outstanding upshot of these “debates” it must be their staggering failure to reassure the American public that they can expect effective leadership through the hardships ahead. There must be many others out there like myself wondering who will emerge from the rubble? I suspect it will be someone we haven’t heard of before, just as Bonaparte was unheard of in France in 1792. This is not entirely a nation of clowns, though it feels like that lately.

Read more …

Uh, no, George; that’s quite a big miss. The process of loneliness emerging as a result of breaking social ties goes back way further than neoliberalism. Try the nuclear family. Try how we design our homes and cities.

Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness That’s Wrenching Society Apart (Monbiot)

What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis. There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on our own two feet. The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year. Employment is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract. Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves.

Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do. As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty” settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves. Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress?

Read more …

One in a long line of obituaries, but a significant one. Many thousands of spcies will die with the reef.

Obituary: Great Barrier Reef : 25 Million BC-2016 (OO)

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old. For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1,625 species of fish, 3,000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habit in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited. Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.

[..] The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.

Read more …

And winter is coming, also in Greece.

More Than 11,200 Migrants Stranded On Aegean Islands (Kath.)

Authorities say 162 migrants and refugees have arrived on Greece’s Aegean islands in the past 24 hours, raising the total number to 11,215. Authorities say 38 arrivals were reported on Samos, 38 on Chios and 22 on Lesvos. The number of individuals sheltered on Samos has increased by about 40% over the past 10 days, officials say. On Tuesday, State Minister Alekos Flabouraris chaired a meeting on immigration strategy where it was decided that migrants will be gradually moved out of an overcrowded facility on the island, while there are plans to build a second facility to detain migrants who commit violations.

Read more …